Zoltan’s Business News & Blog

Yes, in November, TradeHolding.com B2B Network will turn to 8, and the network reached an impressive number of members: more than half a million members use our services more or less often. In 8 years, we have launched many network sites such as: TradeBoss.com B2B Marketplace, Europe Business Directory, Middle East Business Directory, China Suppliers and Manufacturers and many more, all using the same platform. I never mentioned in public about our network infrastructure but now I think it is time to say that the 100k+ unique visitors on the B2B Network + the other 30k+ unique visitors on our other sites (dating, real estate, classifieds) are served by 10 servers and we plan to have at least 3-4 new servers in the next year.

Yes, that’s right, we reached another milestone, 50,000 active real estate listings on Mondinion.com International Real Estate.

And, we do not import listings from other websites as other portals do, all of our listings are posted on a website that is part of Mondinion.com International Real Estate Network or our general classifieds website Kugli.com. Also, the listings are posted manually no XML upload is possible on our site, this is how we want to be unique, we do not need thousands of listings that are posted everywhere on the net, we prefer quality over quantity and it looks like our work is generating the expected results for agents and owners. Of course, for the future we have plans to become an international aggregator where users will have the possibility to search our portal as well as other portals but this is another story.

Some of the most visited site sections are country specific pages such as: Property in Spain, Property in Italy, Property in Turkey, Property in Egypt, etc.

We also introduced in October 2010, the Global Property Search site section which is a new page created mainly for investors and buyers to easily locate properties in cities, countries or regions of their choice. How is it working? Just access www.mondinion.com/Property_Search/, select the type of property you are looking for and start typing your location name, our intelligent software will automatically show you matching countries, cities and regions based on what you type. You can search for entire countries (like Turkey), specific regions (like Toscana) or specific cities (like Budapest). We have over 180,000 locations in our database and using this new search feature will no longer require you to know at what region or province is a specific city, just simply start typing the city name and select from the matching results.

Long time since I last wrote to this blog. It is time to keep you up to date with what I am doing presently. I will post some of my comments from a press release that was released to public just a few days ago:

 ”We have big plans for 2009:
* we will launch regional real estate websites (Mondinion.com partner sites) where we will focus our efforts to sell properties in these regions, our short term plans are to launch region specific websites in Europe, Middle East, Caribbean and Australia
* we plan to translate Mondinion.com and all partner sites and make the content available in several langauges
* we will continue our advertising campaigns to keep and even increase the growth rate we currently have
* we plan to release monthly stats about what real estate and in what regions are our visitors searching
* and, we will launch a new feature that is not available in a large scale anywhere else in the international real estate market, let this be a surprise…”

The good news is that one of the above mentioned regional real estate listing websites has just been launched. It is RealEstatePropertyListings.eu and it is targetting European Real Estate owners and agents as well as overseas investors who are interested in European Properties. More regional partner sites will be launched in the near future.

TradeHolding.com B2B Network is in Alexa Top 100k since 2004, in fact we have many sites on TradeHolding.com B2B Network with a Top 50k Alexa ranking, or even Top 20k Alexa ranking.

Last month, in August 2008, 2 more websites we launched recently reached the Top 100k Alexa ranking:

• OneLoveNet.com Free Dating Site and
• Kugli.com Local Classified Ads website.

Also, Mondinion.com International Property Listings Portal, covering a more specific niche reached 300-500 uniques every day and more and more real estate for sale and real estate for rent listings are posted day after day.

Overall, this summer was very good in terms of traffic for all our websites, our Quantcast measured websites are close to 1 million uniques / month, a traffic that place our network to a ranking of 6658 among all Internet destinations: “Premier World Sites is a top 10,000 destination that reaches over 976K monthly people, of which 226K (23%) are in the U.S.”

I just launched our newest project: Mondinion.com real estate listings portal. Why this name Mondinion? Because:

1. I could not find any available domain name containing the terms “realestate” or “property”.

2. Instead of someverylongrealestateorpropertydomainname.com I preferred to use a name that we think is more brandable like Mondinion.com. I also registered Ragla.com at the same time, but finally decided that Mondinion.com is a better name for a real estate portal.

What is Mondinion.com? Based on our first page definition: “If you are looking for properties, real estate or other housing related ads and propery listings you came to the right place. is a real estate platform, an international real estate for sale or real estate for rent listings directory. Our free real estate for sale or rent directory and classifieds service can help you to sell your house, apartment, land, villa, castle or property and to find cheap US and International properties for sale.” Frankly, I can not explain it better. It will be basically a place where developers, owners and real estate agents will post their housing related listings while investors and home buyers will search and browse among the listings and if offer and demand is matched a deal will be closed. Simple as 1+1.

