Asia Based (Digg Style)

I only heard of Fark through my Akira buddy Joe Peacock, but after writing about how to get Dugg I thought of other sites which can be used in the same way and came up with this list of sites which are similar in Asia or have an Asian theme:

• @News – Japanese digg-style for news.
• 5dig.net –  Chinese.
• Blog Memes – Japanese
• Buzzcn – Chinese Digg.
• Choix – Japanese digg-style, for any links.
• cndigg.com – Chinese digg, same style interface has trackback.
• CoRich Newsclip – Japanese digg style, is an extension to corich social bookmark service.
• CSSlook – Korean, Public bookmarking, nice design for nice designs.
• dingr – Chinese digg-style.
• Douban – Chinese, for books, music and videos.
• Fortune.ccw.com.cn – Chinese digg-style.
• i170.com – Chinese, for the i170.com community.
• Kilasan – Indonesian, for any news.
• Krtica – Croatian digg-style.
• livedoor Clip – Japanese digg-style, for any link.
• MarkeZine – Japanese digg-style, for any links.
• newsing – Japanese, for news with different style voting buttons.
• Oui-News.com – Chinese digg-style.
• Qooqle Video Clippers – Japanese for Videos.
• Yuying.jp – Japanese, general.
• vottie – Chinese digg-style aggregator for videos.
• Uniorb – news, current events in Asian Trend, exotic and fascinating sites in World Travel and pertinent controversial issues involving science, politics, and environment in Reality Check.

Pligg, Méneame or Other Languages:

• Astigg! –  Philippine related news.
• Hao Hao Report – For Chinese news.
• MyThailandHotel – Pligg for travel articles about Thailand.
• SpyMy – for the South East Asia region.
• diggba – Chinese.
• livedigg – Chinese diggstyle for news.
• Open Source – OpenSource, Japanese
• SlashIndia An other kind of social news website.
• humdigg – news for/by the Indian community.

Best Blogs Asia.

Spikes in Traffic from Mentions

Bestblogs.asia is a site which is still in development. Traffic is slow and steady, it ranks well on the major search engines, dominates Asian searches and has high rankings for certain keywords. It’s one of those sites which has high potential and only when the likes of popular bloggers and social media mentions are on the site, is when traffic is noticed.

Impact of Mentions

Getting “famous bloggers” to write on your site is difficult. Bestblogs.asia has seen the likes of the following internet celebrities/companies who have all directly or indirectly mentioned this site:

• Luke Moulton from Flippa
• Adtoll
• DGM Asia
• Vladimir Prelovac
• Patrick Altoft
• John Chow
• Kieron Donoghue

Guy Kawasaki Comment and Traffic

Guy’s comment relating to my recent Alltop post was just:

Thanks for the review.

Thanks, Guy

He then mentioned my article by way of a short post on his Twitter account, he also mentioned the site again a few hours later (thanks!).

I can’t access Twitter in China, but can see the tweets via backtype.

See the screenshots below:

Chain of Events from the Tweet

• Got hits from Twitter.com,
• Got pinged by Topsy.com, which linked to his comment directly.
• Got picked up by robots/Twitter aggregators – http://twitoaster.com and Socialwhale.com
• Url shortners came next – http://om.ly, bit.ly and longurl.org,
• Got hits coming to the site from people clicking on the url shortners on Twitter.
• Mashable got involved by being placed on their twitterlist location.
• A few hours later RT’s or Retweets still mention the article on Twitter.

Conclusion

The conclusion is that even a small comment made in a few seconds, by someone with many followers is that it will cause traffic ripples. I can understand the impact of the importance of social media now and the instant effects it has. It could take me weeks to get links to a certain article using SEO methods but a quick tweet from a popular internet celebrity and links came to the site in minutes.

The question is whether these Tweets will lead to more visitors coming back, tweeting articles from the site on their own…or perhaps it was a one off. Maybe tweets are like getting Dugg (via Digg), the hits are great but may not bring much value.

Also sort of on topic, I’m reminded of this old 2007 post by emonitized which reminds users to post comments on high ranking blogs in order to get traffic. Enjoy!

Best Blogs Asia.

Alltop in Detail

I remember when I was working in my Government Web job, the Directors were telling us “content is key, is the most important thing”. Well this site has alot of content! Think of Alltop as RSS feed shower but made available to the public. Google Reader is a popular alternative but it’s too personal and doesn’t reflect popular sites or stories the public want to read.

The site is split up into seperate sub-domains each with a different topic. Topics range from regional sites, sports to health.

In each topic the most popular sites are displayed at the top, whilst least popular sites are at the bottom. Positions can change over time, due to the “complex Alltop algorythm”.

I’ve seen similar sites to Alltop, but none so complex and automated. I like the way they’ve included Geo countries, the idea and layout is simple and doesn’t focus so much on adverts.

The site now has visible RSS which is great, although I just checked it a moment ago and I can’t view it since they use Google’s Feedproxy service which is blocked here in China..oh well!

Bestblogs.asia on Alltop

I submitted my site to the Web Design section, which includes popular sites like Dzine, A List Apart and Smashing Magazine, sites that I read and look up to for inspiration.

Best Blogs Asia.

Setting up Twitter

Setting up Twitter is easy, but my belief is that you need to know beforehand what function this account will have. Will it be like a mini diary, promote your articles or as a network tool.

It’s pretty simple:

• Go to http://www.twitter.com/ click “Join the Convervastion”.
• Create your username and register – I’d recommend using your full name or business/website name.
• Start connecting by adding friends from your Yahoo, Hotmail etc., address books.

Impact of Tweets

It’s well known that in China, Twitter is blocked but it doesn’t mean the impact of the site doesn’t affect blogs like this one which is based in Asia.

As well as seeing conversations in Google like in the screenshot to the right, in my stats I can see how a user used url shorteners like bit.ly to promote a particular page. I also use Backtype, which is great for seeing where the actual tweets came from:

Best Blogs Asia Tweets

At this point I need to give a hat tip to Yongfook who’s a guy in Japan/Singapore who I’ve looked up to for a while, he’s produced an amazing campaign manager for measuring tweets, a bit like Analytics. Check it out at:

• http://peashootapp.com

Earn Money from Twitter

Making money from tweets makes sense. If you’re popular you could always turn your followers into $$$, where you can:

• Sell products directly (and for twitter)
• Look for leads

I’ve read about Twitter’s involvement in paid advertising (they are abandoning the old API’s basic authentication methods in favour of oAuth) but doesn’t seem to impact the main advertisers who promote paid tweets which are RevTwt, Izea’s Sponsored Tweets and Ad.Ly. I’ve also seen how low paid tweets are aimed at spammers and high paid tweets are aimed at high celebrities.

RevTwt

RevTwt is not so popular as Sponsored Tweets or Ad.ly but give you options to search for advertisers and look at publishers. It was the easiest to setup too. Join RevTwt.

Sponsored Tweets

Sponsored Tweets is huge popular service. I’ve read how Shoemoney makes $6000+ dollars a month from Sponsored Tweets referrals, so I was attracted to the service. Popular with celebrities too, you can join Sponsored Tweets.

Ad.Ly

Ad.ly is very popular and has celebrities twitterers like Newsweek and Mandy Moore. Signing up as a publisher was quite complex since you need either an account or Myspace account. Join Ad.ly.

Conclusion

I think it’s still early days to judge making money from Twitter. If you’ve got a popular site already, then you could make money other ways with newsletters or paid advertising, Twitter is just another outlet I guess.

As a website owner I’ve seen the benefits of getting tweets. Even though I can’t access twitter, I’m still able to get my new content “out there” which is all thanks to the big blue bird!

Best Blogs Asia.

About Bing and Bing Webmaster Center

Bing is a development of Live and MSN search, which is now more stylish than it’s counterpart and organises search results in a better way. Bing is Microsoft’s avenue to get into the dominated search market and with the recently announcement of Apple iPhones containing the Bing search engine…they are on their way.

The webmaster center allows webmasters to add their websites to the index crawler. It also offers the ability to troubleshoot the site and organise how Bing views your site.

The site is split up into:

• Summary – Provides indexing and crawling information as well at your top 5 page scores.
• Profile- gives you the option to enter in your website’s sitemap to help Bing crawl and index your website.
• Crawl Issues – If for some reason you have a crawl issue, you can use the crawl issues tool to see where the problem might have occurred while crawling and indexing your website.
• Backlinks – Provides a list of URLs that link back to your site.
• Outbound Links – Provides you with a list of URLs leading to other websites on your site.
• Keywords – Use the keywords tool to evaluate how your website performs against search specific keywords or terms.
• Sitemaps – Allows you to provide your sitemap to Webmaster Center to help index your site (already included in the Profile tool)

How to Signup to Webmaster

Go to http://www.bing.com/webmaster and Sign-in with your Windows Live ID.

