China Business SEO marketing Guide: 2007

Tuesday, December 11, 2007

China Business community, II

The results are in! We asked which is your Favorite China Business community? Without further ado, here are the results:

LinkedIn: 35%
XING: 14%
Facebook: 14%
F&B and Fashion business1: 7%
KLM Club China1: 7%
Lenovo1: 6%
Globe Forum Business Network1: 5%
Guanxi1: 4%
China dialogue1: 2%
Tianji1: 3%
Hello World1: 1%
Language1: 1%

1 = Added by a guest

Now I know KLM Club China, we have quite some friends there, but what is F&B and Fashion business? Globe Forum Business Network was new to me as well, I signed up and I must say it looks quite nice! Will do an update on what that does to our on-going Chinese Networking endeavor soon.

That’s it for now, oh and BTW, China Law Blog added us to their Blogroll, do check their site out on http://www.chinalawblog.com/2007/12/china_sucess_stories_new_blogr.html , it is excellent!

M

PS If XING and LinkedIn is your thing, look me up: find a direct link in the menu on the right.

Monday, December 10, 2007

China SEO look at social media marketing

Still absolutely excited by the way traffic to http://www.chinasuccessstories.com/ is increasing, I just read a 100% non-Chinese post by SEOmoz that perfectly describes the way I feel about the importance of social communities. For your website ranking, appreciation / valuation and ultimately: traffic.

It complies with what I pointed out in ‘Long live social bookmark exchange’, fully agrees with the added value of sites like Facebook, and underlines the importance of sites like LinkedIn and del.ico.us as described in 'Del.icio.us the China sequel’.

So without wanting to risk dropping too many links here, go ahead and read this: a truly magnificent article on the Basics of Social Media Marketing. -> http://www.seomoz.org/blog/a-visual-tour-through-the-basics-of-social-media-marketing

M

Friday, November 23, 2007

Favorite China Business community?

Which is your Favorite China Business community? As the poll is about to close be sure to make your vote count on www.chinasuccessstories.com. The results so far:
LinkedIn: 39%
XING: 16%
Facebook: 18%
Other: 27%

M

Sunday, November 18, 2007

China website statistics

Curious to find out who is visiting www.chinasuccessstories.com? Want to know what the best referring websites are for your China Business site? Feel free to join me as I scroll through this week’s statistics. To make it a timely snapshot, I will only look at the last 10.000 visitors:

Top 10 countries (number of visitors):
1. United States (2.049)
2. China (1.679)
3. Netherlands (714)
4. United Kingdom (535)
5. Canada (391)
6. India (382)
7. Australia (299)
8. Hong Kong (283)
9. New Zealand (276)
10. France (231)

So far no surprises. What is interesting is the fact that visitors from Canada visit an average of 2,95 pages and spend an average of 5:59 minutes on our site, whereas visitors from New Zealand only visit 1,22 pages and leave after 29 seconds. I’ll have to find out how to come: maybe we are listed on an off topic site somewhere?

Referring websites
Here is a selection of current top referrers. Please keep in mind I’ve only taken the last 10.000 visitors into account, so next week this list can easily look a lot different. Also I’ve taken out email platforms from Yahoo, Hotmail and Gmail.

google / organic 2.374
(direct) / (none) 1.481
stumbleupon.com / referral 607
en.wikipedia.org / referral 237
linkedin.com / referral 203
yahoo / organic 155
chinaventurenews.com / referral 107
twitter.com / referral 103
chinalyst.net / referral 57
online.wsj.com / referral 55
china.startpagina.nl / referral 50
communicaid.com / referral 31
clubchina.klm.com / referral 28
blog.aktualne.centrum.cz / referral 25
live / organic 24
chinabusinesslaw.blogspot.com / referral 19
dogpile.com / referral 19
msn / organic 19
chinese-tools.com / referral 15
entrepreneur.com.sg / referral 15
archives.zinester.com / referral 14
china-business-how-to.blogspot.com / referral 14
chinalawblog.com / referral 14
images.google.com / referral 14
labbrand.com / referral 14
baidu / organic 13
asianpros.meetup.com / referral 11
netvibes.com / referral 11
koh-i-noor.hyves.nl / referral 9
wikihow.com / referral 8
mybloglog.com / referral 7
outsource.meetup.com / referral 7
del.icio.us / referral 6
facebook.com / referral 6

In terms of quality traffic, If I only consider the sites that referred over 10 visitors of the most recent 10k, then chinalawblog-visitors are most interesting, visiting 6,36 pages on average and staying 4:24 minutes before leaving. With 4,14 pages, china-business-how-to.blogspot.com is next. Followed by Windows live search (3,71), chinaventurenews.com (3,59) and communicaid.com (3,58) . Wall street journal online is also worth mentioning with just over 3 pages visited on average.