I tried to build an easy to browse & nice looking website… well, it is not nice looking yet… I am very bad in design, but I already work with a designer to make it more professional.

Mondinion.com Property Listings Website is affiliated with our other Classified Ads Website Kugli.com and whatever real estate ad you post on Kugli.com will also show up on Mondinion.com and vice versa.

Yes, we are online but still in beta… Kugli.com, the free global and local classifieds website opened last week and we are now officially accepting classified ads for local communities.

There are already plenty of classified ads posted by visitors, what I like a lot is the extremely easy ad posting form, thanks to Ajax. There is no need for users to register, they can simply use a form to publish their ads. The biggest challenge so far is convincing users to post their ads, until the site looks empty very few persons will actually spend time to post an ad. But I am confident that in a few months my biggest challenge will be spam and scam fighting… although I already embedded some techniques to detect and eliminitate scam and spam, however nothing can be perfect.

What other features am I going to integrate? Just to mention the 2 most important things:

• member registration, login and ad tracking
• multilingual support.

Also, I have some other plans for marketing, but I will write about this sometime later.

Do you like Kugli.com? We welcome your links from your website and any suggestion.

Yes, I am close to launch www.kugli.com - Free Classified Ads website. I am still working on the scripting part but hopefully it will not take more than a few days to launch it. This is the first project where I use a lot of Ajax.

For the beginning Kugli.com will have 6 main categories:

• Real Estate Ads
• Cars & Vehicles
• Sell & Buy
• Services
• Pets & Animals
• Jobs & Resumes

I am eager to start it and compete with the big guys… So, kijiji and craigslist, be prepared, I am going to compete with you soon.

A new big internet sale:

“In an unexpected move, AOL has acquired social-networking site Bebo. The price tag: $850 million in cash…. AOL has made it clear that buying Bebo is a move geared toward international growth, as the youth-oriented social network is wildly popular in the U.K., Ireland, and New Zealand. AOL reported that it has launched “17 international web sites over the last year and has plans to expand to 30 countries outside the U.S. by the end of 2008,” as well as international versions of its home page and some services. Bebo, meanwhile, plans to launch five localized versions of its service this year (France, Germany, Italy, Spain, and the Netherlands), and AOL will make it a major part of the company’s international expansion strategy.”

Bebo is the 3rd largest social network in the US. and the number 1 in the UK.

The entire article about this deal on news.com.

Yes, it looks like we beat ourselves every month with TradeHolding.com B2B Network. In January, we announced a record number of visitors: 60,489 visitors in just one day. Well, February has been even better. We had 88,952 visitors in just one day: February 26. The next target is 100,000 visitors in just one day. Obviously the number of messages exchanged between our members is increasing as well and the number of new companies that join our network every day. And yes… our revenues are also growing month after month. Considering that I run this network mostly alone (with the help of a few devoted site-partners… and some technical and customer care help…), I think I can not complain… Some of my competition claim that they invested $20 million in a similar site… well I have to say that my investment was in a much much smaller scale… Not to mention the biggest player in the B2B Marketplace Alibaba.com, which was partly sold to Yahoo (I guess 40%) for $1 billion…

Our free dating site, OneLoveNet.com is also growing and things are looking very good here as well. Most of the free dating sites do not have limitations, and it looks like our kind of hybrid model is working very well and although spamming and scamming is still present on our sites, it is on a much smaller scale than on other free dating sites. Thanks to the community as well, our team of moderators are doing a great job. Want to join us? Just read more here.

Regarding our future plans, we will soon launch Mondinion.com, a Free Real Estate Property Ads & Listings website. The goal is to make this website the number 1 destination for international real estate and property classifieds where property owners (and real estate agents as well…) will be able to sell their homes, lands, houses, castles, etc. while international real estate investors will search for real estate ads that will be classified based on various criteria.

According to a survey published by Datran Media, 8 in 10 marketers cite email as the best-performing medium. Also, 82.4% of respondents stated, that they will increase their usage of email marketing. 63.5% of the respondents stated that they target based on demographics and / or geography.

Another interesting thing is that 81.2% of the respondents stated that they already use targeted email campaigns.

At TradeHolding.com B2B Network, we already have a feature for Targeted Mailing Campaigns, our members can send Targeted Selling offers or Buying requests based on selected keywords and / or regional filters. Our database is full of B2B Buyers and Sellers from all over the world, Members who stated what products and services are they regularly buying and selling. Want to try it out? Just login to your account at TradeHolding.com and send your Target Offer.