Ping your Sitemap

Without having to sign in you can also Ping your sitemap, using something like this:

• http://cn.bing.com/webmaster/ping.aspx?siteMap=[your sitemap web address]

Bing Website Submission

Also it’s worthwhile to mention how to submit your site to Bing. It’s a case of entering your url at:

• www.bing.com/webmaster/SubmitSitePage.aspx

Conclusion

I found the webmaster section easier to use and more friendly to the eye than compared to the complex nature of Google and Yahoo’s tools. It doesn’t seem like much at first, but when you click on your site’s link you’ll see more detailed features. I noticed the 404 search section wasn’t working as well as other search engine tools and there was less pages indexed. However, if it helps my site to get on Bing, I don’t mind at all!

Best Blogs Asia.

Baidu Index Features

If you take a look at their index, you’ll see how similar it is to Google. There is a problem in that it does not break down its data by cities, has restrictions on the number of searchable keywords (3 at present) countries and regions and language but has the advantage of being updated more often.

It’s a statistical tool for showcasing search volumes, based on it’s web search statistics. The statistics are shown in real time, which better compared to Google whilst tracking can be made from short term to long term to a whole year.

There’s also a great write up on Baidu search at Filination SEO for Baidu.

Best Blogs Asia.

Microsoft Bing and the Chinese Search Engine

Surprisingly there isn’t much information online about 114, before it was at 114.vnet.cn now is located at http://so.118114.cn/. It’s a search engine which has photos, videos, news etc., and looks to be linked up with Soso.

Bing produced the site in Chinese, but searches can be made in English but with only a few results. I don’t think it’s a Chinese version of Bing since there’s one already.

Bing

I think Microsoft are a bit sneaky with this launch especially the trouble they got in the past with Live being bundled with versions of IE.

Screenshot in Action

Restrictions with 411

Whilst writing this article, I’m realising that 411 crops up because it’s Government controlled. If I search for something which I shouldn’t or search for something in error then I get this site often. I do still think Microsoft having alot of catching up to do with Baidu, so maybe this is their way of getting into the market.

Best Blogs Asia.

Digg List

How it works is that registered users submit content based on news stories, blog entries, videos, pictures and anything else. You write about the post and Digg links back to you. Users can then rank your post by digging or Dugg it, likewise if they don’t like your post they can bury it. The most popular stories get promoted to the homepage.

I’ve learnt that to get into Digg you need to:

• Write great content
• Have a catchy title
• Promote your digg listing within your online circles
• Keep trying
• Make sure the content contains no broken links and the hosting can cope with traffic
• Comment and Digg on other people’s listings – get established.

One way would be to multiple accounts, digging your article but if the content isn’t written well or interesting, then it’ll get buried quickly.

So what should I write about

Have a target audience in mind, who reads digg and what are there ages. I’d predict I’ll be from teenagers to 30+ year olds so writing the following may appeal to them:

• Write something “old school” but with a twist
• Infotainment content (education, information and entertainment) works best
• Solve a problem
• Promote up-to-date information
• Look for trends
• Write lists, how to guides or Top 10 things
• Make it entertaining, funny pictures work well
• Be interesting

I’ve also heard that stories submitted early in the morning PST usually do better then stories submitted at night.

Remember your titles

Titles are the most important thing on Digg, look at how others structured their words, making them short, interesting and to the point.

What happens when you get Dugg

Unfortunately I don’t have first hand experience, but I’ve read that don’t expect to be rich from more users clicking ads as it seems Digg users know how to ignore them. However, do expect your server to down, perhaps more subscribers to increase as well as social bookmarks to improve i.e. Delicious.

Best Blogs Asia.

List of Free Backlink Sites

From the index list, remember to replace bestblogs.asia with your own site name! You can also submit your site to this list…very quick and simple although the list isn’t as big as the one below:

• http://www.websiteoutlook.com/www.bestblogs.asia
• http://www.statbrain.com/www.bestblogs.asia
• http://whois.ws/whois-info/ip-address/bestblogs.asia/
• http://whoisx.co.uk/bestblogs.asia
• http://www.wikifox.de/bestblogs.asia
• http://www.builtwith.com/?bestblogs.asia
• http://whois.tools4noobs.com/info/bestblogs.asia
• http://www.aboutus.org/bestblogs.asia
• http://www.quantcast.com/bestblogs.asia
• http://www.cubestat.com/www.bestblogs.asia
• http://whois.tools4noobs.com/info/bestblogs.asia
• http://www.alexa.com/data/details/?url=bestblogs.asia
• http://www.siteadvisor.cn/sites/bestblogs.asia/summary/
• http://whois.domaintools.com/bestblogs.asia
• http://www.aboutdomain.org/backlinks/bestblogs.asia/
• http://www.whoisya.com/bestblogs.asia
• http://www.who.is/whois-com/bestblogs.asia
• http://www.robtex.com/dns/bestblogs.asia.html
• http://www.zimbio.com/search?q=bestblogs.asia&btnG=Search
• http://whois.ws/whois-info/ip-address/bestblogs.asia/
• http://www.wikifox.de/bestblogs.asia
• http://searchons.com/found-it.php?u=bestblogs.asia
• http://www.protect-x.com/info/bestblogs.asia
• http://www.feedest.com/feedHost.cfm/host/bestblogs.asia
• http://www.statsreview.com/bestblogs.asia
• http://siteanalytics.compete.com/bestblogs.asia/
• http://www.statbrain.com/bestblogs.asia/
• http://www.urladex.com/url/bestblogs.asia
• http://tool.alimama.com/ip/bestblogs.asia/
• http://tool.alimama.com/whois/bestblogs.asia/
• http://tool.alimama.com/alexa/bestblogs.asia/
• http://tool.alimama.com/chinarank/bestblogs.asia/
• http://tool.alimama.com/keyword/bestblogs.asia/
• http://tool.alimama.com/meta/bestblogs.asia/
• http://tool.alimama.com/gettext/bestblogs.asia/
• http://tool.alimama.com/get_header/bestblogs.asia/
• http://tool.alimama.com/code/bestblogs.asia/
• http://www.speedmap.cn/tool/?url=bestblogs.asia
• http://alexa.59bj.com/?url=bestblogs.asia
• http://alexa.soogla.cn/?url=bestblogs.asia
• http://ex66.com/zz/?url=bestblogs.asia
• http://www.pruke.cn/alexa/Index.asp?url=bestblogs.asia
• http://ex66.com/zz/Index.asp?url=bestblogs.asia
• http://www.360mf.cn/seo.asp?url=bestblogs.asia
• http://www.wonmay.cn/tools/?wd=bestblogs.asia
• http://www.54aa.com/sl/Index.asp?url=bestblogs.asia
• http://www.liequ.org/?url=bestblogs.asia
• http://www.myindexed.com/?domain=bestblogs.asia
• http://www.ymdg.net/tool/sl.asp?url=bestblogs.asia

Best Blogs Asia.

Domain Prices

This article is based on Go Daddy since I’ve used them often. .Com, .net and .org domains will increase in price from July 2010, my recommendation is to do the following:

Renew Now

Now is a good time than ever to renew your domains for the long term. If you register for more years, you’ll get discounts. Domain names that contain your full names, should always will registered for the long term.

Sell or let expire your unused domains

It’s all too easy to buy a name based on potential and then forget about it and never use it again. It’s worthwhile to go through your domains, let domain drop or try to sell them on Flippa or Sedo. If you see a domain as an investment, then register it for the long term.

GoDaddy Price Reductions

Their codes change every month, so try these established Godaddy codes.

Conclusion

So what’s the future of buying domains. Well the registrars tried to limit domains to certain groups but failed, for example I can purchase a New Zealand domain and not be in the country. There is coming a point where all the great names are registered, if you want to buy one of these domains then expect to pay a premium price for it. If you’ve got some established and keyworded domains, keep them or sale them depending on your circumstances…but no one knows what the future will hold.

Best Blogs Asia.

Search Engine Sites to Submit to

I recovered the search engine links below, sorted them in order and removed the non-working links, reciprical linking as well as links that require registeration. I’ve basically updated it for 2010, so you can be safe with your free search engine submissions.