Least interesting referrals delivering over 10 visitors are: blog.aktualne.centrum.cz (only 1 page viewed per visitor), baidu with 1,13, entrepreneur.com.sg with 1,20 and msn / organic with 1,21. Remarkable difference to me is the traffic from MSN versus Live. Any clue how come? I don’t.

Conclusions?
Many obviously as I didn’t even mention entry pages, exit pages, trends compared to a week before etc. So I’ll be brief. I love http://www.chinalawblog.com/ in terms of quality, and http://www.chinaventurenews.com/ as far as the mix of pages viewed times time spend on site is concerned. I’m also grateful for Wall Street Journal dropping our name referring 50+ visitors times 3 pages viewed: not bad. And good for Google PageRank, I think, since they are such an authority.

Looking at quantity stumbleupon.com is nothing short of a gift. And finally chinalyst.net looks promising considering the fact we just recently joined.

From time to time I will try to keep you updated on our China website statistics so you hopefully will benefit from knowing what works for us. If at any time you would like to share what sites are best for your online business, please let me know, I’ll be most happy to give you some additional pointers you could try to improve your China website statistics with.

M

Saturday, November 10, 2007

Link exchange is dead, long live bookmark exchange (if I was Google)

If I was Google I’d always be on the lookout for websites trying to manipulate their way into top ranking. So no surprise they do that, and - needless to say - with a lot of success. If I was Google I’d prefer to look as closely as I could to what makes humans actually tick (click) and like. And I’m pretty sure they do this as well. Through offering Google Analytics for free for instance. Through Gmail. Docs, Maps, etc.

By offering quality tools for free, Google gets great insight into which sites deserve high ranking and which don’t. Effectively killing the old game of counting links pointing at your site to determine whether you matter, or not. Still… backlinks matter a little bit. Just like your content, Title (and other) tags, etc. The big landslide this fall was that reciprocal links were pulled out of the equation. Somebody linking to your site, who receives a link back to return the favor, simply isn’t doing it for Google any longer. Fair enough. Good call, I think. At least to some extent.

Now
If I was Google, I’d also look at other things. And I know they do. For instance? How about looking at how many people bookmark your China website. They can. Easily. Remember the Google toolbar (with advanced features turned on?), that is how they find out your website is memorable. Also no doubt in my mind whatsoever that they turn to many social bookmarking sites out there for reference. I mean. Wouldn’t you? If hundreds of people bookmark some page on del.icio.us you’d have to be blind not to take that into account.

So here goes… I officially declare the death of link exchange – as if that was up to me ;-) And I proclaim the new way to demand attention: social bookmarking exchange. If you social bookmark me, I will social bookmark you. Just say the word. Respond to this post, let me know which keywords you’d like me to use describing your website on del.icio.us, Stumbleupon, etc., and let me know where to find your bookmark to www.chinasuccessstories.com (containing any keyword you find appropriate and hopefully China + Business).

Together we can do it: long live bookmark exchange!

Thursday, November 8, 2007

Angelina Jolie and me (Brad Pitt), part II

One of the first posts on this blog was titled “Angelina Jolie and me (Brad Pitt)”. It was inspired by the best read post on Chinalyst.net. A few months later I decided to join www.chinalyst.net with our China Business Blog. A great site for those who want to spare themselves the hassle of finding English language China blogs, and the trouble of subscribing to each and every one of them. It is also a well organized site in the sense they give credit where credit is due, meaning also they let you share in their (I guess meager) revenues.

Today I checked what the all-time popular content is. Here’s what it says:

Angelina Jolie Shows Off Her Tattoos (93849)
Women Receive Gifts to Shop in their underwear (41607)
6 Hottest Pictures of Zhang Ziyi Plus 3 of Her Nudity Double (SFW) (34763)
China's Top 5 Nude Girl Posters for 2006 (31154)
China's Top Ten Hottest Girls (26609)
Series - China's Hottest Women - # 2 - Maggie Q (24343)

This time I’ll leave it up to you to draw conclusions on what this means for your web site, if you look to attract a big crowd to your English China Blog.

