That's right -- keep out all possible light

As part of our continuing series on sites blocked in China, we are sad to announce today that Alexa.com is now being censored by the Great Firewall of China (GFW). Access to the site from China was first reported as interrupted on 27 December 2009.

For those of you unfamliar with the service, Alexa provides independent rankings and ratings of websites around the world.  While not the most reliable of measures, they do provide an independent means for judging the popularity of sites. Alexa achieves its rankings by anonymously registering the surfing habits of volunteers who install the Alexa toolbar.

There has been no word from the Chinese government (there never is) as to why this seemingly innocuous service is being blocked, nor any confirmation that it is indeed being blocked. However, users in Shanghai and other parts of China are unable to access Alexa, while users in other parts of the world can.  This also means that users in China who have installed the Alexa toolbar will no longer be able to have any of their traffic registered with Alexa.

The upshot of this move is two-fold:

• Users in China will have to find some other means of comparing website traffic (or access Alexa through a proxy)
• Sites located in China or who depend on users in China for a significant amount of their traffic (like RightSite) will see their Alexa rankings drop dramatically.

Since Alexa’s site contains no content other than rankings of sites, and since it is big enough to run its own servers and not share IP addresses with other sites, we are going to surmise that someone in the government was not happy with the way that the company was gathering its data.

Perhaps not coincidentally, Alexa launched a Chinese version of their site on October 15th of this year.  As services and sites in English are much more likely to be overlooked by the censors than those operating in Chinese, I would suspect that this development is somehow related to the authorities choosing this time to block this service that was founded in 1996.

Alas, since RightSite had only recently broken into the top 50,000 sites on Alexa worldwide, we are taking this news a bit hard.

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RightSite Starts to Get Some Love

While the site that my company runs, RightSite.asia, is an industrial property website, our company’s core purpose is online marketing.  The service that we provide for our users is Internet-based promotion and that’s why RightSite’s online marketing is critical to our mission.  If we are successful at making RightSite popular on the Internet, then we have the means to help our users find more deals on the Internet. You can think of it as a specialised online marketing service for members of the industrial asset management community.

So it was a big milestone this week when I received a Google Alert that showed five new entries on the Internet related to RightSite. I have these Google Alerts set up to track information related to a number of topics on the net and I use the RightSite.asia alert to track our success at spreading the word about RightSite. The alert works by gathering the results of an Internet bot that automatically searches the Internet for new entries related to the keyword that I select, and then sending me an email with the results of that search. You can set these alerts up for various time intervals, but I have this one set up for daily reports.

So the upshot of all this boring tech stuff is that there were 5 new entries found on the Internet on that day about our company. Since my usual alerts show only one or two new links, this means big progress.  I’m sure Tiger Woods generates a few more hits than that, but I have no intention of driving into any fire hydrants just to improve my search results.

And if these links bring more visitors to RightSite, then it means more benefits for the businesses that list their properties and services on our site.

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1. RightSite Marches On
2. Blocking Parked Domains in Google AdWords
3. Problems Accessing Google Docs in China

Marketing RightSite with AdWords

For RightSite, like many online businesses, one of the ways that we market ourselves is through Adwords. Anyone who has used the web has seen these little pay-per-click text (and image) ads placed next to search results and on the pages of many blogs and smaller sites.  These ads allow businesses a means for publicising themselves in relevant media and provide useful revenue to online publishers.  What many people don’t realise is that, at least in RightSite’s case, approximately 15-20% of the clicks that advertisers paid for end up being fraudulent.

In the past several years a whole industry has grown up to take advantage of google adwords that makes the hookers on Tongren Lu look positively saintly. There are many variations on this business, but the basic elements are:

• Parked domains
• Domainers
• Bots that make fraudulent clicks
• Naive or inexperienced Adwords users
• A revenue sharing model that provides Google with a share of all revenue to publishers and fees to advertisers

To take it from the top, RightSite starting advertising with Google Adwords several months ago, and after it took us a few weeks of practice to figure out how to promote our site effectively using these tools, we started to see a significant number of clicks on our ads. In all, we have been spending about RMB 3000 per month on Adwords.