Be careful

Alot of SEO’s recommend not to submit your site to too many directories. I agree with this statement, the major search engines can pick up on this and reduce your link juice, directory sites which are linkfarms can also harm your PR value…so watch out.

The said, there is no harm in submitting your site to targetted and on topic engines and a couple of submissions per day will not harm your site.

Major and Established Search Engines

Alexa – Submission Page
Bing – Submission Page
Google – Submission Page

cuil – Submission Page
Duck Duck Go – Submission Page
Entireweb – Submission Page
FyberSearch – Submission Page
Infotiger – Submission Page
LookClick – Submission Page
MixCat – Submission Page
OneSeek – Submission Page
Scrub The Web – Submission Page
Search Site – Submission Page
Search-O-Rama – Submission Page
WhatUseek – Submission Page

Chinese Search Engines

Baidu (in Chinese, but pretty easy to figure out) – Submission Page
iASK – Submission Page
ODCN.org – Submission Page
SoSo – Submission Page
Uncover China -Submission Page
ZhongSou.com – Submission Page

Search Engine Links in Japan

Harmony Search (text mostly in Japanese) – Submission Page
WASALive! – Submission Page

Individual free search engine submission links

Some of these sites may be new, but most are unknown to me.

iDoFind.com – Submission Page

Abraham Search – Submission Page
Acoon.com – Submission Page
Active Search Results(ASR) – Submission Page
All Xplore – Submission Page
amidalla – Submit Page
Amfibi – Submission Page
AnooX – Submission Page
AxxaSearch – Submission Page

Big Finder – Submission Page
Blue.lu – Submission Page
Boitho – Submission Page
Burf – Submission Page

Claymont Search – Submission Page
Coolfishy – Submission Page
Coyote Search – Submission Page 

eBingBong – Submission Page
Exalead – Submission Page

Find Once – Submission Page

Geona – Submission Page
Gheto Search – Submission Page
Gooru – Submission Page
guruji – Submission Page

hengine – Submission Page
homerweb – Submission Page
HopHunt – Submission Page

Iconnic – Submission Page
Igwanna – Submission Page
Intel Seek – Submission Page

JGDO – Submission Page

Lexxe – Submission Page
Liggs – Submission Page
Logical Cities – Submission Page

Mardox – Submission Page
Megaglobe – Submission Page
Myahint – Submission Page

Navisso – Submission Page
NetSearch – Submission Page

Oriango – Submission Page
Official Search – Submission Page

SearchIt – Submission Page
SearchWiz – Submission Page
Secret Search Engine Labs – Submission Page
Semager – Submission Page
seeknet – Submission Page
Shoula! Search – Submission Page
SitiDi.net – Submission Page
Slider – Submission Page
SonicRun – Submission Page
Spider Monkey – Submission Page
Stopdog – Submission Page
STSEEK – Submission Page
Swoogle – Submission Page
Super.Info – Submission Page
Susy Search – Submission Page

Thagodz – Submission Page

Ulysseek – Submission Page
UNAMOO – Submission Page

Vmgo.com – Submission Page

XavierSeek – Submission Page
Xoole – Submission Page

W8 Search – Submission Page
Walhello – Submission Page
Watta Search – Submission Page
Web Squash – Submission Page

Yasmos – Submission Page
Yoozila – Submission Page

Other Languages

Make sure your site is in the current language. If you have an English site, my recommendation is to create a sub-domain, make sure all the content (including the META data) is in the language of your country of choice, then submit the sub-domain.

acoon.de (German) – Submission Page
Anopt (in Russian) – Submission Page
Buscan.com (Canary Islands) – Submission Page
Cavarzano (Italian) – Submission Page
Cnous.ch (French sites only) – Submission Page
cruiser (Serbian) – Submission Page
DeepIndex (in French, but indexes English pages also) – Submission Page
Enter UK (UK sites only) – Submission Page
fastbot (German) – Submission Page
gogo – (Russian site) – Submission Page
Insitor (German) – Submission Page
Jabse (Bulgarian) – Submission Page
Jungle Spider (German Sites Only) – Submission Page
Rambler (in Russian) – Submission Page
Nepal Search (Nepal sites only) – Submission Page
NetSprint (Polish) – Submission Page
NIGMA.RU (Russian) – Submission Page
Pogodak! (Croatian) – Submission Page
Portelo (Israel) – Submission Page
Searchers (UK) – Submission Page
Semager (German) – Submission Page
Seznam (Czech) – Submission Page
SpongeLink (currently only US and UK sites) – Submission Page
Szukacz (Polish Sites Only) – Submission Page
TROPICA (in German, but appears to accept English sites) – Submission Page
WEBoFANT (Swiss only sites – URL must end in suffix ‘.il’ or ‘.ch’) – Submission Page
Wirtualna Polska (Polish) – Submission Page
XOLA (Vietnamese, but appears to accept English sites) – Submission Page
YAAL.DE (German) – Submission Page
Yandex (Russian) – Submission Page
Zatka (only Indian sites) – Submission Page
Zoohoo (Slovakia)- Submission Page

Same Network Engines

Submitting to one will most likely provide data to all of them.

Web Portal Guide – Submission Page
Search Blast – Submission Page
The Seek Portal – Submission Page
Find That Website – Submission Page
Search It Guide – Submission Page
Find Similar Pages – Submission Page
Smart Search Guide – Submission Page
Klik Point – Submission Page
Hi Seek – Submission Page
Hot Site Search – Submission Page
More Web Search – Submission Page
Peak Search – Submission Page
Prime Search Results – Submission Page
Search Box – Submission Page
Ifernatix Solutions – Submission Page
The Original Search Engine – Submission Page
AZ to ZA – Submission Page
Dr. Search – Submission Page
Help You Search – Submission Page
My Search Pilot – Submission Page
Your Reply – Submission Page
Dash Launch – Submission Page
All Best Search – Submission Page
Better Internet Search – Submission Page
I Need Search – Submission Page
Local Search Engine – Submission Page
Ask the Search Guru – Submission Page
Searching Portal – Submission Page
Home Business Data Center – Submission Page
Go Find Here – Submission Page
Sitefind – Submission Page
Gokoole – Submission Page
AcuSearch – Submission Page
My Coco Land – Submission Page
All Can Seek – Submission Page
All U Search – Submission Page
All We Seek – Submission Page
And Search – Submission Page
AskSearch – Submission page
Beat Bop – Submission Page
Best City Search – Submission Page
Best Net Search – Submission Page
Big Splash – Submission Page
Computer Seek – Submission Page
DigiCrawl – Submission Page
Dot Search – Submission Page
Easy To Search – Submission Page
Final Search – Submission Page
Find This – Submission Page
Find Path – Submission Page
Find Your Search – Submission Page
FindZilla – Submission Page
Fitter Bitter – Submission Page
Hip Flip – Submission Page
Hypno Search – Submission Page
Lightning Search – Submission Page
Meta Search Live – Submission Page
MicroSeek – Submission Page
Mota Crawler – Submission Page
One Search Nation – Submission Page
Querybit – Submission Page
Rapid Crawl – Submission Page
Refresh Line – Submission Page
Remote Search – Submission Page
Search Mind – Submission Page
Search Quick – Submission Page
Search Bell – Submission Page
Sly Seek – Submission Page
SparkleBerry – Submission Page
Surfer Search – Submission Page
Sweet Search – Submission Page
Teeter Totter – Submission Page
Text Billboards – Submission Page
Think Seek – Submission Page
Thunder Seek – Submission Page
World Seek – Submission Page
Wow Seek – Submission Page
Yuppy Search – Submission Page
Maddog’s Profiles – Submission Page
WaWiz – Submission Page
More Web Search – Submission Page
Find Portal – Submission Page

• Download these search engine links 28kb

If you of any relevant sites which should be on the list, let me know in the comments below.

Best Blogs Asia.

Impact of Zhifubao

Alibaba recently announced that its user number has reached 200 million. It now overtakes Paypal as world’s largest electronic payment gateway. It took Zhifubao 5 years to get the first 100 million users in the end of August 2008. The period shorted to 10 months to enlarge its user number from 100 million to 200 million.

Alipay oversees ￥450 million worth, or 2 million transactions every day. Currently, the number of merchants supporting Alipay has surpassed 460,000, not including those on Taobao and Alibaba. In terms of banking, Alipay has entered into strategic cooperation with domestic commercial banks such as the Industrial and Commercial Bank of China, Agricultural Bank of China, China Construction Bank, China Merchants Bank and Pudong Development Bank, along with organizations such as China Post and VISA. Alipay partners with banks to provide an escrow service for payments, which reduces the settlement risks faced by Alipay’s customers in their e-commerce transactions.

