Zoltan’s Business News & Blog

…yes, this is exactly what we are doing at TradeHolding.com B2B Network. Buyers and Sellers state what are the products and services they are regulary selling and buying. Then, we are quickly calculating how many sellers are selling the product you are buying and viceversa, then you have the ability to send all of them a message, this way buyers and sellers are connected and a deal is very close.

This feature is especially good in buying process, as an RFQ (request for quote), imagine the need to buy olive oil, or icumsa sugar. You just define your exact needs and send it to hundreds of qualified sellers! They will get back to you with their offer and you have the ability of selecting the best offer!

We received an excellent feedback from members who already tried this feature, they are quite satisfied with the responses. If you would like to try this, just join through one of our partner sites (for example: European Business Directory).

Just checked compete.com today and I noticed that we are the leader among other popular B2B websites.

What do we see from this graph? TradeHolding.com Members spend 1.5 times more minutes on our site than on importers.com and 3 times more (!) minutes than on tradekey.com. Quite an achievement! And, if we consider that TradeHolding.com B2B Network has many external partners as well (not running under the domain name: TradeHolding.com), our leadership is incontestable. 

Here are 3 region specific B2B websites, all part of TradeHolding.com B2B Network:

• Middle East B2B Directory
• European B2B Directory
• African B2B Directory

3 months passed from this year and things are looking good on our web portfolio.

Our websites reached about 500,000 unique visitors, we find this amazing. We had days, when our sites were visited by more than 20,000 people. The distribution of our traffic is:

• B2B sites (TradeHolding.com B2B Network + Premier Business Club): 10 - 15,000 uniques / day
• Romanian websites (www.index2000.ro, www.1job.ro, www.class.ro, etc.): 5 - 8,000 uniques / day
• OneLoveNet.com, online dating site: 800 - 1,000 uniques / day (not bad for a new site).

Our member base is also growing quite fast, especially on the B2B Network, every day between 200 - 300 new members join our B2B sites. But, the dating database is also growing, although we could have a lot more profiles with nice fotomodel pictures… but invest a lot of time to imediatelly delete fake members and profiles (and we also automate things). But, we prefer to have less but more real member profiles.

Our year to year revenue is up by 35%, we are quite satisfied with this.

We haven’t had the time yet to launch our business social networking site, Kugli.com, mainly because the lack of time and because we work in the same time on many new and old projects. Our future plans include the launching of Kugli.com (don’t want to estimate when will this happen…) and we already started to work on a new global real estate portal. We also have some innovative ideas, we are 40% ready with a project that could revolutionize PPC market but right now it is postponed… I need to find a few more creative minds… well I can not do everything alone.

And now, let’s spend some time with the family. Happy Easter to all of you!

Dave, from Importers.com claim in his post that Importers.com is the number 1 US B2B website. I did not quite understand his points, it is obvious that AliBaba.com has a lot more US visitors than Importers.com.

On that chart, AliBaba.com’s and GlobalSources.com’s ranking is obviously below Importers.com… They are ranked among the top 500 most visited sites in the US while Importers.com is ranked somewhere at position 100,000. So, it looks like David was wrong.

I checked the same data comparing 3 sites: Importers.com, BusyTrade.com (a Hong Kong based B2B website) and TradeHolding.com. Here are 2 charts:

What we see here?

• TradeHolding.com visitors views almost 12 pages / visit, the same value for Importers.com is 6.8 and for BusyTrade.com is 3.3
• Importers.com has 22,000 US visitors / month while TradeHolding.com has 15,000 uniques / month, but we can clearly see from the chart that TradeHolding.com has the fastest growing trend
• If we take into consideration that TradeHolding.com also has some cobranding deals with other B2B websites (including TradeBoss.com, 1stWorldTradePortal.com, DigitalExpo.biz, BeautyB2B.eu, Europe.BloomBiz.com, etc.), most probably we can say that TradeHolding.com B2B Network reaches more US visitors than the stated 15,000.

Why I took these 3 sites? Because there is no sense to compare our sites yet with AliBaba.com, they are far the most known B2B site.

We just introduced a new feature on our B2B Network. I believe we are quite innovative here, as far as I know, no big B2B and Import Export website offers something similar. The problem with many B2B sites is that they offer an Enquiry Cart feature and you can actually send hundreds of canned messages to virtually any member no matter how targeted or untargeted is the message. So, I sell mobile phones, let’s just send my message to hundreds of other members no matter if they are dealing in agricultural products or chemicals. In my opinion, this is equivalent with spamming and in my opinion it is actually decreasing the response ratio. Members get saturated with unrelated offers and requests and soon quit.

Anyway, what we introduced is the so called AutoContact feature. We match Top Member sellwords with other member buywords and send a warm invitation to possible buyer in the name of the Top Member to review the Top Member’s Profile, Trade Leads and Products. It is a 100% targeted advertising, our initial testings shows that we can increase a lot the responses received by Top Members. I won’t tell you exact increase percentages, it is not relevant yet but I believe the increase will be significant.

So, actually, we do the job instead of Top Members, we invite in their name -using some personalized messages- relevant members to visit their Top Member profile. We save them time and money.

Today, I will simply summarize what me & my team did in 2006 and some of our plans for 2007.

