Zoltan’s Business News & Blog

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.

Cristian Mezei’s Webxperience is 2 years old. Congrats man!

According to their definition, Webxperience is an internet library and directory. Indeed, sites and links are organized very well, just like in a real library. From categories like Arts & Hummanities, Business & Economy to Society and Culture, you find there virtually everything. According to Google, 13,300 pages are indexed from their domain.

They celebrate the site’s 2 year anniversary, and they offer a 50% discount on site submissions. So, act quickly and get some quality backlinks for less.

Congrats again Cristian.

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!

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.

Yes, on the Internet, everybody can become a fotomodel. Not a fake one with a fake picture as we mentioned a few weeks ago on our post: Dating Sites with Fotomodels.

We have recently added a picture rating section to OneLoveNet.com, the fastest growing free dating website. Yes, our growth is just as we expected, everything is looking good, we have more and more singles online and our Alexa ranking is showing a +2,8 million change in our rankings. So, I will quote from the site: “Picture Rating at OneLoveNet.com allows you to browse profiles & pictures radomly and vote on them. Meet & Vote on Sexy Boys, Sexy Girls, Sexy Men, Sexy Women and Singles from all over the world and add your profile and picture to find out if you are sexy or not, hot or not or if you are just looking for new friends.”

So, add your profile and your sexiest photo and find out how sexy and hot you are.

Some of the most important factors when ranking a page or website on a specific keyword is (1) the number of external incoming links to the page, (2) the quality and relevance of the page linking to your site and (3) the anchor text. The more quality and relevant sites link to you the better your ranking for your website and page.

Obviously big business directories and b2b portals like TradeHolding.com B2B Network have thousands of incoming links from other quality websites including trade associations, business magazines, government pages, region specific portals, etc. It was / is our job to drive targeted business traffic to our B2B network and implicitly advertise your company, products and offers. We spent years and a lot of money to advertise our network and reach an everyday growing business audience, currently our network is visited every day by about 12,000 business owners, decision makers, sellers and buyers. Obviously, a simple company presentation website with only 4-5 pages can never dream about a similar traffic, unless your company is a well known brand like Microsoft, BMW or Nokia, but you can actually increase your search engine rankings. Most company presentation websites receive less than 5-10 unique visitors / day but with a well prepared SEO campaign you can actually increase this to a few hundred targeted visitors / day. And, if you can convert just 1-2% of your traffic into customers, this would mean an additional 2-5 sales / day! Can you afford to send these customers to competition?

TradeHolding.com B2B Network has an integrated directory on all of our partner sites, these directories contain links to relevant websites on a categorized environment:

• Middle East Websites
• European Websites
• African Websites
• Business Websites

You can add a link to your website from these site sections since 2005 and clever webmaster already used this option to link to their websites. Until now, this was the only section on our websites where we allowed external links to be placed to our network, these pages actually contain only external links to other websites.

Since March 2007, we are testing a new option on 2 partner sites: TradeBoss.com and Middle East Business Directory. We have embedded a link box to the top right corner of company classification pages, these boxes can be rented by companies including a link to their company website. Getting links to your website from these pages obviously have a higher value than the above websites section because these have no outgoing links and the page strength is not divided to many different websites.

How does this work? Imagine that you have a website / page where you are trying to sell crude oil in large qantities. You browse to the relevant category(ies) on Middle East B2B Marketplace: Chemical Companies and / or Crude Oil Companies, click on Add Your Link Here on the top right corner, set the desired anchor text (it should be similar to the page title you are trying to advertise, for example: “ABC Company sells Crude Oil” or “Crude Oil for sale”), page description, personal details, pay for the link and you are ready. The more links to add using similar anchor texts, the better your chances that you will be ranked for that specific term.

Additionally, in 2006, we also launched TradeHolding.org, the Business Links Directory, where you can get free links to your business website.

So, remember: try to concentrate on getting many relevan links to your business website from various relevant sources. This is definitely a must if you intend to be ranked by search engines.

On 11 February I posted in my blog an article: Dating Site With Foto Models. Today,  when I checked my blog stats, I found that I get some traffic through google for the search term: “fotomodels”. I quickly went to google and typed the term: “fotomodels”. I thought that my site will show up somewhere on page 5-10, but no, my post is on the 1st page, the 10th position!

Can you believe this? Just search on google, you’ll see what I mean… Frankly, I have no idea how do I rank for this search term, my post was about fake profiles on dating sites with… fotomodel pictures, but it looks like, I wrote something very interesting. Although, this post was not advertised anywhere (just a few diggs), it looks like this was enough to be listed on page one for a one word term like fotomodels… Thanks Google!

Let’s see where will I rank with this new post, this time… about … fotomodels.

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.