M (the lacking in Angelina Jolie Brad Pitt of www.chinasuccessstories.com but you knew that ;-)

Saturday, November 3, 2007

China Business Plans

Just as my China Business Plans for Google PageRank 5 were picking up speed, Google decided to flip the book on me… Why? Not sure. We kept PR4 which isn’t bad – 4 is the new 5 (I comfort myself ;-) Question remaining: what will it take to move up the China ranking ladder from now on. First let’s analyze what we have going for us now. After that I will unveil my China Business Plans for higher ranking (and please let me know if you have any suggestions whatsoever!):

Firstly
We offer great China Business how-to content on www.chinasuccessstories.com The new site will make it easier to browse through all the articles. As we are currently redesigning over a thousand pages, we must be careful Google doesn’t get lost in the process as it has already indexed most of our content: http://www.google.nl/search?sourceid=navclient&hl=nl&ie=UTF-8&rls=GGLJ,GGLJ:2006-29,GGLJ:nl&q=site:chinasuccessstories%2ecom

Secondly
We secured a great amount of back links. Over 10.000 (!) according to Yahoo!: https://siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com/search?p=http%3A%2F%2Fchinasuccessstories.com&bwm=i&bwmf=s&bwmo=&fr=moz2&fr2=seo-rd-se Most Pagerank predictors out there analyzed us, and were absolutely sure we deserved PR5 – or higher - based on this huge amount.

Thirdly
We are found in many communities. Our China Business LinkedIn group is growing at an amazing rate (over 250 members now). Assuming you've subscribed to our newsletter on doing business in China on www.chinasuccessstories.com already, visit http://www.linkedin.com/e/gis/36656/50377703F693 for details. We are active on XING as well. Yahoo groups. Google groups. Joined meetup.com recently which is really nice. The list goes on.

Also
As far as social bookmarking is concerned, more and more people started bookmarking us (over 20 fans on del.icio.us today http://del.icio.us/url/c714c238b520b5332f197ad8d3550ccc). People faving us on Technorati http://www.technorati.com/blogs/www.chinasuccessstories.com Liking us on StumbleUpon http://mmmdeman.stumbleupon.com/ Discovering us on http://www.mister-wong.com/users/259763/ So no complaints here, though we could use so more credit: add us to your favorite social bookmarking site anytime!

And…
… the list goed on. Luckily www.chinasuccessstories.com wasn’t the only site that didn’t get upgraded, almost nobody moved up. Many even dropped in ranking, we didn't. But since we are not just any site (at least I think), what can be holding back our China Business Plans PR-wise? It is we suffered some downtime when moving to another hosting provider? Could it be the –very modest – use of Adwords, Enhance and Yahoo marketing pay-per-click-advertising-programs to make ourselves visible? The fact that we do no longer have the Alexa-toolbar on our own browser because the spywarekiller killed it, and Google noticed we dropped a few points there as a result? Beats me. I plan to achieve PR5 regardless of whatever it is asap. So I you have any suggestions or plans, please let me know, I will return the favor!

Wednesday, October 24, 2007

Monday, October 22, 2007

Favorite China Business information source?

What is your Favorite China Business information source? That was the question we asked on http://www.chinasuccessstories.com/ Here are the results:

China Business Web sites, blogs: 41%
Books and magazines on China Business: 19%
Business fairs, seminars, conferences: 16%
China network clubs, groups, communities: 12%
Your (www.chinasuccessstories.com) website! (1): 7%

Answers marked with 1 are added by a guest, so they obviously don't weigh as much.

The winners are therefore China Business Web sites, blogs and Books and magazines on China Business. Did we miss any China Business information topics?

Monday, October 15, 2007

China Business Blog goes LinkedIn

Dear China friends,

You are most welcome to join our (as in: www.chinasuccessstories.com) China Business group on LinkedIn! I'm positive you will benefit from it, being able to get into contact with other China Business minded professionals like yourself. Please visit http://www.linkedin.com/e/gis/36656/50377703F693 for details.

M
(I am assuming you've subscribed to our newsletter on doing business in China on www.chinasuccessstories.com already. If you haven't, you should do so before requesting to join the China Business group on LinkedIn).

Saturday, October 6, 2007

Facebook’s China traffic killer app?

Imagine having 50 China friends on Facebook (which is not a lot), imagine 10 of them installed the Blog Friends app (which is not a lot) and 10 of their China interested friends did the same thing (trying to make this a simple explanation). Every time you publish a new post to your (China Business or else) blog, a hundred profile-pages (10x10) are updated with your feed! Broadcasting to an audience of like-minded people has never, ever, been easier as far as I'm concerned. Try it! Look me up: my name on Facebook is Michael de Beer, you will recognize me easily by the China-red Puma/Tuna avatar. -> http://www.facebook.com/s.php?q=michael+de+beer&n=-1&init=s Whatever you do, do not hesitate to add me as a blog friend. Doing so, your blog will show up on my pages, viewed by many, and my China Business Blog, www.chinasuccessstories.com will show up on yours to return the favor. Forget link exchanging. This will have a way bigger effect in the long run, driving much more high quality traffic to your China site.