Since its launch in 2004, AliPay has become the most popular and extensively used online payment tool for all areas of e-commerce in China.

Join Alipay

You can join Alipay here, but watch out since it’s completely all in Chinese (no Alipay affiliate program yet):

• Join Alipay

Alipay FAQ

Do I need an Alipay account?
There’s no need to create an Alipay account. All you need is an Alibaba.com Membership. You can buy via Alipay with either a Visa or MasterCard that’s verified by your bank

How does Alipay secure your online transactions?
For Buyers: Pay securely with your credit card without exposing your details. We only release payment to the supplier after you confirm delivery of your order. When paying online, your details are protected by VeriSign SSL encryption (the highest level of protection commercially available).

For Suppliers: After the buyer has made payment, we will confirm that it is safe to ship the order. When the buyer confirms delivery, we release payment directly into your bank account.

Godaddy Using Alipay

Godaddy the huge web hosting company in the US has started to include Alipay in it’s checkout options. The meaning of adding it to their list of options is that they recognise the Chinese market and potential customers.

Conclusion

I can foresee Alipay growing and moving into Western territories. Perhaps eBay will buy them out or even Google, but one thing for sure is that they have grown massively over the past few years.

Best Blogs Asia.

Bookmarks for SEO

A free backlink is great, also the possibility that a user could search and find the link to your page is great, so submitting pages to bookmark sites is very useful.

Tips

Make the title interesting, the description to the point and fill out relevant keywords/tags. By doing so, this will help exposure of your page.

Sites I use

Backflip – organises personal bookmarks into a searchable directory.

delicious – a social bookmarking website and is my favourite one to use.

Furl – Save, share and recall anything you find online.

SiteJot – Save bookmarks online.

Yahoo Bookmarks – Unknown but useful took.

What Next….

What you then do is find your url in the bookmark site, example site.com/username/ and then submit that site to each of the other bookmark sites. This way, any updates will be visible instantly and shared around. Do the same thing with each bookmarking site and then use Delicious as the main place to obtain an RSS feed. Ping the RSS feed and wait for the hits!

Best Blogs Asia.

Facebook Plans to Enter China Market

Facebook has huge impact around the world, everyone knows that…except in China. Sina reports Facebook is looking to enter the China market and looking at the stats below you can see why.

Recent stats from CNNIC (Dec 2009) show that:

• GDP – $4.3 trillion
• Population – 1.33 billion
• Internet Population – 338M
• Online Shoppers – 87.88M
• Online Spending – $1.25 trillion

However, here in China we’ve survived without Facebook by using similar sites like Xiaonei and Kaixin001 etc and new comers operated by the portals such as BaiShehui by Sohu, Pengyou by Sina, Taojianghui by Taobao.

On a personal level, I think all the marketing in the world won’t help Facebook due the censorship over here, the failed startups like Myspace China and that the China market doesn’t know about the site in the first place. Could be an expensive marketing disaster for them if they decide to enter the market. BTW: Their site is still blocked over here.

Chinese Social Media Landscape

The diagram below shows the link up of all the China based social media companies.

2010 Internet Growth in China

Tencent is growing (home of the QQ Penguin), I can see them developing further and further in China. Living in China isn’t just about browsing the web at home, but it’s about using social tools like QQ and Instant Message Sevrices. Tencent just invested $300m into DST, which is a Russian based Internet company which owns stakes in Facebook and Zynga.

Jack Ma from Alibaba is developing into a China Internet Superstar! He’s runs Taobao as his e-commerce setup, Alipay as his payment processor, Koubei as his online community and Aliwangwang as his Instant Messenger service. He is also involved with Yahoo in China too.

According to iResearch, internet advertising spend in China reached a value of 6.4bn yuan ($936.9m) in the first quarter of 2010 which is a huge level of growth whilst the number of phone users in China has to 1.094 billion.

Baidu is continuing to be a monopoly in the search market, where it’s forecast to be worth $4.9 billion in advertising revenue by 2015. By China exiting the market, they managed to extend its market share from 58.4% at the end of last year to an impressive 64% by the end of Q1 2010.

Best Blogs Asia.

Flipping the same Sites

Sites on Flippa are being bought and resold quickly for nearly over double the price, just by tweaking the titles only.

I’ve seen that by just including the following you can get a higher price:

• Including the PR value
• ADDING CAPITAL LETTERS
• Mentioning Clickbank
• Showcase how much money is made
• Showing Uniques

Example

321answers.com the questions and answers community!
19,000 uniques / 85,000 views, 2,800 questions, facebook application
Sold: $650

321answers.com – Established Questions/Answers Community FOR SALE
Over 3,000 questions. PageRank 4. Also includes Facebook application
Sold: $1600

6 Year Old Domain. Video Product
Includes An Email List Of Over 20,0000 Emails
Sold: $750

Clickbank Product w/ SALES – Top Google Rankings – List Of 19k – NO RESERVE
Established Product Listed On Clickbank, Has Traffic, Income, and A Huge List.
Sold: $3200

$88 profit/month and growing, 69k hits/month and growing, zero maintenance
One page, stupidly simple site, rapidly growing, tonnes of room for optimisation
Sold: $4999
$168 profit/month and growing, 89k hits/month and growing.
Adsense Revenue Only – Organic Traffic
Sold: $5100

LinkSite.net Web Directory / $140 per month
PR3 Alexa 20K Respected Website
Sold:$1150
LinkSite.net Web Directory / $140 per month
PR3 Alexa 18K Respected Website
Sold: 1350

Online Poker Profit System
Selling The Most Advanced Poker Robot Available
Sold: $1000
Great In Poker Site – with 7000 Uniques and $300/month
24hr Auction – Act fast
Sold: $3,150

TweeCate New Exciting twitter application
Locate how far people you follow live from you
Sold: $105

Hot Viral Twitter Locator makes over 1k per month
PR 2, 800k Alexa, viral traffic, exponential growth
Sold: $1700

Conclusion

It’s all about showcasing the benefits of your site. Rather than wasting time displaying what the URL is, explain the values of the site and how much it makes.

Best Blogs Asia.

Getting into Google Images

From my experience the process of getting images into Google takes a while, as the Google Imagebot works differently to the general spiderbot. To get into the images section, your site needs the following:

• Have relevant page content compared to the image – this means titles, keywords, alt text and h1>h6 tags
• Relevant text needs to be near to the image.
• Changing the filename to the relevant searchable keyword helps too.
• In Google Webmaster, turning on the “Enhanced Image Search in the Webmaster tools” is useful.

Another tip is to embed your image directly from your site into forum posts, even if you don’t link to your site’s page the image is linked instead so could help your image to spidered quicker.

Best Blogs Asia.

Internet Censorship in China

I can’t write too much in detail in this issue as similar sites like mine have commented and have had their sites blocked in China. However, I am able to state that the Chinese government monitors internet use inside the country (via the great “firewall of China”) and the data passes across fibre-optic cables at three points where it goes international.

So what’s going on with Google?

They launched the search engine in China about 4 years ago, agreeing that the company would censor specific content in accordance with the Chinese Government’s wishes. It seems after the Beijing Olympics in 2008, Mr Brin changed his mind and Google began drafting its plan to send Chinese users to its Hong Kong site.

Until recently, Google.com was available to users in China and uncensored searches were redirected to the HK site. I’ve noticed this for a while, where I wondered why China allowed the .com and .cn versions of the site in the country.

Currently, when I access Google.com I see the .com.hk version only, so I believe results are being filtered over here.

Impact of Google leaving China

Surprisingly, the impact make not affect Chinese people as much as you think. The internet is widely used for downloading, Instant Messaging (via applications like QQ) and other social activities. The most popular search engine is Baidu, whilst Bing and Yahoo China versions are still available. For me, I work in the field of Web Development, so the impact will affect me more than the local user. I wouldn’t be able to find relevant backlinks or tools like Analytics to check my sites. The Google Webmaster section is already blocked, it’s a useful utility to use but I’ve been able to survive without it. For a couple of years my default SE of choice is Yahoo, not sure why but is just a useful site.

Other points to note that:

• China Unicom Ltd., the country’s No. 2 mobile-phone operator, said it wouldn’t install Google’s search functions into new handsets given its decision to stop censoring.
• Go Daddy Group, a provider of Internet addresses, told members of Congress it would cut back its business in China, following new Chinese requirements for information about registrants.