After a few weeks of looking at Adwords reports, however, we started to notice some highly unrealistic click-throughrates on our ads. In many cases there was one click per impression, and in many cases there were even more click than impressions.  We were getting ripped off.

Folllowing some investigation, we discovered that most of the high click through rate sites that were displaying our ads were parked domains. Domains that someone has bought as an investment and is leaving fallow while they wait for the opportunity to re-sell/extort cash from some poor chump who needs that domain.

The Basics of AdWords Fraud

If you read this post, you can get a complete explanation of the high click rates, but in short, unscrupulous domainers set up programs that click on the google ads — your google ads — on their sites, so that they can generate fraudulent revenue.  If they do this stealthily enough most users, and Google, never notice.  And, since Google gets a cut of all of the ad revenue from these fraudulent clicks, their motivation for stopping these shenanigans is limited.

How to Protect Against Click Fraud

The best way to protect yourself against click fraud is to tell Google not to show your ads on parked domains.  While there is a chance that you could generate real traffic from ads placed on parked domains, the quality of such traffic is quite low (high bounce rate, low time on site) and the risk of getting ripped off is simply too high.

This post explains how to instruct your Google Adwords account not to display your ads on parked domains. However, since Google changed the Adwords user interface a few months ago, a few modifications to these procedures are necessary.  I will do my best to explain.

Updated Procedures for Blocking Parked Domains in Google Adwords

While we still spend about an hour per week scouting through our Google AdWords report for fake clicks, eliminating parked domains has removed the vast majority of the fraud that we had been encountering earlier.  So taking these steps is definitely worthwhile.

In your Google Adwords account, choose “Reports” from the Reporting tab.

Create a Placement Performance Report as specified here.

Follow all the instructions as listed in the BGTheory.com page above, except that under the new Adwords interface, the navigation has changed.

The New Navigation

Opportunities

1. The BGTheory.com post above refers to a “Tools” tab in AdWords navigation. This tab no longer exists.
2. Now, users should navigate to the “Opportunities” tab. (Sound much more “market-ese” than “tools,” doesn’t it?)
3. On the Opportunities page, look for the Tools block in the left column
4. Click the “More tools” link to navigate to the Tools page
5. On the Tools page, choose “Site and Category Exclusion”
6. On the site and category exclusion page, choose your Campaign. (You should repeat this for all your campaigns).
7. After choosing your campaign, click the “Page Types” tab
8. Under “Page Types” tick the boxes for “Parked Domains” and “Error Pages”
   

   The Final Steps

9. Then save all changes, and you are done.

Presto!  You have just saved yourself some kuai and helped prevent a few domainers (and possibly a few Googlers) from being evil. Now if people will only tell their friends about this then maybe we can put a few domainers out of business and save us all some money.

If any of you know of more effective ways of preventing fraud, I would be glad to hear from you.  At the same time, if any of our users have questions, I will do my best to answer them.

Until next time, see you here on Mingtiandi.

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How RightSite Uses SEO

SEO is important to us because RightSite basically makes it money by charging members for premium services, and these services provide RightSite’s users with tools for marketing themselves on the Internet via RightSite. If RightSite is a highly ranked site on the Internet and gets a lot of relevant traffic, then these services will help our members to market themselves effectively.  If RightSite does not get a lot of traffic, then our services are really not all that valuable.

Tools for Measuring SEO Performance

We use a lot of tools for measuring how successful our web traffic is, primarily Google Analytics and Google Webmaster Tools.  One other tool that we use is Alexa.com, and this is what has been driving me crazy. According to its website, Alexa is

Alexa’s Web site is built on the notion that timely and relevant information is essential to a vital web experience.

Alexa Site Information – Alexa has built an unparalleled database of information about sites that includes statistics, related links and more. All of this information can be found on Alexa’s Site Overview pages, Traffic Detail pages and Related Links pages. To access these pages, simply type the URL of any site into the Alexa Search box.

The big number that people seem to look at on Alexa is the Traffic Rank, which shows how your website traffic ranks compared to all the other websites in the world.  Google is #1, Yahoo is #2, and — well, I think you have it figured out by now.