Monday, September 17, 2007

China Business SEO / SEM world speed record for Google?

This week China Business Success Stories achieved an important milestone in its effort to become one of the top China Business web sites out there. In what should qualify as an official world speed record, we accomplished one of our short term objectives: reaching the top ten spot in Google, searching for China Business. Big deal? Huge! It means we beat around 700 to 800 million others, leaving but a few to outperform us on this particular search. Forget top 1%. Forget being ranked in the first 1% of the first 1% searching for China Business. If I'm not mistaken, we are now in the first 1%, of the first 1%, of the first 1%, of the first 1%, and then some. Effectively leaving more than 99,999999% other China Business sites behind us!

World record?
Is it a world record? Well if anything, it goes to prove – make sure to discuss this with your online marketer – that within 8 months you can establish amazing results, if you are willing to spend the time and effort (in our case 1FTE of work at least). And it doesn't have to costs half a million dollars, if the web site:

is on topic with the desired keywords
actually has to offer benefits to its audience
is well designed as far as usability is concerned
content has more than one contributor and offers ways to respond
is accessible to / optimized for search engine spiders
gets noticed by some 2.0-type of web sites out there (as long as it is still 2007 when you read this)

China Business SEO / SEM stats
Depending on which country you are from (and in what language your OS (Operating System / Windows) is!), you can now find us on: the number Nr. 4 spot on the first Page in Google if you're looking for China Business related sites in Holland/ Dutch language. That is to say, on at least 3 days of the week. Google uses different databases and servers, so half the time you would need to look on the second page of Google's results. As far as I could gather, in the US we are on the third page, in India same thing, etc. Where exactly? Please tell me.

Look for China Business on any search engine of your choice, and let me know where we stand?

Make sure to click our 'organic result' as well, because that is one of many factors Google uses to determine whether our China Business world speed record was good judgment. I think it is. I hope you agree!

PS Any tips, suggestions or comments on how to improve our China Business ranking (or on any given keyword), are highly appreciated. For instance: what on earth do we have to do to get PageRank 7 – in world speed record time obviously – on Google? Is it a matter of waiting, or keep trying?

Monday, September 10, 2007

What’s your favorite China Business Topic?

That was the question we asked on http://www.chinasuccessstories.com/ Here are the results:

Chinese Law: 11%

Importing from China: 37%

Guanxi intricacies: 5%

Marketing in China: 15%

Banking & Finance China1: 7%

electronics1: 10%

chinese gadgets1: 2%

euopean law1: 2%

chinese gadgets1: 2%

import export1: 7%

petroleum1: 2%

Glassine paper1: 1%

Recruitment in China1: 1%

All answers marked with 1 are added by a guest, so as some were added later, they obviously don't weigh as much. The winners are therefore Marketing in China, Banking & Finance China, import export and Importing from China. Did we miss any China Business topics?

Monday, September 3, 2007

Crazy Chinese Business Analyses

As promised: I’d get back on Crazy Egg's analysis of our China Business site. And – call me crazy – I couldn’t wait and ran a test this weekend. The results of which I’m happy to share. What makes our China Business site click? Have a look!

My First conclusions (make sure to click for the large version of the jpg):

Most visitors click in the top 10 or 20% of your page if it is as long as ours is. So it is love at first sight, or you are out.
Big surprise to me was that almost nobody clicks on the pictures (they link just as well, but somehow most people prefer the text link). What is the expression? Mind over matter; function over form; something like that? Help me out here. Content is king? You tell me…

People absolutely love to click on poll radio-buttons (bet your statistics program never found that out for you until now, right?).
When provided for, visitors actually use the search function on your web site – also quite remarkable. I mean with Google toolbar in place to search for content directly on any site, I’d personally NEVER use that.

And finally, I’m not sure yet if visitors actually click on specific words in text-links or not. Most clicks are centered, but the ‘prominent’/’interesting’-topic words seem to outperform the others by a fraction.

Jump to a crazy – way to early to decide – conclusion? Why not. Don’t forget there are many more things to deduct from this data – not to mention what Crazy Egg’s confetti feature has to offer. But here’s what I think matters to potential advertisers:

Drum roll?
From this day on I’m convinced that advertisers (China Business related, or any for that matter) should demand a spot in the top section of your pages, and should be well happy to pay at least xx times more for that spot than the amount paid for advertisements on the bottom of pages.

Also: they should demand text based ads. As our site for instance draws many people looking for China Business, China market, China sourcing, China law, etc. make sure to get those words in in your copy, and you’ll be looking forward to a crazy response on your China advertising dollar!

