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!