Who Benefits from Google Leaving

I guess there are always winners and losers when it comes to something like this. I read that the portal Tom.com, owned by the Hong Kong tycoon Li Kai Shing, has quit offering Google.cn on its pages and replaced it with Baidu.com. Baidu’s following and it’s stock price should increase. Less popular site’s like QQ’s Soso should get more visitors as well as Alibaba’s Taobao.

Conclusion

So what’s the conclusion? Well life goes on as normal over here. The Big G knew the terms and conditions whilst opening offices here, they (or you) may not agree with these Government policies, but over here isn’t a Western culture and comparisons can’t be made. There might be a huge opening now for a Western Search Engine to develop in China (although would need to follow Government rules), perhaps I should go ahead and launch mine!

Best Blogs Asia.

Website Valuation Tools Compared

There are thousands of value calculators on the internet, so I reviewed many and came up the best examples to use. I checked this site – bestblogs.asia. In my mind it’s worth about $10k – $20k since it makes revenue, is established over time and is a popular resource with many top 10 listings on Google.

Using Bestblogs.asia as the example, using:

• http://www.cubestat.com/ – $9,160.77
• http://www.statswebsites.com/ – $31,979.00
• http://www.valuemyweb.com/ – $24,366
• http://www.websiteprice.net/ – $14.775

Out of this selection, I think ValueMyWeb is the best as it breaks down what the positives are of the calculated site. If I was selling Bestblogs.asia, I may use $9000 as a minimum bid and $30,000 as the BIN bid.

Focusing on

To increase the value of a site, they seem to focus on:

• Backlinks
• Page Rank
• Impressions
• Impact in Social Media
• Alexa

Best Blogs Asia.

Coupon Details

When signing up, use this MyAds coupon code to receive the first $50 of clicks for free!:

• March 10

If that doesn’t work I’d recommend bookmarking the following sites which update their pages with Myspace coupon codes.

• Deal News
• Deal Sea

Claim your free $50 worth of advertising now!

Examples of MySpace Ads

Just did a quick search online and seems the TOS are quite broad, if they’re able to show ads like this!:

Best Blogs Asia.

List of top traffic sites

Looking at the China market and their placement in the Top 100:

• #8 Baidu – Search Engine and Music Source
• #10 QQ – Instant Messenger
• #14 Sina.com.cn – China Portal
• #15 Google.cn – Search
• #22 Taobao – Portal
• #27 163.com – Portal
• #40 Sohu – Portal
• #41 Soso – Portal
• #68 Tianya.cn – Portal
• #75 Tudou – Portal
• #81 Renren – Facebook clone

Conclusion

There are alot of portals on this list, especially ones in Pinyin language to cater for the Western keyboards.

Best Blogs Asia.

Using Auctions

To start with you need a site to sell, so I either develop an existing site I own which is the easiest option (aged domains are popular, regardless of content it seems) or I go out and buy a domain or site and develop it. By being involved in an auction, it means I’m pretty sure of what name I’m looking for as well as understanding the potential value. “Potential value” means that I’m going to sell the domain asap, so look for relevant affiliate offers from well known networks in order to showcase what can be made from the site.

Auction sites I use would be Flippa itself, Bido and Sedo, as well as contacting domain owners directly via Who.is and asking if they’re interested to sale.

Contacting Existing Site Owners/Contacting Potential Buyers

I normally send off an email something like this:

My company owns XXXXXXXX.com, and I would like to know if you would have an interest in buying it. Owning a strong keyword domain name can help you rank higher in search engines for the term, and I believe this is an important term to own. The price for this domain name is just $xx, and it is being auctioned at Flippa. I found your contact information via Google, and this is a one time individual email.

Long Term or Short Term

I always choose short term, but if the domain is good and has alot of potential then I’ll keep it for long term. When finding short term sites to flip, I first use the national online newspapers. I see what stories they are writing about, which groups and countries they are targetting, as well as specific product names. You wouldn’t believe how many products are being launched without the company buying the .com name or local urls. You do need to be careful of copyrights too.

Make the Title Saleable

See the example below of recent domains that sold on Flippa, look at what they focus on and notice the pattern.

Sites seem to sell if:

• They mention revenue
• Date.
• Page Rank.

Information needed in the Listing

The site listing needs to be clear and to the point, I normally break it up into paragraphs, use bold titles and explain the reason why I bought the domain and it’s potential. The listing should contain:

• Revenue, even if it’s 0. Explain why.
• Screenshots, preferably Google Analytics
• Explain copyrights, answer potential questions

Other ways to get more sales include:

• Offering to host the site.
• Improve your Trust by filling out the details.
• Adding Clickbank.
• Add a custom Twitter account.

Flippa Tags

Flippa tags are a great way of finding out which types of domains and sites sell best and how much they sell for. This is what I saw what people are bookmarking when I last looked:

• eCommerce
• Wordpress
• Adsense
• Autoblog

Whilst highest average sales are:

• Community – $15,432
• Jobs – $13,919
• Tutorials – $13,377

Highest clearance Rates are:

• Car Insurance
• Bookmarking site
• Work at Home

Conclusion

I think by creating a Community Car Insurance site, then you’re on your way to making big money. But seriously, when creating a listing showcase the positive attributes of the site. If it has high pr, then promote it or if it’s got keywords in the domain – promote that too. Look at what the “Big Flippas” are doing and see how they got successful.

Best Blogs Asia.

Previous Pagerank Updates

• 06/06/2007 (Wednesday)
• 20/10/2007 (Saturday)
• 01/11/2008 (Thursday)
• 29/02/2008 (Friday)
• 29/04/2008 (Tuesday)
• 24/07/2008 (Thursday)
• 27/09/2008 (Saturday)
• 31/12/2008 (Wednesday)
• 1/4/2009 (Wednesday)
• 28/5/2009 (Thursday)
• 29/10/2009 (Thursday)
• 31/12/2009 (Thursday)

Predicted Pagerank for 2010

• First Page Rank Update: 31st March 2010 – 30th April 2010
• Second Page Rank Update: 30th June 2010 – 31st July 2010
• Third Page Rank Update: 30th September 2010 – 31st October 2010
• Fourth Page Rank Update: 31st December 2010

Best Blogs Asia.

About Sedo

Recently I used Flippa for buying and selling domains and sites, with general success. However, Sedo is much bigger and seems to offer more protection (via hidden negotiations only through Sedo staff) as well as domain parking services. They have the global world’s largest database of high-quality domain names, which is thought to be over 3.0 million names.

Domain Parking

Afternic are probably their most well known competitors to park a domain, but how do Sedo fair?

Parking was very easy, I just pointed my nameservers to their site and waited for the clickthroughs. There was no fee or limitations on the number of domains and found the landing pages pretty generic but the value per click was pretty low. I rarely use a landing page unless I’ve a popular keyworded domain, but would think for monetising non US/UK traffic, using their landing page would be a good idea.

I didn’t try out the Sedo Pro program, so not sure if the stats/revenue would improve for domain parkers.

Benefits

• Payment via PayPal and Direct Deposit
• Parked domains can be marked “for sale” with keyword experts available to suggest improvements
• Potential buyers can see hits

Negatives

• You get paid for clicks only and never control or see the true value
• Revenues are very small or big, depending on your domain name
• Parked pages look like advertisement pages.

Domain Brokerage

A few weeks ago, I spotted a great domain and made a bid as the seller didn’t set a price. A few messages went back and forward from the Sedo control panel, where we finally agreed a price. However, I was surprised to find out that even though my bid was locked and accepted, the seller decided to initiate a 7 day auction where my bid would be visible and could be outbid at any time.

I sort of find this practice a bit disappointing and off-putting, if my bid was accepted I surely would get the domain…but instead I had to wait nervously to see if I’d be outbid at anytime. More money for Sedo and the seller I guess.

To speed things along, I actually won the domain, paid the total to Sedo who acts as the “middle man” and then waited for the owner to receive the money. I think received the domain from Sedo and everything was complete!

I found the positives were that both the seller and buyer were protected, the sale had to go through and generally everything went well. My only gripes would be all messages had to go through the brokerage team and there was a bit of a delay involved. There is also no rating system like on Flippa where you can see how many times a user has made transactions on the site as well as positive/negative feedback.

Conclusion

My general conclusion would be to use them as a place to buy and sell your names, since they offer alot of protection. In regards to parking, you won’t earn alot unless your domain is popular to begin with and you’ll get frustrated with the lack of controls so I’d probably look at Google Parking directly.

Best Blogs Asia.