M

Saturday, September 1, 2007

China crazy!

Two non Chinese words: crazy egg. Much oblige to Johan from www.avblog.nl (excellent Dutch AV review blog). Best thing to happen to my humble China SEM/SEO life in long time. Sounds kinda sorry. Don’t get me wrong though. It’s not because I am in such worse condition, it is just that www.crazyegg.com is in that good shape.

I encourage you to try it. I do not endorse it in the sense that I get paid to do so (wish I was – I’d get rich overnight), let’s be clear on that. It is simply helping my China Business SEO effort in a major way. I’ll make sure to demonstrate how and why in the next post! So go ahead, try it – it is free to try – and if you don’t like it, you must definitively be crazy! Or, as crazyegg.com says: ‘you must be crazy not to try this’. They are right!

Currently I’m running my fourth heat-map-test of my China Business Blog (http://www.chinasuccessstories.com/) and never before – in my ten years of being an Internet stats addict – have I seen such useful feedback; Google Analytics eat your heart out. Whether you are into China, European, American, or global online marketing; I promise you, you are crazy if you do not love crazyegg.com big time!

M

Monday, August 27, 2007

Del.icio.us the China sequel

Digging Stumpleupon, I decided it is time to put some of my China time and effort into del.icio.us dot… 'oh-no-that-was-the-domain-extention-already', dot-nothing, just type http://del.icio.us then-nothing ;-). http://del.icio.us/ ok? Back to business! I look for del.icio.us users who a share the similar China interest as the target audience of http://www.chinasuccessstories.com/ and add them to my network (http://del.icio.us/MMCDEB). Now I hope those China Business enthusiasts will do the same and add me to their network. This will help my China bookmarks get out there, helping many China oriented entrepreneurs out in the first place, while driving some quality traffic to my China Business site on the other hand. Just in case, I've added http://del.icio.us/rss/MMCDEB to this blog as a widget. And I installed del.icio.us as an app on Facebook (http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=791032597). Next? Give it thumbs up on Stumbleupon? Or – in an effort to remain on topic here – would that be lack of taste?

Wednesday, August 22, 2007

Add URL to Naver.com?

In an effort to make sure our China Business site is listed on the one and only search engine that manages to dominate Google – www.naver.com that is, in South Korea – I just wasted half an hour looking for the submit website / add URL page on Naver. Translating the site via www.worldlingo.com didn't help much. Nor did searching Google for "add url" / Naver.com. I've given up, I'll 'naver' manage to find it on my own. Anybody out there knows how to submit www.chinasuccessstories.com to Naver?

Thursday, August 16, 2007

China web 2.0?

Here's PART of a collection of sites and web 2.0 type of communities, blogs and other internet hubs that I use to get the word out on www.chinasuccesstories.com. It is quite a (web 2.0) list, well worth visiting obviously. But does conquering the China Business community really need all this effort, or am I just being impatient? Let's see. You – now that is defining web 2.0 isn't it – be the judge:

LinkedIn: find me on http://www.linkedin.com/pub/0/898/4a7 and our executive editor http://www.linkedin.com/pub/3/392/425 and some others linking to www.chinasuccessstories.com
Twitter: I actually like this app. Look me up on http://twitter.com/FishinChina and make sure to press 'follow' to get the short version of updates from www.chinasuccessstories.com
MSN Live Spaces: http://chinabusinesssuccess.spaces.live.com/ (I'm not a big fan of this one)
Facebook: look for Michael De Beer (I will add pictures and high school details soon ok?)
Google(reader): sort of summarizing all the rest on a page at http://www.google.com/reader/shared/03356582014251863994 ("and there's a feed too")
Flickr: the site "that loves me" on http://www.flickr.com/photos/how-to-china/
Del.ico.us: some of my bookmarks http://del.icio.us/MMCDEB
StumbleUpon: this turned out to be great for traffic http://mmmdeman.stumbleupon.com/

More China Business promotional sites?

Many! I'll get back on you on communities like http://clubchina.klm.com and http://www.fcclub.com/ sometime later. And on what commenting on blogs does to your ranking. Deal?

Meanwhile I'm making sure that if you can't remember www.chinasuccessstories.com you can find us on:

http://www.myfeedz.com/feed/98728

http://www.bloglines.com/blog/China-business

Among a lot of others.

But let's get back to web 2.0 shall we?

