Zoltan’s Business News & Blog

Over the past five years, proudly left behind, 170,000+ companies joined TradeHolding.com B2B Network since 20 November, 2002. TradeHolding.com B2B Network is The Biggest Business to Business Network used everyday by thousands of buyers and sellers from all over the world.

On our 5th anniversary, we are proud that we reached a few more milestones. We had a record number of visitors (42,267 unique visitors) in November, and it looks like our traffic is growing every month.

Some other milestones:

• record number of contacts in October 2007
• record number of new Top Members in October 2007
• record number of revenue in October 2007. 

We are working extremely hard to keep a clean B2B Network and eliminate scam and fraud as much as it is possible. Our number one goal is customer satisfaction. We try to keep our premium service fees low (compared to our competition we are a lot more cheaper and I can say without any hesitation that some active free members are even getting better results than paid members at our competition….), but at the same time we try to offer the best services.

So, Thanks to all our Members and hopefully, we’ll all use (an even more improved) TradeHolding.com B2B Network at our 10th Anniversary as well!

It looks like there are many new free dating sites lately. We also launched a new dating site a few months ago: www.onelovenet.com and although it is quite hard to enter the free dating market, it is extremely challenging and if you have the knowledge and the right budget, the results will be showing up. I am talking from my own experience.
It is fun creating an environment where new loves are created and you can actually find your soulmate. Although in today’s world, when more than 50% of the marriages are ending with a divorce, someone can have more than one soulmate in a lifetime.

My free dating industry predictions for 2008:

• POF and OKCupid will share the 1st place in terms of visitors in the free dating industry, POF will lose its domination.
• There will be at least 3-4 more strong players (including my site OneLoveNet.com, we already hit the nail and in less than 4 months since we are launched, we are well ahead of what we have planned, things are looking very good now…).
• I believe Markus from POF will regret that he did not sold POF when he had some really good offers, his profit margin will be much lower, the competition will be much higher.
• Paid websites will offer more free services just to get more and more members.
• Some of the dating sites will continue their qustionable marketing tactics (Markus and Andy from collaboradate blogs a lot about this). And the small players will lose their interest and will be bought by bigger players.
• Meetic will continue its Europe domination and possibly buy other dating / social networking sites.

More to come.

I just read on AGLOCO blog that the viewbar will be most probably released in March. It looks like they are quite under pressure to do so, they are pressed by their shareholders… the members….

“The March target, and all the dates we have projected for the Viewbar release, have been based solely upon our Engineers’ best estimates. I have asked our head techie for a firmer date, but he hasn’t given one to me. If I press him, he can give me an estimate, but he cannot be sure. Anyone who has worked with software engineers knows that they don’t like giving estimates because they know problems come up all the time in software development. For instance, we could give you an exact date only to get a bug in the last day of QA that would blow up that date. When we started the Viewbar software we had one engineer working on it. We now have six. We have incentive - we know that the Viewbar release is the real launch of AGLOCO.”

Also, some members are questioning the success of AGLOCO: “AGLOCO sounds too good to be true. Why am I getting paid without putting anything into it?”. And, let’s see the response he got from an AGLOCO official: “If being “too good” is our only problem, I think we’re in great shape!

Joking aside, seeming “too good to be true” is probably the number one reason people DON’T sign up for AGLOCO. It seems strange to “get something for nothing.” The truth is, you’re not getting something for nothing. You’re giving the Viewbar a small share of your computer monitor, which we (and apparently many advertisers) consider extremely valuable. You are also choosing us as your partner for commissions, referrals, and fees accumulated through everyday browsing. So, instead of some other middleman making this money, AGLOCO makes it. We win, you win, and the advertisers/companies win for getting your business.

Also, if you decide to refer other Members and build the community, you get more because YOU have built the community and provided it with its most valuable resource: more Members. By providing value to AGLOCO, we provide value back to you for your efforts.

So, essentially, AGLOCO doesn’t cost you any money to join, but you are “putting something in it” to reap the returns AGLOCO will provide you. If it’s worth it to share about 3/4-inch of your screen with the Viewbar and possibly to take the time and effort to build our network, you have earned every cent of your AGLOCO payout.”

I believe in AGLOCO success, mainly because I see how much money is in online advertising, and I believe that I won’t lose anything by spending about 2-3 hours of my time every month to promote this idea and my business + recruiting more members. Yes, AGLOCO is my business and it can be yours as well. All you have to do is to Join AGLOCO.

You can also read more about AGLOCO on my blog.

If you check my about page you will notice that I am running a free dating website: OneLoveNet.com. Well… it is quite new but already having lots of members and the traffic is growing day after day.

Well… I compared my site with some other dating sites. The strange thing I noticed that on many sites, the homepage contains photos with singles who look like fotomodels… Come on, is this the real life? Who do you try to fool? “Register now and meet this beautiful girl from…” or “Join now and chat online with Nicole… she is waiting for you.” The photos are usually professional photos that were made in a studio by the respective dating site… Come on, most of these profiles are fake profiles. Do you really think that a fotomodel will use a dating site to meet a guy??? To meet you??? Give me a break…

OK, let’s suppose they are real woman not just fake profiles, what are your chances of dating with them? There will be hundreds if not thousands of man who will want to date with her… Will you be the one?

Real life and real dating is different. It doesn’t matter how you look or how professional is your photo, there has to be a spiritual connection between you and the one you want to date. At OneLoveNet.com, you can meet real singles locally with real photos who do not look like a fotomodel. We do not select good looking profiles to our homepage and we do not post fotomodel pictures to our site. Most of our singles are simple with a real life, trying to find the one. But, one of them can definitely become your fotomodel.