However, the issue that I have with Alexa is the wild variations in its rankings.  In general, I have been pleased to see that RightSite has made significant progress since it was launched in March of 2009.  At first we had no Alexa ranking, and then we started showing up at around #2,000,000 in the world, gradually worked our way up to a six-figure ranking, and now we have broken into the top 100,000 this month.  However, while we have made progress, there have been wild variations from week to week.

If you look at the images in the photo gallery above, you will see that RightSite was ranked at #15,962 in one frame (as of Saturday the 14th of November). However, on Sunday the 15th, our ranking had slid back to #99,119.  Both of these numbers represent significant progress over our 3 month and 1 month average rankings, but if the folks from Alexa are listening out there a little stability would be appreciated.

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1. Alexa Bricked Up in China
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3. Promoting B2B Media On LinkedIn

Because No One Builds Traffic Alone

LinkedIn is a social networking site for professionals worldwide.  It provides people with the opportunity to share knowledge, promote their credentials and keep in touch. At RightSite, it is providing us with free tool for increasing our referral traffic by more than 50% in a one month period. If you have a job and you haven’t checked out LinkedIn yet, then don’t think about leaving that job to start your own business.

At RightSite, most of our referrals (traffic to our site from sites other than search engines) now come from LinkedIn.  This is a tremendous source of traffic and it’s all free. If you are starting your own business, or you’re interested in promoting the one that you work for, then here are a few tips.

The easiest people to reach in LinkedIn are members of your own network.  If you are an entrepreneur or marketing professional then you should have a good-sized network.  If you don’t have at least 100 folks in your LinkedIn network, then consider a career in Library Science.

Beyond your own network (who probably know about what you’re doing already) there are a lot of other tools available for letting people know what you’re doing and driving traffic to your site.

General Pointers

• Join as many groups as possible that are related to the industry that your B2B covers, your media (such as the Internet, B2B trade media, etc), the locations that you focus on, or investment/business in your area.
• Be sure to include a link to your site in every post
• Be helpful – don’t just use LinkedIn to pimp yourself or you will build up annoyance rather than goodwill.  Give people information they can use, or give them the opportunity to promote their knowledge both on LinkedIn and on your site. If you provide a real service, then you will get real results from LinkedIn’s users.
• Try to make your posts on Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursdays.  You will get more response when your input is fresh, and users are much less likely to use LinkedIn on busy Mondays or Fridays.

Groups

• LinkedIn has thousands of groups for diferent professions. Find groups related to the media industry or related to the industry that your B2B covers
• Join as many groups as possible, and be an active, helpful participant
• If your contributions make it onto your group’s email digests, then it will be pushed out to all the group’s members.  If you join the right groups, that can mean reaching thousands of professionals every week for free.

Discussions

Discussions is a section available in LinkedIn’s Groups section

• Use Discussions to get advice on sourcing an outside consultant or service
• Use Discussions for finding experts eager to contribute content to your site

News

News is a section available in LinkedIn’s Groups section

• Use the news section to share your editorial content with professionals who may be interested in such information.  Be sure to post each story on relevant groups only.

Answers

Answers is available to interact only with people in your direct network.

• Use Answers for technical questions that you can’t solve yourself, or to source vendors

What are you working on now?

• Use the “What are you working on now?” tool to make small announcements that will let people know about your progress on an interesting project, or to solicit help on finding staff, a computer supplier, or other routine items.

Later I promise to give a few tips on using Xing, Plaxo/Pulse, Digg, Reddit, Del.icio.us, StumbleUpon and about 50 others, but this is all I have time for today. Look forward to seeing you next time on Mingtiandi, and happy Easter.

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• Built the beta version of the RightSite.Asia’s first stage
• Assembled a database of 1500 industrial zones and more than 4000 service companies for use in the site
• Established our offshore company and onshore WFOE company
• Didn’t go broke on a lot of unnecessary staff or hardware
• Mike lost 8 kg and lowered his resting pulse by 25 beats per minute (still trying to achieve that work/leisure balance)

Now we have to develop some new goals for 2009.  Having already built our site, our aim for the new year will be to make RightSite famous and start creating revenue.  In an even shorter frame of reference, our company will focus on marketing to make our site famous and build up traffic during the first half of the year.  By building this traffic we can assure ourselves of easier revenue generation in the second half of the year.  Here are a few of our goals for the next six months (in no particular order):