Here is where YOU fit it in. Again more (or less China) web 2.0 sites. Demanding YOUR (2.0!) attention:

Add a positive comment here:

http://www.searchles.com/links/show/chinasuccessstories.com?add_comment=true

Vote for us here:

http://www.bestezines.com/?China-Success-Stories&id=4161

Subscribe to our newsletter here:

http://www.chinasuccessstories.com/free-newsletter-on-how-to-do-business-in-china/

Favorite us on Technorati here:

http://www.technorati.com/blogs/www.chinasuccessstories.com

Digg us here:

http://www.digg.com/business_finance/China_Success_Stories_on_Chinese_Business_and_Commerce

Wiki away on us here:

http://www.chinglish.com/community/show/China+Success+Stories

Check our ranking here:

http://www.alexa.com/data/details/traffic_details?url=chinasuccessstories.com

Recommend us here:

http://topsites.blogflux.com/sitedetails_106368.html

Whatever you do review us here:

http://www.stumbleupon.com/url/www.chinasuccessstories.com/

Done yet?

Web 2.0 is starting to cost all of us too much time isn't it?

;-)

Tuesday, August 14, 2007

Del.icio.us in China?

My new friend and much appreciated contributor to China Business Success Stories is Ted Lee. An ambitious, friendly, bright and 100% passionate young guy from Guangzhou, who wanted to bookmark us using del.icio.us only to find out, www.del.ico.us is not accessible in China – or at least from his part of China. Shame because I think these types of sites are getting more and more important for sites like Google to determine whether you are worth a proper ranking. China should reconsider del.icio.us in that respect as far as I'm concerned, would you agree?

Saturday, August 11, 2007

Business China, the new how-to China Guide with inside tips 'n tricks

As my China Business project (www.chinasuccessstories.com) is aiming to welcome as many US entrepreneurs as possible, I'm testing an ad for MSN livesearch through http://marketingsolutions.yahoo.com/. The keywords targeted are:

china manufacturer, china business consulting, china marketing, china market research, china business strategy, doing business china, china advice, business opportunity in china, china business to business, foreign investment in china, china consultancy, china business consultant, china strategy, doing business in asia, guanxi , china business opportunity, business culture in china, law china, china business culture

Market:
United States and Canada

I wonder what max 10ct CPC and 10$ per day will do for us: I guess not a lot, because a similar campaign though Enhance will take a year to finish a 100$ deposit, because I refuse to pay more than 10ct a click.

The ad looks like this:

China Business Success Stories
Business China, the new how-to China Guide with inside tips 'n tricks.
www.chinasuccessstories.com

Would you click on it?

Wednesday, August 8, 2007

Mianzi book China

Should I create a Facebook profile to help draw attention to www.chinasuccessstories.com or not? And if I do, do I put on my China hat, or shouldn't I.

Face facts?
‘Mianzi’ (面子) means ‘face’. And in Chinese culture Face is an important theme. Not to be taken lightly.

Hmmm....

Saturday, August 4, 2007

Big (huge) China profit plan?

Visited a Holland Casino today. Need I say more? It's genetic I think. The combination of Chinese genes and the impossible mathematics of gambling is a surefire win-win. No - as in zero - risk business. Good luck with this piece of advice!
M

Tuesday, July 31, 2007

To send or not to send China newsletter?

Sent out China Business Success Stories newsletter (summary) today. Meantime wanted to check stats. And posted a new China Expert Guest Blog item. That was overdoing it for our server (I think). It shut down. What to do? Ignore: I think it affected less then 20% of our readers, many of whom will read it later again. Or resend? Let's see. I think: do nothing, better luck next week, and after all, Tuesday is the China Business summary of last week, so no harm missing it if you subscribe to our China newsletter to be on top of things (which is every Friday). Agree?

Friday, July 27, 2007

China Business according to Live search

Microsoft live search, a gift to SEM? It might. Not because it even comes a tiny bit close to Google, but its suggested / related searches provide great insight into what other people are looking for. See, I want www.chinasuccessstories.com to perform on the - actually spot on - keyword combination “china business”. So I make sure the Web site contains those words as often as is relevant, and pray for the best. In comes Live Search. If I search for China Business, Live Search tells me what others are looking for (or so I think). It suggests:

· China Business Directory
· Doing Business In China
· China Business Wholesale
· China Business Inflatables
· Understand China Business Culture
· China Legal Business · Business Leaders To China
· Business Etiquette In China

So? Well if anything it gives me focus on what topics (see previous post also) to focus on if I want to be found on China + Business. Worth figuring out if Microsoft is right on this, isn’t it?
M

Favorite China Business Topics?

Just posted a new survey on www.chinasuccessstories.com

Favorite China Business Topic?

• Chinese Law

• Importing from China

• Guanxi intricacies

• Marketing in China

Click here to vote or see results!