2006 in words and numbers:
* launch of http://www.tradeholding.org/, the Business Links Directory
* launch of http://www.onelovenet.com/ singles & social networking website
* relaunch of our romanian job & recruitment portal www.1job.ro, including several improvements made on the site
* several improvements made to our B2B Network, including regional advertising and powerful presence in the Middle East through our Middle East Business Portal
* now, our website network (b2b, recruitment, dating, portal and social networking websites) has more than 250,000 registered members from all over the world.

Plans and goals for 2007:
* launch of a new Business Social Networking website: http://www.kugli.com/
* continuous improvement and advertising of our websites: TradeBoss.com B2B Portal, Premier Business Club, 1Job.ro - Romanian Recruitment & Headhunting Portal, Singles & Friends at OneLoveNet.com, TradeHolding.org Business Links Directory
* reaching 200,000 members on TradeHolding.com B2B Network.

I personally thank my team for their hard work and thank you and all our members and visitors for the continuous use of our services. Hope that we will continue to work together in 2007.

In November, I wrote down some of my thoughts on Social Networking Sites. At that time, I mentioned that I hate MySpace and I would never use it. Probably I am too old.

But, these websites and other relationship related websites (dating, business, recruitment) get more and more publicity and media coverage. Also, VCs invested a lot (and probably will invest even more in 2007) to similar websites and business. And the year is already started with a few interesting aquisitions.

• Hearst Magazines Digital Media, the online unit of Hearst Magazines, has acquired eCRUSH.com, Inc., a top entertainment/community network for teens and young adults. The announcement was made today by Cathleen P. Black, president of Hearst Magazines. (Hearts Press Release)
• European online dating and chat company MEETIC has acquired UK-based DatingDirect.com in a deal worth £27.3m. (New Media Age)

Paul Woodward, published an interesting article about Chines Social Networking Sites and VCs, according to his post 16 Chinese Networking sites received about $93 million funding between 2003-2006.

Let’s see if me and my team will be able to offer something new in this social networking industry. We will soon launch our business social networking site, Kugli.com, so stay tuned. Our recently launched dating & single website, OneLoveNet.com is getting to become popular, especially in my country, as we mainly advertised in local websites. But, international advertising campaigns have been launched as well, so we expect our international traffic to grow quickly as well, we already have many international members.

And something else. I noticed that Xing.com (formerly openBC.com) is advertising in Alibaba.com newsletters. I wonder what kind of deal do they have, as they are basically targeting similar niches. Probably Xing.com is need of more Chinese members. 

In January 2007, we are running a Promo on TradeHolding.com B2B Network. We offer 3 times more credits with any new or renewed yearly Gold and Platinum Memberships.

If you are a member, simply login here and go to Top Member page to order your membership. If you are not a member yet, please register first to benefit from this offer.

So, you receive 750 credits instead of 250 credits with a Platinum Membership or 300 credits instead of 100 credits with a Gold Membership. Credits can be used to bid on your company and or trade leads positions. When I write this post (4 January 2007), you need to bid 16 credits for 1 week to rank among the top 10 Premium Trade Leads. These show up on our homepage. Considering that 10,000 unique visitors reach our B2B Network every day, with 16 credits you can present your offer to buy or sell to 70,000 visitors. In other words, if you buy a Platinum Membership now, your cost to reach 70,000 visitors is 16 / 750 credits * $199.95 = $4.27, if you buy a Gold Membership now, your cost to reach 70,000 visitors is 16 / 300 credits * $99.95 = $5.33. Of course, noone can say that all these visitors will be interested in actually reading what you need to buy or sell, our network is a general B2B Network.

Plus, if we take in consideration that Gold and Platinum Members can post and showcase their products with pictures on various heavily visited pages (for 1 full year), this deal is really not that bad.

Manufacturer Directory, Suppliers, Wholesalers, Traders, Products, Industrial Supplies

I always enjoyed movies where famous managers travel from one city to another just to negotiate some new deals or eventually sign a new contract. It was good to see that as a successful manager you can reach the whole world.

Those days are gone, technology changed everything. Now you can do almost everything from your office or even your home, especially if you are running a “virtual” business. All you need to have is a good internet connection and you can be where you want… of course only virtually… But, you can definitely manage your business through the internet.

Do you think real businesses can be created and managed entirely through the Internet or real money is in the real world? I earn most of my income through the internet and although I am not complaining, I could do better. I personally don’t travel a lot for business but I would love to, I am staying 12-18 hours a day on the … internet…

So, can you manage your entire business from your (home)office or do you need to travel a lot?

I hate MySpace. Probably because I never had the time to use it… or I am too old. + The content created by the vast majority of members is so ugly.

As the owner of a software company, we were also involved in creating a niche social networking site. It was a great experiene, however, I was not involved in the project directly. So, I knew we were working on the site but haven’t checked the website too many times. But… the guys from the company definitely did a great job. This was about 1 - 1.5 year ago and at that time I never thought about building something similar as a publisher. But things are changing quite fast on the internet and although we are not the first on the market, I believe we could have success with a specialized business networking site. Yes, I know there is already a Xing.com but I believe there is still growth potential and if you change a few things, you can actually have a great product. And, if it happens to be mainly free and mainly supported by advertising, this might be even better. We all know that Markus is making a fortune from his free dating website, so the AdSense supported business model might be a good one. My only concern is that I would depend too much on google….

Some related sites I use about 1-2 times a month:

• www.xing.com
• www.del.icio.us
• www.digg.com.

I am still collecting the ideas on what to include on the site, features, complexity of the forms, software & design, etc. But, sooner or later it will be launched. I already have a killer domain name for it but let this be my secret for now.