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.

This is my first post in 2008, I have not been quite active lately (blogging)…

Couple of things happened this January (and not only):

• we bought a new server for TradeHolding.com B2B Network and put it into production
• launched www.chinatradeholding.com, a specialized website mainly focusing on Chinese Manufacturers, Chinese Wholesalers and Chinese Products; China is a big market and we thought we need tp have a site that is targeting the cheap Chinese B2B Market
• we generated a record revenue for December 2007, so far it looks like 2008 January will be even better
• added Internal Messaging between members
• yesterday (24 January, 2008) we get to another milestone: 60,489 visitors reached our network in just one day
• working hard on making the B2B Network more user friendly
• working on OneLoveNet.com free dating site as well, the installed Forum software might not be the best solution for us, at least we could not integrate it too well with our existing membership structure; the number of members looking for love is also growing day after day, our database now have more than 15,000 single profiles.

More news when I’ll have time.

We, at OneLoveNet.com, just launched the Dating & Singles Forum. We intend to make this place a busy community where you can discuss about many aspects of dating and relationships and not only.

We kindly invite you to login to your OneLoveNet.com account (or join if you do not have an account yet), visit the Dating & Singles Forum and start interesting Topics or participate in existing Topics.

We also have a board exclussively for our Moderators. We already added some guidelines for Moderators, if you are a Profile Moderator, you can read the guidelines here after logging in your acount. If you would like to become a Moderator, please contact us.

It is summer… the weather is hot…. today, there is 40 grade C in Satu Mare…. But, I am working hard.

I am proud to introduce OneLoveNet.com Web 2.0 Community… part 1… many more new enhancements will come in the near future. The goal of this part is to eliminate fraud and scam as much as we can from OneLoveNet.com free dating site. So far, this has been done by me alone… but I realized that the community should decide who’s a scammer and who’s not. So, I need you, I need Moderator members.

Moderators are volunteers who optionally and periodically review profiles and photos and collectively decide if a profile is a scam profile. As a Moderator you can freely contact as many members as you want and based on the communication with the member or your own intuition, you can decide if the profile is real.

Interested? Read more here and apply to become a Moderator.

Just a short summary of June so far, from my point of view:

• TradeHolding.com B2B Network traffic up to an average of 14,000 unique visitors / day
• OneLoveNet.com is now averaging 1,200 uniques / day, the site is in page 1 in search engines for many competitive terms
• Working hard on keeping both TradeHolding.com and OneLoveNet.com spam and scam free…
• The Romanian Internet Market received its first significant venture capital investment (10+ million Euro invested in 2 jobsites: www.bestjobs.ro and www.ejobs.ro), too bad these sites were the 2 biggest email spammers in 2000-2001… but anyway, congrats to the owners
• a new partner joined TradeHolding.com B2B Network: www.southafricab2b.co.za will mainly focus on South African market and hopefully our B2B Network will have a stronger presence in this region
• still working on the real estate portal, it will be launched soon!

I was quite busy in the last months with some technical problems and did not have the chance to write.

Now, I am writing to ask you, the bloggers to review some of our websites: OneLoveNet.com Free Dating Website, European Business Marketplace & Directory or Middle East Business Portal. Write a short review with 1-2 links about any of these sites in your blog and we will reward you with a free link on our high quality business links directory, TradeHolding.org. If you added a review to your blog, just post here and I will add your link.

Yes, one of the main problems on free dating sites such as OneLoveNet.com is that many scammers are using them. Although we use a number of automatic and manual methods to block and delete these scams our methods can never be 100% safe.

