Zoltan’s Business News & Blog

Today, I will simply summarize what me & my team did in 2006 and some of our plans for 2007.

2006 in words and numbers:
* launch of http://www.tradeholding.org/, the Business Links Directory
* launch of http://www.onelovenet.com/ singles & social networking website
* relaunch of our romanian job & recruitment portal www.1job.ro, including several improvements made on the site
* several improvements made to our B2B Network, including regional advertising and powerful presence in the Middle East through our Middle East Business Portal
* now, our website network (b2b, recruitment, dating, portal and social networking websites) has more than 250,000 registered members from all over the world.

Plans and goals for 2007:
* launch of a new Business Social Networking website: http://www.kugli.com/
* continuous improvement and advertising of our websites: TradeBoss.com B2B Portal, Premier Business Club, 1Job.ro - Romanian Recruitment & Headhunting Portal, Singles & Friends at OneLoveNet.com, TradeHolding.org Business Links Directory
* reaching 200,000 members on TradeHolding.com B2B Network.

I personally thank my team for their hard work and thank you and all our members and visitors for the continuous use of our services. Hope that we will continue to work together in 2007.

In November, I wrote down some of my thoughts on Social Networking Sites. At that time, I mentioned that I hate MySpace and I would never use it. Probably I am too old.

But, these websites and other relationship related websites (dating, business, recruitment) get more and more publicity and media coverage. Also, VCs invested a lot (and probably will invest even more in 2007) to similar websites and business. And the year is already started with a few interesting aquisitions.

• Hearst Magazines Digital Media, the online unit of Hearst Magazines, has acquired eCRUSH.com, Inc., a top entertainment/community network for teens and young adults. The announcement was made today by Cathleen P. Black, president of Hearst Magazines. (Hearts Press Release)
• European online dating and chat company MEETIC has acquired UK-based DatingDirect.com in a deal worth £27.3m. (New Media Age)

Paul Woodward, published an interesting article about Chines Social Networking Sites and VCs, according to his post 16 Chinese Networking sites received about $93 million funding between 2003-2006.

Let’s see if me and my team will be able to offer something new in this social networking industry. We will soon launch our business social networking site, Kugli.com, so stay tuned. Our recently launched dating & single website, OneLoveNet.com is getting to become popular, especially in my country, as we mainly advertised in local websites. But, international advertising campaigns have been launched as well, so we expect our international traffic to grow quickly as well, we already have many international members.

And something else. I noticed that Xing.com (formerly openBC.com) is advertising in Alibaba.com newsletters. I wonder what kind of deal do they have, as they are basically targeting similar niches. Probably Xing.com is need of more Chinese members. 

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

Today, I just reached 100 AGLOCO referrals. It looks like my network started to grow. In fact, the entire AGLOCO network is growing, of course with the help of the members and … google… Today, there are 822,000 pages indexed in google containing the word AGLOCO. This is a big number considering that AGLOCO has been launched less than 6 monhts ago.

Why do we all join? In fact, nobody knows for sure what will be the future of AGLOCO. But considering the tremenduous viral effect generated by members, it can become a big surprise for all of us. Everything depends on management and on how well AGLOCO’s technical team will be able to handle the load on their servers.

In the last 3 months AGLOCO was mentioned a lot in the media, blogs, forums, etc. with both positive and negative comments. Here you can find some quotes about AGLOCO:

• Our self-worship is only encouraged further by current trends in advertising. Services like Agloco will compete for our attention, and pay us for viewing individually tailored ads, so that we only ever see what is apparently relevant to us and nobody else. Thus the message that all that matters is me will be reinforced at every turn on the Internet. (OhmyNews)
• AGLOCO is a reincarnation of AllAdvantage, although the founders are trying to spin a different story. Like the previous company, AGLOCO asks users to disclose personal information and install a toolbar that rests at the bottom of the browser screen. The key difference is that AGLOCO is also reimbursing a portion of affiliate fees earned from ecommerce sites when users make purchases, and they have a multi-level payout scheme where users can get part of the fees generated by referred members, plus new members that those people referred, down to five levels (this is why it is being called a pyramid scheme). It looks like AGLOCO is also offering stock in the company to users. (Techrunch Blog)
• Today’s hottest Internet businesses are all about the power of social networks. Companies like MySpace, Facebook, and YouTube are worth billions because businesses see that these social networks are generating huge advertising and marketing opportunities. (Work at Home Business Opportunities)

 Be part of AGLOCO, join the network.

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!

When I woke up this morning I just noticed a big decrease in traffic on many sites I own / manage. I didn’t know what is really going on, just checked my stats over and over again and couldn’t find anything strange… until I saw some news about an earthquake in Taiwan.