Domains List

These lists are taken from Google and Alexa rankings, perhaps aren’t 100% correct but give a general indication of the popularity of these types of domains. Just to note, Best Blogs Asia came in a respectable 29th place, but here are the most popular .asia domains.

Google Indexed Asia Sites

Seekjobs.asia
An Asian jobseeker site which seems to rely alot on Google Ads and other job type site referrals.

eguide.asia
A general portal linking to other related sites, searching for all things Asian.

Eyeka.asia
Interesting site, showcasing creative talent.

Chip.asia
An India based Techy site, promoting all that is new with computers and gadgets.

Media.asia
Media and advertising news online.

Travian.asia
Travian is a browser based game setup, looks to be from Thailand.

It4u.asia
Simple guide on how to use the internet in Asia.

Vietlong.asia
Looks to be a Vietnamese shopping portal.

Persian.asia
A photo community of Iran.

Bharatmatrimony.asia
Indian matchmaker site, could be quite popular.

Alexa Indexed Asia Sites

Rightsite.asia
Developed by Michael Cole, helps users find property in China.

Lankasri.asia
Sri Lankan portal.

Popzone.asia
Cambodian portal.

Fenglin.asia
A Chinese language SEO type blog/site.

Xinxigang.asia
My Chinese isn’t so great, but I think is a general search/web portal.

Thee.asia
An Asian rock type band…cool!

Tinypic.asia
Upload pictures and display them.

Cantonese.asia
Forum for Chinese Cantonese writers.

Best Blogs Asia.

Top 10 .Asia Sales

I guess the keywords used in the top 10 shouldn’t be too much of a surprise to people. Discover.asia, Business.asia and Promotion.asia would be aimed at bringing in potential tourism due to the booming Asian economy. It’s also interesting to see Discover.asia has no live website or landing page, which makes me think the domain is ready to be sold (at profit) in the future.

Just to note, all sites except Business.asia are either not live or generic landing pages with advert links. The Business site is a custom German site where you need to register your details.

• Discover.asia – $112,000
• Sex.asia – $83,000
• Sexshop.asia – $54,000
• Models.asia – $41,000
• Business.asia – $29,000
• Promotion.asia – $26,000
• Vodka.asia – $25,000
• Spa.asia – $23,000
• Gps.asia – $22,000
• Resorts.asia – $22,000

Problems with Landrush

With me being based in Asia, I participated in the landrush, landrush and sunrise auctions. It was confusing beforehand as all domains were available to buy as you had to make a purchase and cash was deducted. However, it wasn’t until 6 months later that you would receive an email for each domain you “bought” stating that in order to get the domain you had to participate in an auction with other buyers of the same name, the price had no set limit either. It felt like a bit of a con at the time and could of been handled better.

However, since the landrush has passed any domain you see available is free to purchase without any restrictions.

GoDaddy .Asia Promo Code

I use GoDaddy for all my Asia domains so would recommend them. I managed to get a promotion code for all Bestblogs.asia readers, giving you great savings on .asia domains:

• $14.99 .ASIA domains

Conclusion

DotAsia names are taking off, there are things like a DotAsia Events Schedule and at the end of 2009 DotAsia, the group that manages the .asia domain spearheaded Blogfest.asia and the Hong Kong BloggerCon which coincided with the Asia-wide gathering.

As GoDaddy states, .ASIA domains give you regional recognition making it easier to manage your Web presence and increases your exposure to the growing number of Internet users in the Asia-Pacific region.

Best Blogs Asia.

Setting Up Self Branding

By using your full name and job role as keyphrases, you can be highly ranked.

Think of your personal profile as an online CV using descriptive (and searchable) titles. Add your current job, previous work and qualifications. In the website section you should enter your company and personal urls.

LinkedIn is all about Networking, so setup and join relevant groups and link to your working associates. Feel free to join discussion groups and Q&A topics to promote yourself on the site.

There is also a function on LinkedIn where you can get recommended by managers, colleagues and clients. Having positive feedback written about you can only help towards gaining trust from potential employers.

Other Tips

LinkedIn recently announced that it now works with Twitter via a Tweets App. By making your twitter account visible on your profile, you can use “#in” or “#li” to share posts from Twitter to your LinkedIn status.

Remember to switch your profile to “Full View for Public” to get spidered and ranked on SE’s.

Upload your photo to improve credibility.

Best Blogs Asia.

Bing

To make sure your site is included in the MSN spider search, submit to Bing’s URL submission page. Bing uses MSN’s search algorithm. If your site is already getting organic search traffic from Live Search (Live.com) and/or MSN (as shown on your web analytics reports), you do not have to re-submit your website to Bing.

Yandex

Yandex is the largest search engine in Russia.

Itgives priority to Russian websites so if you want to be sure to be indexed on Yandex, you should create a Russian content (perhaps on it’s own subdomain).

Then, go to the Yandex webmaster page, paste your url, enter the captcha and it’s complete.

Baidu

Baidu is the most popular search engine in China.

My personal experience is that pages/sections written in Chinese will get indexed even if the majority of your content is written in English.

Submit via the Baidu Submission Page and enter the captcha.

Ask

I still keep thinking Ask is still called Ask Jeeves, shows how old I am! Anyway, you should know all about Ask but you need to setup an updated XML file via http://submissions.ask.com/ping?sitemap=http://www.theURLofyoursitemaphere.xml (Where theURLofyoursitemaphere.xml is your own url with link to XML file).

Cuil

I was reading that Cuil is bigger than Google, perhaps this is the case so maybe there is no need to submit your site to their index as it’s probably been spidered already. Submit to Cuil.

Duck Duck Go

Duck Duck Go is a unique search engine that can find silly and imaginative words that are used. It has a simple interface and is generally limited unlike the others. Enter your page and search phrase via Submit to Duck Duck Go.

Best Blogs Asia.

About Go Daddy

I’ve written about them before when I mentioned the genius which is their Superbowl ads and the GoDaddy Girls. The company was setup by serial entrepreneur Bob Parsons. It’s currently the largest ICANN-accredited registrar in the world and has more than 36 million domain names under management.

How I buy a Domain

Buying domains is too easy, of course buying a single keyworded domain is very difficult but there are some .Asia or country specific domains which are available.

I normally check Who.Is first by typing in a full website name, then if available I will buy on GD. If it’s currently already purchased then I think use their TDnam domain service, which I’d have to say is hugely under-rated as there are many bargains to be found. I make a purchase for at least 2+ years (this helps gaining more “trust” on site’s like Google), perhaps I hide my registration details and then also implement a discount promo code….easy!

Screenshot of my Yearly Domain Spend

I must admit my yearly spending is huge, as shown by the screenshot below. I guess I’ve got 60+ domains, some .com’s, .net’s, .asia’s and country specific names which I’ve kept over the years:

GoDaddy Promo Codes

They’ve been in contact with me and offer a special discount to all Best Blog Asia readers, signup and buy a cheap domain with a price reduction instantly!

• 10% off total order

GoDaddy Bad Press and Feedback

They are one of those companies that get both good and bad press, it seems you either really like them or really hate them. Let me address these problems straight on, alot of the gripes come from the following (further bad press is at http://nodaddy.com):

• Too much oversell. When buying a domain, the process is too long and they are trying to sell you too many products before you checkout.
• Expensive prices compared to other Registrars.
• Poor customer service.
• Hosting problems. There are complaints that either the hosting features aren’t good enough, contracts are too long…
• Shutting down hacker/dubious sites.

My Response

Of course, I can’t go into these issues in detail as each customer has difference experiences. However, on the issue of “oversell” they do try to sell their other services, but they also include a “No Thanks” button at the bottom which is a much better improvement than a few years back. As for hosting, I think the services are average and aimed at sites which are developing/don’t get alot of traffic.

Go Daddy will always be known as a Domain site, so complaining and comparing their other services to say a dedicated hosting company won’t work. Their prices are cheap for the features they are offering. As for domains, they are perhaps more expensive than other companies but they do offer bulk discounts and regular promo codes.

Conclusion

I use them because I’ve had no personal problems, they are a well known established company and love the fact I can get regular discounts on my domains. They’ve improved the user interface on the site, which is great. I also find transferring domains very simple and the Help section seems to answer my questions most of the time.

Best Blogs Asia.

About Naver

Naver is run by NHNCorp an Internet content service and online games operator headquartered in South Korea.

Naver functions similarly to Google and Yahoo with information search and book search services, desktop search, multimedia search services, music and video search, Internet phone service and mobile search.

Stats and Earnings

NHN announced earnings of the 2008 year with increased sales and income of 30% compared with 2007. Total sales in 2008 reached $8.6 million and net income reached $2.6 hundred million.