Wednesday, July 25, 2007

User driven China content

User driven (China) content obviously is a blessing for any SEM/SEO pro. But sometimes it is more than that. Sometimes somebody posts nothing less than a pure gem. Like Colin Friedman of China Expert International Ltd. (a member of the British Chamber of Commerce in China) did on http://www.chinasuccessstories.com/2007/07/18/business-and-travel-etiquette-in-china. On topic, extended, of added value, thx C!

Tuesday, July 24, 2007

Bidding war for www.chinese.com

Now here's a domain name I would love to have had: http://www.chinese.com/. Apparently I'm not the only one. Somebody (a company in Hong Kong) just paid 1.1 million dollars for it. A considerable amount of money? That depends on your point of view. After all it's only a tenth of cent per Chinese…

Sunday, July 22, 2007

Best read Blog in the world is Chinese!

A surprise to me in a way, because it seems China is outperforming already on Internet as well. Best read Blog in the world is Chinese! According to TheGuardian the blog of Chinese actrice and director Xu Jinglei is visited over 100 (!) million (!) times. If you read Chinese, check it out: http://blog.sina.com.cn/xujinglei (I have no clue what it is about, so feel free to let me know what it is she writes about!)

Meanwhile I'm hosting the worst visited blog in the world (it has only been a week, ok?). So I added some widgets today. Please use the del.icio.us one and of course the one provided by Feedburner, which will keep you updated on my Chine Business ventures (for free). Whoever said nothing good in life comes easy?

M

Saturday, July 21, 2007

China Business?

Just starting this China Business supporting blog it seems quite silly to ask the visitors (10 a day ;-) what to do. With that being said, why not go out on a limb. Here's the question. Remember: I am the one who changed Twitter overnight (see previous post, with http://twitter.com/FishinChina/statuses/159544332), and the same guy that develops lighting speed according to Alexa with http://www.chinasuccessstories.com/. You know: that modest dude.

Question is: should I put my time, effort and money into making this world a better place, before or after making some (pocket change) money? Think Bill Gates on this one. If I want to help improve the lives of many, Chinese, African, Brazilian, should I sacrifice all I have right now – which is about 0,001% of what Bill has – or should I push forward doing what I love doing (fishing, doing business & thinking of China) to make sure I actually have something to spend by the time payback is due. You decide. If you happen to be Chinese your vote counts double. Let me know!

Thursday, July 19, 2007

China friend finder?

Back in the day 'how to win friends and influence people' was a breakthrough bestseller. A great book. I read it: you should read it too. 'Winning friends' as an art. Or at least as a technique. BUT a sincere one. Not as a gimmick or trick.

Fast forward a few decades, and you discover the teachings of Dale Carnegie still make a lot of sense. One big difference though is that the term 'friend' is not what it used to be. And I'm to blame for that too. Why? Because I like to meet interesting China oriented business men and women, or other sorts of China entrepreneurs, I have this Twitter account (http://twitter.com/fishinchina). And I like to meet people. Or see what it is they are up to. But whenever I want to stay updated on somebody's thoughts on China or their whereabouts in China, and I click 'Add', they all of the sudden are 'friends'.

Don't get me wrong. I love having friends. As many as possible. Probably that is why I actually do have some friends. Five or six. Real friends that is. Mainly Dutch, not Chinese (yet?). On Twitter though it takes me 1 second to make friends with a joint China focus. I have 'won' 70 friends in one week. Forget Dale Carnegie! This is way easier.

My concern? I suspect my China Twitter friends aren't real friends. They are real people though. And some of them are Chinese. But friends? Actually I hope they aren't, because I would hate to let all of them down by not attending their birthday parties, weddings, funerals, baby showers, etc. And to reverse that: I'm pretty sure they are not waiting for me to show up on these events either. Neither here, or in China.

I can only hope we stay friends for as long as we mutually benefit from our Twitter friendship, and stick to what it was that made us friends in the first place. And if any of my China Twitter 'contacts', 'links', 'connections', really wants to become real friends, I really do look forward to that. And I promise, I will visit you – at least once a year – in China! Deal?

M

Monday, July 16, 2007

China Newsletter

On my site (http://www.chinasuccessstories.com/ in case you missed it), I feature a newsletter. Perfect for China entrepreneurs, consultants focusing on China, managers of multinationals, international traders, non-profit organizations and educational institutions: basically anybody who is serious about his China related business. But… what is the best time to receive our newsletter? Don't ask me. I recently asked our visitors though. The results so far? Check it out:

When would you like to receive our China weekly newsletter?

During the weekend: 25%
On weekdays: 22%
Does not matter when: 41%
Thursday h20:321: 7%
Monday mornings: 5%

So you be the judge: what should I do?

Feel free to let me know. Especially if you are a China crazy entrepreneur!

