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!

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.

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, 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.

…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).

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.