Naver owns more than 77 percent of all Web searches originating in South Korea, according to Internet market research company KoreanClick. Each day, on average, 16 million people visit, keying 110 million queries into its standard Google-like search function. “Knowledge iN” a real-time question-and-answer platform, which gets “an average of 44,000 questions a day”. Questions asked range from why North Korea is building a nuclear bomb to which digital music player is best.

Other Sites linked to Naver

There was a launch of its Japanese service in 2009, their first international expansion site.

Junior Naver is a place where children can have fun with various activities, such as games, comics, virtual farms, and making their own avatars. Kids learn many things from that site.

Hangame, South Korea’s first online game portal.

Conclusion

As Comscore states “Seeing Asian search engines like China’s Baidu.com and Korea’s NHN ranked alongside Google and Yahoo! underscores the fact that search has become a truly global phenomenon. The continued development of search in international markets will undoubtedly present compelling opportunities for savvy marketers on a global scale.”

There are other sites gaining ground such as Daum which is the 2nd largest Internet portal in Korea gaining a 20% share in the Korean search market.

There are thoughts that it’s successful user driver content Knowledge search was copied by Yahoo Answers three years earlier and that Google’s Universal Search was based on Naver too.

Best Blogs Asia.

What is a Gravatar

The meaning is Globally Recognized Avatar and is an image that you define and appears on your comments or a post on a blog. They help to identify your identity on the internet.

You can sign up and get a Gravatar for free.

Wordpress Gravatar Code

By default, Wordpress doesn’t include Gravatar support so it needs to be added. Also to note this code only supports WordPress 2.5 and above.

Locate your local themes/NAME/comments.php file and place the highlighted code into your location, anywhere within the foreach and endforeach (the comments loop) will work. I also set my own default avatar in case a poster doesn’t have their own, this is useful to continue with the balance/control of my site:

Best Blogs Asia.

About Marchex

Based in Seattle and run by Chairman, CEO, and Treasurer – Russell C. Horowitz, President and Director – John Keister and COO – Peter Christothoulou. Back in 2004 they made the huge purchase of $164 million portfolio of Name Development (more commonly known by domainers as the Ultimate Search portfolio), a collection of over 100,000 domains ranging from Remodeling.com, BayAreaHotels.com, Beijing.com and Cuisine.com.

They decided that they could make more money by providing some level of development with content aggregation as opposed to their old parking model. To do that, they acquired Open List in May 2006 for $13 million. They also run a propriety search marketing product is called Marchex Connect. In addition, the company offers pay-per-click, contextual, and call-based advertising services.

Marchex Income Statement

I see their operating costs are more than their profits. Their financials are:

2008
Revenue ($ mil.) – 146.4
Gross Profit ($ mil.) – 80.4
Operating Income ($ mil.) – (173.7)
Total Net Income ($ mil.) – (127.9)

2007
Revenue ($ mil.) – 139.4
Gross Profit ($ mil.) – 68.5
Operating Income ($ mil.) – (0.5)
Total Net Income ($ mil.) – (1.5)

Bad experience with Marchex

I came across Marchex by accident, I was interested in a .com domain name which wasn’t popular but thought had some personal value. I found out the contact details from who.is and sent off an email. I was contacted shortly by a representative of Marchex called Riccardo Soff where the conversation went as follows:

Me: Hi, how much for **********.com? I want to offer you 1000 USD. Regards
rsoff@marchex.com: $50,000 USD for this domain.
Me: Ok please send over the stats and other info to justify this price? Thanks
rsoff@marchex.com: Per company policies we don’t disclose revenue and stats. Thanks, Riccardo Soff
Me: Ok noted. But as a potential buyer, how can 50k be justified as I can see it’s not ranked in google or is a popular keyword? Regards
rsoff@marchex.com: This is the asking price, I don’t have to justify. If you are interested please feel free to put in a certified offer….(and so it went on)

Summary

I’m a potential customer and curt replies doesn’t reflect a company who make their living buying and selling domains or with replies like “I don’t have to justify…” when I asked a relevant question.

Of course a price needs to be justified if you are going to buy it. The domain market isn’t regulated but comparable prices can be made to other domains bought/sold.

My point is what if all employee’s of business acted in this fashion? Perhaps they thought I’m probably one of many potential buyers who couldn’t afford this domain but I thought “all leads and enquiries must be followed through until it’s conclusion”, is a practice I follow and has led me to be successful.

In order for a domain to be priced accordingly, the value should be ranked on:

• Popularity of keyword – how often is it searched
• Existing presence on the web, any searches made
• Comparable domains and prices
• Potential value, will this keyword be searched more/less in the future

Conclusion

Marchex do run a monopoly, since they own a lot of premium single keyworded domains which obviously generate a lot of revenue from being parked or just sitting on the server waiting for someone to contact them.

Their customer service seems pretty poor, coming up with a price out of “thin air” only makes the buyer angry, which can’t be good for the company and can lead to articles such as mine which are questioning the company’s practices which all leads to bad PR.

Also since Marchex has developed sites which actually answer the question or satisfy a visitors curiosity, this leads them to not make any money rather than by clicking ads on a parked page- so why would a business want to do that? Of course they are looking for high organic rankings and traffic boosts but as reflected in their Financial Statements and declining stock price, it means revenue is declining.

Best Blogs Asia.

Current Blogging Model

Current blogging models usually consist of 3rd party adverts such as 125×125 graphic ads on the sidebar or using Adsense, with the hope that advertisers purchase them each month or people will click the links. The problem is with this model is that there are more effective ways to make more revenue.

We can’t compare blogs to television. Television networks make money from advertising or, for premium cable channels, from subscriptions. Advertising can work on some content web sites, but it usually works best when the reader is coming to the site to figure out a solution to a problem. If an ad presents a relevant solution to that problem, the ad can be effective.

Effective Blogging Model

The most effective model is to solve a problem or fulfil a want/need on your site. My suggestion would be to check exactly what the most popular pages are on your site, what people are searching for and cater your posts to their needs. By solving problems and helping others, you can make more revenue!

Direct Advert Sales

Selling to your potential audience seems to be the best way. If you know what your users want, then targeting specific products to them is like shooting fish in a barrel…know your customers and what they want.

Affiliate Marketing

By picking a product or service which is tailor-made for your audience, you’ll have more chance to make a sale. If there are consistent levels of sales on your site, you can contact the company/affiliate company and try to negotiate a higher payout.

Sponsorships

I was going to recommend the obvious “targeted sponsorships”, but depending on the amount of revenue – any site sponsorship would work. Best Blogs Asia has some site sponsors, some sponsors have focused on certain areas of the site like emails or the directory section – tailor made to their target audience too.

Best Blogs Asia.

About NetEase

Founded by Ding Lei, NetEase operates a leading interactive online and wireless community in China, using the site 163.com. NetEase also own the popular Yodao/Youdao search engine which lets users search for web pages, images, news, music, blogs, Chinese-to-English dictionary entries, and more. It’s also the second-largest gaming developer after Shanda Interactive.

Services

The site provides Internet users with Chinese language online services centred around three core service categories: content, community and communication, and commerce.

Content
Provides news, information and online entertainment to the Chinese public. The Web sites consolidate and distribute content from more than one hundred international and domestic content providers.

Community and Communication
The NetEase Web sites also provide a broad array of free and fee-based community and communication services

Commerce
They offer an online shopping mall, providing Internet users in China a single online location at which they can shop from the convenience of their homes and offices.

Revenues

Revenues are generated from fees charged to users of online games and wireless value-added and other fee-based premium services, as well as from selling online advertisements on the NetEase Web sites.

According to its financial report 2009, NetEase made US$117.5 million in total fourth-quarter revenues and gaming revenue increased more than 32 per cent year-on-year.

About Youdao

Youdao is a search service developed by Netease and it provides three kinds of service: web search, blog search and dictionary. Netease’s Youdao also represents China’s portal site attempts to explore the search market.

The most recent feature is a product search called Youdao Gouwu. You search for some product, it shows you available products from online shops, you can compare price and link to the shop’s website.

Best Blogs Asia.

QQ Facts

This information came from their website and is fascinating in terms of numbers and potential!

• QQ has 342 million active user accounts.
• QQ has 42 million peak concurrent users.
• QQ has 26.1 million paying internet subscribers & 13.4 million paying mobile subscribers.

The interesting figure is the large number of paying subscribers to the service, MSN and Yahoo must be dreaming of these figures!