A dating scam usually involves the following steps:

• The scammer posts an attractive photo (such as attractive professional fotomodel photo) and fake profile on a dating website.
• The scammer sends the same message to many members. In this message the scammer usually express his / her interest in the member and provides a freemail address (yahoo or hotmail) and prefers to continue the discussion by email.
• If the scammer gets replies, he/she will present stories (a relative died, he / she was travelling and his / her pocket was stolen, etc.) and will claim how bad his/her current situation is and needs help and support to overcome it in some way. The story is usually very emotional and will easily gain sympathy and affection from the victim.
• No matter what the story is, after a short or long period of establishing trust and desire, the scammer will ask for money to be sent by Western Union, Monegram, cash money orders, send merchandise, etc..

Never send any money to someone you met on the Internet! If you suspect that a member’s profile is fake please imediatelly use the Admin Alert function we have on all profiles, we will investigate and take the required steps to delete / block the profile in question.

Being the fastest growing free dating site, our job, to reveiew all accounts are getting harder, day after day, this is why we always need your help and support to stop or at least minimize dating scam on our website.

OneLoveNet.com, free dating website is now 5 months old. We are close to 3,000 members… growing exponentially day after day. I still wonder where would this site be if I would have launched it in 2003-2004, when I initially built the script.

Anyway, we are working hard to follow member advices and try to build a community that will be extremely useful for members. We are close to launch the chat section, hopefully this will make even more contacts between the members.

Some new sections we launched recently:

• Dating by Profession
• Zodiac Dating
• Hot Picture Rating
• Religious Singles: Catholic Singles, Jewish Singles, Muslim Singles, Hindu Singles

Our Alexa ranking also have an exponential growing trend, not to mention Quantcast or Compete rankings.

OneLoveNet.com is still a small player in the free dating industry but if they can keep this growing trend I really think by the end of 2007 the site can become one of the top 5 free dating sites.

If you would like to write an article on your blog about OneLoveNet.com or place a link to us from your website, you are more than welcome. In return, I will give you a free featured link on TradeHolding.org, Business Websites & Links webdirectory.

David Evans, wrote an interesting post in his blog about Selecting the Right Dating Software. On a similar theme, Mark Brooks, wrote about List of Dating Softwares and Services. Very good points although I have my own comments as well.

In  my opinion, you are not going to make a big deal with a $50 - $1000 script you buy. You can not become successful if you do not have your own development team or if you know nothing about servers and scripting / db. Show me one successful dating site using a script that is sold in tens or hundreds of copies. I bet you can’t.
Create your own software and be prepared to work on it as your community is growing. This is what we (or me alone???) are doing at www.onelovenet.com dating site. I could have bought a $50 script and launch the website a lot more earlier, but I preferred to wait a few more months and develope something I can understand from A to Z.

Actually, I had a prealfa version in 2003… of the script used right now on OneLoveNet.com. I think if I would have launched in 2003 my site could be somewhere in top although I have to admit that at that time I did not have my current marketing knowledge. In 2003, I had been involved in some other B2B related projects and put away the dating one, the dating market was saturated and I really didn’t have a marketing plan. Now… the market is even more saturated, but I have some marketing knowledge and have a real plan and budget.

Dave wrote: “I still say it costs several million dollars in marketing money to build up a decent-sized dating site. Some things get cheaper like hardware and development costs due to advances in software. Marketing just gets more and more expensive.” The question is what we call decent-sized dating site: 100,000 members? 1 million? 10 million? In my opinion, you can build a 100,000 member community in 12 - 18 months with much less than 1 million dollars. You just need to know where to put your money. Yes, affiliate marketing is a waste of money. But there are many other ways to promote your website. One of them… probably the most important one is the viral effect. Build something that will make your members talk about your site. Viral marketing is a very powerful tool and if you use it wisely, it can be your best friend. And, someone should give me those “several million dollars”, I can make a miracle.

So, to summarize, to start a new niche or general dating site in 2007:

• build a custom software
• be prepared to have someone who can constanly work on your IT part
• be prepared to spend a lot of money (I let you decide the amount, but I do not think we can talk about millions of dollars) to reach the critical mass
• have a well wrote marketing plan where you prepare for every possible scenario.