Zoltan’s Business News & Blog

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.

I am a little late with stats for April but here are just a few numbers:

• 144,000+ members
• 91,000+ trade leads
• 33,000+ products
• 11,000+ unique visitors / day
• 550,000+ trade lead searches and 170,000+ product searches

Our traffic is growing quite fast, and we had a record number of new registrations in April 2007, 3,867 new members joined us.

Some older stats here: October Stats.

…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

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 share with you how do we use our B2B environment to promote registered companies and their related products and trade leads. I will focus on Top Member promotion, because in every networking environment, paying members get more benefits than free members. This does not mean that free members can not get good results using our network, but obviously paying members are getting more responses.

So, how do we promote your products?

1. Top Member Companies, Trade Leads and Products are ranked higher in our databases.
2. Top Members with an active membership can post more products and more trade leads.
3. We promote by email Top Member Products to matching members.
Example:
You sell sugar and add your product to our database. A new “sugar” buyer joins our B2B Network. This sugar buyer will look for “sugar” trade leads and “sugar” products on our database and obviously he will see your offer and product on top positions and most probably an RFQ (request for quote) or buying request will be generated and sent to you.
Wait, this is not all! We also promote your “sugar” products to ALL “sugar” buyers by email periodically, so you can expect a constant flow of RFQs by e-mail! These emails are actually right on target because we send your products and pictures to members who are interested in your offer. So, a mobile phone buyer will never receive your sugar offer and vice versa.
4. Buy & Sell Alerts are sent out daily or weekly (based on member preference) to members who opted to receive these alerts. They are designed to keep members up-to-date with what is happening on their industry: sellers of products receive constant notifications with new buyers, buyers of products receive constant notifications with new sellers + links to trade leads posted on member’s industry. Obviously, Top Members have priority here as well, so your chances of being found by a potential buyer or seller are much higher.
5. Top Members can contact more members than free members.
6. We promote your memberwebsite mywebsite.bloombiz.com through our B2B Network.
7. You receive up to 25% discount on Targeted Trade Offer when you decide to send a mass offer or request to matching buyers or sellers.
8. Top Member Products and Companies are also appearing on the right column of some of our partner sites on certain site sections whenever a match between a searched word and a Top Member Product or Top Member sell or buyword exist.

Actually, I have to admit that many of these targeted promotion tactics were only introduced in the last 10-12 months but it increased Top Member response ratio by almost 90%!

And, just another personal opinion. Often, our members simply pay the membership fee and expect miracles. Let me tell you clear and in a public environment. A Top Membership worth nothing if you:

- do not have a company description

- do not provide sell and buy words

- do not add at least one trade lead and one product.

This will only generate you a number of totally unrelated requests and offers because other members will not know what you are selling or buying! So, please do not waste your money in becoming a Top Member if you have nothing to sell or buy.

But, if you invest some time in following my advices, our network can become a valuable resource for your import export needs.

Join our European Business Marketplace if you are not a member yet and benefit from our import export marketing. And, as an addon, you still benefit from our 3 times more credits promotion by the end of February. If you are already a member, please login on the partner site where you signed up or through our general partner site: Market at TradeHolding.com.

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

Yes, if you did not know this so far, I am writing it clearly: the internet is gobal.

Our main office is in Romania, Eastern Europe, but we run a few region specific B2B portals like Brazil B2B Marketplace or Middle East B2B Portal. We are getting more and more recognition through these regional portals, local and regional media is started to be interested is us and our work.

Today, we got a serious partnership proposal from a well know publishing company from Middle East. They are interested to partner and work together with us and … will see what will happen. And, I have to tell you that this is not the first similar proposal we got from well known Middle East Companies. So, it looks like it doesn’t matter too much where you are located or have your main offices if you do your job.

Yes, of course, similar requests will certainly lead us sooner or later to establish a local presence in a specific region, but the above scenario confirms that this is certainly not a must… yet.