I wish all of my readers, partners and clients a Happy New 2007! A healthy & wealthy new year all together with your friends and family.

And just a few new year quotes:

• Cheers to a new year and another chance for us to get it right.  (Oprah Winfrey)
• We will open the book.  Its pages are blank.  We are going to put words on them ourselves.  The book is called Opportunity and its first chapter is New Year’s Day.  (Edith Lovejoy Pierce)
• Glory to God in highest heaven,
  Who unto man His Son hath given,
  While angels sing with tender mirth,
  A glad new year to all the earth.
  (Martin Luther)
• It wouldn’t be New Year’s if I didn’t have regrets.  (William Thomas)

Happy New 2007!

I first read his blog about 10 days ago, since then I read it daily and everyday I find something new. Well, new for me. His old posts are very interesting, he writes about blogging for a living (although he claims to donate his blog income to charities), AGLOCO, AdSense and other Internet media, Google and a lot more. Even cars…

John Chow lives in Vancouver, Canada and he is a self proclaimed Internet (or dot Com) mogul. According to his posts, the personal blog gets around 200,000 unique visitors a month. This is quite a lot for a personal blog, so he is definitely doing something very well.

His style of writing is excellent, his posts are easy to understand… and I would love to have his writing skills. But, considering that English is not my mother tongue, I think I should not complain. What I like the most is the embedded images, screenshots and charts into his posts. John, what editor do you use? I am quite new to blogging and it is hard for me even to change the colors of my blog. I wonder if I should write my posts first in a normal editor like OpenOffice not directly through the WordPress editor.

Let’s get back to the subject. In my opinion, reading his blog is a must for everybody who is serious about making a living (exclussively) online.

For all my friends, readers, business partners, customers:

Merry Christmas and Happy New Year!

May Happiness, Health, Peace, Prosperity and Success be yours throughout the coming year.

This is what we got though TradeHolding.com Contact Us form:

“hi
my situation is EMERGENCY
i need $5000 for …
please fastly help me and transfer to my acc no’BANK **** IRAN-TEHRAN
swift:*********
acc no:*******
acc holder: *************
benef: ***************

thankyou
**************”

At least they added a “thankyou”….

I read at The Paradigm Shift (Hardware Sensitive Business models) that ebay use about 17,000 servers and macth.com use about 1,000 servers. Quite impressive, I wonder how many server admins are needed to manage that many servers. How are these and what exactly is monitorized? How often to they change HDs, memories, network cards, routers, etc.? How often do they upgrade the software? These are all questions that need to be asked before you plan to make a site that has the chances to become … the next internet boom.

Handling large amount of data requires optimal indexes and powerful servers, a lot of RAM especially. This is quite true with our B2B Network, TradeHolding.com as well. We only have about 125,000 members but although our databases are quite optimized, we constantly work on changing slow queries and rebuild indexes, tables where needed. We store a lot of information that help us better understand our members’ needs and requirements and the generated reports are sometimes slow.

But, we are definitely on the right way…

I will try to keep you posted about what are our members and visitors searching on various TradeHolding.com B2B Network partner sites. We store these details every month and if you read my blog, you will get a better picture of what is popular.

Some quick stats:

• an average of 7 - 8,000 visitors / day reached our B2B Network in October
• the most importer / seller companies are from China and exporters / buyers are from USA, Canada, UK and Germany
• 393.693 trade lead searches in 31 days an average of 12.700 searches / day
• 117.581 product searches in 31 days, an average of 3,793 searches / day

And now, let’s see the top of the searches:

cement: 1112
sugar: 972
steel: 700
vegetable: 657
mobile phones cellular phone cellulars: 621
granite: 585
IRON ORE: 581
copper: 551
coffee coffe cofee: 547
meat: 545
GOLD: 543
handicraft: 537
fish: 525
stone: 523
tea: 518
urea: 514
shoes: 510
bearings: 486
food: 484
tyre: 466
furniture: 442
rubber: 440
nuts: 433
Jewelry: 431
hardware: 426
wood: 418
battery: 417
HMS: 406
parts: 403
vegetables: 400
clothing: 396
mp3: 395
auto parts automotive automobile: 393
charcoal: 390
mobile phones: 385
fruits: 384
gold dust: 376
second hand: 373
tram: 372
honey: 372
cable: 370
wine: 369
apparel: 368
leather: 365
laptop: 364
marble: 363
coffee: 359
Jewelry stone gold: 355
textile fabrics apparel knitted fabrics texture: 355
alcohol: 353
cosmetics: 351
spare parts: 346
light: 346
cosmetic: 345
ipod: 344
cocoa: 344
construction: 339
bag: 339
CRUDE OIL: 338
paper: 337
footwear: 333
live animals: 332
plastic: 332
nike: 331
shoe: 328
tubes: 324
soap: 322
auto spare parts: 321
DVD: 321
salt: 319
coal: 316
textile: 311
fat oil: 310
bitumen: 309
eggs: 307
tobacco: 307
software: 307
electronic electronics: 304
spare: 302
lamp: 302
air jordan shoes online trade: 294
accesories: 294
LDPE: 293
advertising: 291
timber: 291
spices: 290
iron: 290
motorcycle: 290
cement chemical chemicals: 289
wire mesh: 289
art: 288
engine: 288
fruit: 287
yarn: 284
beverages: 283
glass: 283
HDPE: 282
computers: 282
aluminium composite panel: 282

What can we see on this list? Commodities like cement, sugar, steel, gold, copper, granite and iron ore are on the top positions. This confirms, that our network is a popular place for industrial products.

Consumer products like mobile phones, handicraft, shoes, textiles are also wanted, based on our experience these products are mainly searched by smaller importers.

I will try to follow in time how this list changes from month to month. I will keep you posted.