A powerful earthquake jolted Taiwan late Tuesday, killing two people whose home collapsed and prompting a tsunami alert on the second anniversary of the waves and quake that killed 230,000 in south Asia. (ABC News)

A pair of powerful earthquakes off the coast of Taiwan damaged undersea cables and disrupted telephone and Internet access in Asia on Wednesday.

“All of the ISPs in Singapore are affected,” said Michael Sim, a spokesman for Starhub Internet Pte. Ltd., which provides cable and wireless Internet services, referring to connectivity problems in Singapore. Sim blamed the disruption on damage to undersea cables caused by the earthquakes. Internet access in the city slowed to a crawl and some Web sites were unreachable.

“Everybody’s doing their best to migrate [traffic] to alternate routes or to fix the affected routes,” Sim said.

Japan’s NTT Communications Corp. said 84 leased lines were out of service as a result of the problems and international toll-free calling was being disrupted. Conventional international calling was in operation albeit with limited capacity, said Akiko Suzaki, a spokeswoman for the carrier in Tokyo.

In Beijing, a China Network Communications Group Corp. (China Netcom) representative, who gave only his surname Chen, said some international connections had been affected. That disruption left some international Web sites accessible in Beijing, while others could not be reached. Chen did not know when full service might be restored. (InfoWorld)

After further checking my stats, I found at that this is the cause of the dropped traffic… it looks like I am at least 25-30% dependent on China, Taiwan, Singapore, Japan traffic. Our sites register at least 75% less Chinese logins.

My AGLOCO network has started to grow, already reached 50 persons. The more people you refer the more shares you will own on AGLOCO. 

Today, just a few promotion tips for your AGLOCO network. The promotion tips are taken from an old AGLOCO newsletter. Don’t know what is AGLOCO? Read below:

• AGLOCO - Own the Internet 
• Join AGLOCO  

To help you we have also listed a couple of blogs that our Members have created to share ideas on how to obtain referrals, as well links to two successful Members who have over a thousand referrals.

Ideas
http://aglocoideas.blogspot.com/(good site for ideas for obtaining referrals – sample emails etc.)

Two successful recruiters:
http://mccallsnotes.spaces.live.com/blog/ (over 6,000 referrals)
http://www.johnchow.com/the-agloco-viewbar/ (over 1,700 referrals)

Two ‘fun AGLOCO sites’
http://aglocovideo.blogspot.com/ (a Malaysian video in English)
http://www.aglocotest.com/ (A newbie diary)

Still not an AGLOCO member? Join mine here.

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.

There is an interesting article in WebMasterWorld about AdSense predictions for 2007. I will try to summarize what I like the most and whether I think it will happen or not:

• Google’s overall revenues will either stay the same as 2006, or rise slightly. True
• Marginal quality sites will become less and less profitable. True
• Continuing trend from 2006, advertiser behavior will continue to change pushing DOWN ad prices, but overall ad expenditures will increase. True
• Google will not allow any third-party audit of their click-fraud rate in 2007. Unless they will be forced to do so
• 2007 will see the first documented case of click-fraud blackmail. The same lightweight criminals in poorly policed countries that currently collect blackmail from mid-sized companies by threatening DDOS attacks will realize that they can get the same effect much, much easier by threatening to get AdSense publishers banned. The ransom note will go something like this: “On Thanksgiving Day, you will see hits on your home page from over 5,000 unique IP addresses that contain the unique URL of www.yerdomain.com/#payup-or-else. You will wire $2,000 to the following bank account by Dec. 15th, or else we will use 5,000 other unique IP addresses to click-fraud your account during the second half of December. Google will then freeze your Christmas profits and then ban you. If they don’t ban you, they will still keep your funds. In any case, we will attack again until Google does ban you.” Interesting, however, I think that google have the power to distinguish these clicks.
• The total number of AdSense publishers will continue to swell, which means the average AdSense payout will continue to drop. By the end of 2007, the average monthly AdSense publisher payout will be under $10 (it’s probably well under $25 already). Another good one, so actually there will be more millionaires and more and more publishers who’s only aim will be to pay the hosting fees from AdSense revenues…
• More and more money is put into internet advertising. Hmm… most probably true
• Spam and black hat stuff though will also escalate. Unfortunately most probably true…
• Webmasters will continue to whine for solutions that require Google get into the human intervention business. Google will continue to ignore all such suggestions. They will need to make changes. I guess currently their technology - human intervention ratio is about 80-20%, in my opinion, in 2007 this will go toward a 70-30% or even 65-35%. You can resolve a lot with IT but not everything.

If you want to read more, go to WebMasterWorld and read this post.