PS Want to know the outcome? Subscibe to our weekly newsletter on http://www.chinasuccessstories.com/free-newsletter-on-how-to-do-business-in-china/

Thursday, July 12, 2007

Angelina Jolie and me (Brad Pitt)

Angelina Jolie and China? What is up with that? Always busy scrubbing the web, I (the Brad Pitt of China Success Stories ;-), visited http://www.chinalyst.net/ – which is a decent China Blog portal – when my eyes were drawn to their "All-time Popular Content" section. Best read post? -> Angelina Jolie Shows Off Her Tattoos (19377). Also in top five: China says Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt are a good match for adoptive parents (5762).

Mind you Chinalyst is a community for English blogging related to China and Chinese Culture.

First post is about Angelina Jolie's tattoos, that are somewhat Chinese (Cambodian actually). Second post is related to Pitt and Jolie's wish to adopt a Vietnamese baby. The articles origin from…

http://www.panasianbiz.com/2006/12/angelina_jolie_shows_off_her_t.html

http://www.panasianbiz.com/2006/12/china_says_angelina_jolie_and.html

Note the first line? "Shows off her t…" Perhaps that explains the high volume of traffic on this Jolie post?

Anyway, I'm thinking does a Web site on "Doing business in Asia, Japan, China, Hong Kong, Taiwan, South Korea, and Russia." (Panasianbiz) need this type of jolly content to get noticed? And is oúr China entrepreneurial target audience also in desperate need of a break?

Either way, Angelina – like say, Paris Hilton – is good for business if you live of ad revenues the way an average China Blog does. But does this mean we also have to feature more Angelina Jolie content, photo's or even youtube clips? Not to mention Paris Hilton and perhaps some female tennis players? Or is quality, on topic content, the way a Web site like chinalawblog.com features, all it takes to get noticed?

Let's find out.

<H3>We are going to spice up (upgrade / enhance?) our China Business Web site a little bit. We will not show Angelina Jolie naked, nor nude. A pic of her tattoo will be as far as we will go, ok? And this will be our first and last time we feature her semi naked. Here you go </H3>

*imagine a picture here*

Caption: Angelina Jolie without Brad Pitt semi naked, half nude with tattoo.

That should get us some traffic. Let's just hope it doesn't get us banned from serious business sites and blogs. Or lead advertisers on our site to belief we aren't serving their ads to their China Business target groups.

We can do better than this, right? We can. So let's leave it at this.

Bye Angelina,

Love Brad

PS According to http://inventory.overture.com/d/searchinventory/suggestion/ I should have used more words to make this post well read, so please note I didn't use picture, sexy, movie gallery, golden globe, jennifer aniston (!), poster, scene, myspace etc. Sorry about that Angelina.

PPS To Panasianbiz: keep it up, like reading your site!

PPPS We WILL add a light hearted fun content section to our Web site soon. Plus I'll let you know, if this post will be our best read one (let's hope that won't be the case). Subscribe to our China Business newsletter and be the first to find out!

And on a final note: I am aware of the fact that in my first PS I did use some of the words I know people with an interest in Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt are looking for (just to make sure we do this properly). To make up for people landing on this page who absolutely aren't interested in doing business in or with China, here's a link to http://www.pittwatch.com/ A 'fan' (?) site about Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie with pictures, current news and gossip.

Cheers, I'm off (to http://www.chinasuccessstories.com/)

Wednesday, July 11, 2007

China Fireworks

Allright, so I use two statistics analysers for our China business insiders site. One is a classic (also used by Dutch hosting compay Vuurwerk (Fireworks)) and the other is Google Analytics. Now the first says we have almost 1.5 times as many China interested visitors as Google Analytics does. What's up with that? I'll find out, and let you kow!
Chinese greetings,
M

Monday, July 9, 2007

China Blogfux Business

OK, so I'm figuring China web 2.0 out. Meaning, working with blog-type web site on http://www.chinasuccessstories.com/. And using the tools at hand to get noticed on sites like Blogflux (to name but one). So today on http://topsites.blogflux.com/sitedetails_106368.html I noticed what giving a reciprocal link does for your ranking, which is still not a lot – hey it has been 1 day – on long run, I am sure it will do something.

Sunday, July 8, 2007

Testing China Business Blogging

Just a small test to see if Word 2007 supports my ramblings on doing business in China for my web site http://www.chinasuccessstories.com.

Saturday, July 7, 2007

Business in or with China, the how-to China guide

China business, Chinese commerce, Western trading and Guanxi: all on how-to be successful investing or dealing, in or with, China. Complete with free weekly China Business Newsletter!
My site: please check it out on http://www.chinasuccessstories.com/