Revenue Streams

QQ already does more than $1 billion in revenue (+ 40% net margin). That’s 2x Facebook estimates. Tencent market cap on public market is $21 billion, Facebook’s a theoretical $3-15bn.

Aside from the chat program, QQ has also developed many paid sub-features including games, pets, Q coins, ringtone downloads, etc. Also they sell merchandise based on the toy penguin figure associated with QQ!

QQ Services

• I’m QQ is Tencent’s first real English website to introduce QQ to English speakers.
• Qzone is a blog, where users can customise their blog.
• 3G QQ is a free WAP site that can be visited by users at any time.
• WebQQ allows you to chat with your friends via a pure Web-based IM client.
• QQLive offers both live online video and on-demand video.
• QQMail is Tencent’s free email service in the style of Gmail.
• Shuqian or QQBookmark is a social bookmaring site similar to Del.icio.us.
• Taotao could be described as a micro-blogging site, just like Twitter.
• QQVideo is a video sharing site, similar to Youtube.

Join QQ

Signup with your email address, a password and then afterwards download the application.

• Signup with QQ
• Download for PC Tencent Messenger 2008 or QQ 2009 English (Recommended)
• Download for MAC QQ for Mac
• Access the ImQQ site for any problems.

Conclusion

If QQ decide in the future to let advertisers publish adverts through the software, then I believe it would be very profitable for the advertiser. They are developing in places in India and Vietnam as potentially in the US with mobile games.

The huge number of additional applications (which look to be “borrowed” from popular Western sites) will make QQ a continual force to be reckoned with and with huge potential for advertisers.

Best Blogs Asia.

About Taobao

Taobao is the largest online shopping marketplace for consumers in China and is controlled by Alibaba. With a registered user base of more than 80 million as of September 2008, Taobao reaches an overwhelming majority of online shoppers in China.

There are 200 million items in selection, such as clothing, accessories, cosmetics, home appliances, mobile phones, computers and digital cameras.

Investment in Taobao

Alibaba Group aims to make Taobao.com, its C2C (customer-to-customer) online trading platform, the world’s biggest retailer and will invest RMB 2 billion ($291.64 million) in the Web site over the next five years where it has already invested a total of RMB 3.45 billion ($503.13 million).

The hope is that it will beat eBay and Amazon in terms of global revenue within 5 years and surpass Walmart within 10 years!

Taobao Affiliate Programme

There is an affiliate programme which consists of emailing certain inviduals but I’m looking into this and will post results further.

Conclusion

Taobao is only going to get bigger and by Westerner’s thinking, it can be largely ignored since it’s not publicized in Western media. However, with a Taobao has a 78 percent share of China’s domestic online consumer market, quoting statistics from iResearch it is a potential eBay beater and combined with pages in English language in the future, there is a way for Internet Marketers to make huge amounts of money from new signups and commissions.

Best Blogs Asia.

Using Flippa

Flippa used to be a popular section of the Sitepoint forum where you can buy and sell websites and domain names.

It’s expanded greatly as indicated by the amount of sales and revenue earnt at the bottom of the homepage! Buying and selling site is huge business and prices can range from $75 to upto $150,000! Although it’s worthwhile to note that only 35% of sites get sold overall so targeting the right buyer is key.

There is a set fee to pay, then a % of the seller/buyers fee, so I’d suggest you have a quality site to sale at a high price otherwise there is no point in using this service.

How to make money using Flippa

The people who sell effectively are those who don’t promote the website’s name, but promote values such as:

• Revenue earnt per month
• Unique views
• Alexa Ranking
• Dmoz listed (Being listed in Dmoz can increase your value)
• Backlinks (in particular Google backlinks)

They also make the most money using:

• Adsense
• Direct Advertisers (Although this can be a dark area for certain buyers)
• Clickbank
• Ebay EPN

It’s important to base your listing on a seller’s need as they usually ask for information like:

• Full Google Analytics Stats
• How much bandwidth is used, content platform (i.e Wordpress), time taken and pageviews
• Revenue is earnt in the last 6 months
• Ranked keyword positions (Google)

Sellers usually price sites on 10 to 12 months worth of income, however site’s can sell for a lot more depending on future earnings/statistics. I also think sellers need to be realistic in their set price depending on potential revenue and stay away from terms such as “never monetised the site” or “never got had time to use X offers” – these friendly comments should be seen as a warning as we’re all in the business to make money here and not monetising it properly is a big no no.

Most Expensive Sites

For buyers, it seems like the bottom dollar value of “How much can I make from this site” and “How popular is the site” are the most important things. If you plan to sell your site, think of it from a buyer’s angle…it’s all about revenue!

Sites that sell the most use:

Clickbank
Sites which link up to Clickbank, create referrals to Clickbank or paying money to affiliates. Example: Clickbank Membership site

Ranked Keywords
Usually these sites are quite old and have high PR. Also the amount of backlinks from established sites also help towards getting a good price for this type of site. Example: Football Keyworded site

eBooks
I never understood how a site could make money from having a one paged site which wasn’t designed very well, to a link up to an email form which they requires the user to purchase an eBook online for a set price. However, people are doing it and making money from it. I think it relates to Clickbank products too. Example: eBook Site.

Conclusion

For SEO Masters, it’s a quick way of starting up a niche site exploiting the short term SEO results from sites like Google and making a small fortune basing revenue on 1 month’s results. Other ways are to sell niche sites which rank highly for specific keyword phrases (even if those phrases aren’t that popular). Again Flippa sales depend on the buyer. If the buyer has a lot of cash, then in their mind they’re already looking for sites for a specific need which fullful specific criteria. As a seller, you need to make your site’s criteria very clear – if you make a lot of revenue – tell the buyer. If you get a lot of visitors or have high page rank, tell them also.

I’d suggest listing sites for $2000 minimum to make it worth your while. A site which you haven’t used or made much money from still has some form of value depending on it’s domain name, age and (aged) backlinks.

Best Blogs Asia.

Internet is a huge, huge business over here and a lot of money has been made so I’ve listed the most valuable web companies by market capitalisation.

List of Rich China Web Companies

Top 10 list of internet based companies.

• Tencent Holdings – US$ 26.8 Billion – Internet & Mobile Phone Value Added Service
• Alibaba – US$ 11.95 Billion – B2B Trade & Online Retail
• Baidu – US$ 11.75 Billion – Search Engine
• Netease – US$ 5.34 Billion – Web Portal & Online Gaming
• Ctrip – US$ 3.41 Billion – Travel Site
• Shanda – US$ 3.13 Billion – Online Gaming
• Sohu – US$ 2.93 Billion – Web Portal
• Changyou – US$ 1.91 Billion – Online Gaming
• Perfect World – US$ 1.89 Billion – Online Gaming
• Sina – US$ 1.60 Billion – Web Portal

Best Blogs Asia.

Yahoo Offices in Asia

Yahoo, like Google are based all over the world, by using Yahoo Image search I found the following:

Hong Kong

Normal looking office entrance, a bit grey though.

Normal looking office entrance, a bit grey though.

Singapore

This Yahoo office looks like fun!

Desks with bits of paper on them.

Google Offices in Asia

Beijing

Located in Beijing.

What’s that on the ceiling?

Taiwan

Taipei 101 building, which was the tallest building in the world for several years.

Mario in the Office?

Baidu Office in Asia

Japan

Big Baidu logo with the cat print.

Having a rest during a conference.

Best Blogs Asia.

Soso Search

Launched in 2006, the translation of Soso means “search search”. Tencent also own QQ, the most established Instant Messenger in China so the combination of QQ and it’s Soso search engine, means alot of eyes view alot of content that the site offers. The layout of the site is similar to Yahoo search results and the SERPs look similar to Google’s. The site is a Chinese partner of Google and uses it’s Adwords technology. One of the site’s features is its encyclopedia and Soso Ask which will be in direct competition with Baidu’s Zhidao answer service in China.

Example of Soso in Action

Tencent Search Marketing

They recently launched a pay-per-click (PPC) ad auction system called Tencent Search Marketing. There is no campaign or ad group levels as keywords and ads are the two major features in the system’s structure. Adverts are on the bottom, top and right side of the organic search results, where Adwords ads are at the bottom of each page.

Their auction system uses CTR and CPC to determine ad ranking, minimum bid for keywords is RMB 0.30, there is no control over daily budget, split testing isn’t possible and the search volume seems lower than with Baidu or Google.

Create a Tencent Search Marketing Account

You need to signup with https://tg.qq.com/ in order to create an account.

Best Blogs Asia.