• Build a directory of 1000 available properties
• Increase our directory of service companies to more than 6000 companies
• Attract at least 250 unique visitors to the site every day by June 30th
• Enhance RightSite’s directory of industrial zones by guaranteeing that all entries contain full contact information, transportation information, and detailed descriptions in Chinese and English.
• Ensure that RightSite appears on the first page of the Baidu and Google search results for “China industrial real estate, China industrial property, China industrial zone,” and other relevant key words
• Keep staff turnover at 0%
• Not spend all of our cash on equipment and other silly things
• Create Phase II of RightSite, including premium listings, client sites and purchasable keyword priorities
• Lose another 1.5″ from Mike’s waistline (I’m still trying to get rid of the effects of all that wine I drank in my previous job)

Although making money is goal #1, there are still a number of steps for us to take before we can start taking in any of that cash.  So, it’s easy to say, “let’s get down to business” and try to start selling listings today, and we could probably sell some. However, this approach would not be likely to create a satisfied customer base if the site doesn’t have the traffic levels to guarantee that people who list on the site will receive the inquiries that they need to drive their business.

So RightSite will be focussing on marketing for the first half of 2009, and on sales for the second half of 2009. I promise to keep you posted as we work toward meeting our goals.

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Glamcham event that we organised at my last company

Last week we had RightSite’s first official event, the Private Beta Private launch party, and we are happy to announce that it was a success.  Out of the thirty-three people we invited, about 14 showed up, but many of them brought guests, so we ended up with a full-house in our private room at the Big Bamboo.

This event was intended as a contributor appreciation party to say thanks to the many friends who helped us get our site launched.  However, the party was also a great way to let people know that the first stage of our project has been completed and to show people that we have made some progress.

While we intended this event as a one-off, the enthusiasm that it generated among our friends and staff have got me thinking about making this a regular monthly or quarterly event.  At my last company, we had monthly events that we called the GlamCham parties, and they were very helpful in bringing together our staff with our clients and helping everyone to understand each other better by drinking lots of free wine.  Easy marketing and all done through barter deals, so there were no cash expenditures.

For RightSite, we are planning some events that will bring together foreign manufacturers and local industrial zone owners to have a few drinks and trade name cards.  While this may sound simple, and most people will acknowledge that these two groups need each other, actually getting them to socialise can be tricky. Besides the language barrier, there are also some real party-style barriers.  Local events tend to centre on traditional banquets, whereas foreigners are more accustomed to the Chamber of Commerce cocktail party.  The venues also tend to be quite different.

So our challenge is to find a format and venue style that will make both groups comfortable (and at price that we can afford).  Once we have accomplished this, we should have a very effective marketing tool.

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8 is far out!

This is a special kind of post that I haven’t done before — a thank you post.

I’m writing today to express my appreciation for all of you that have helped to make Mingtiandi.com what it is today — #8.  Let me explain.  After less than eleven months of publishing this blog, Mingtiandi.com is now occupies the #9 position on Google, and the #7 position on Yahoo for the keywords “China industrial property.”

What this means is that if you are interested in this industry but don’t know where to find information, when doing a search for China industrial property you will first find a few multi-zillion dollar B2B sites before making your way a few steps down the page to Mingtiandi.com.  (Which is funded by a $80/year hosting package, some free software and a strange sense of humour).  Needless to say, we are pleased.

But it’s all because of you. The many of you have subscribed to the site or recommended us to friends have helped us to climb our way up the rankings.  And we will do our best to continue bringing you an inside perspective on starting media projects in China and all the excitement that is the world of online industrial property media.

We hope you will keep enjoying the site, and we look forward to seeing you next time, right here on Mingtiandi.

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Beta Ray Bill is not part of the Private Beta

This week marks a big event in China’s industrial property history (or at least a big event for us) — the launch of RightSite’s private beta.

It only took about eight months of development, but the site is now fully functioning and ready for use.  However, just to be sure, we will be restricting the use of the site to invited users (thus the private part of private beta) until February 5th. Although this does restrict most people from using the site right away, this is not that much of a loss to us or our users since the site is basically empty of content right now.

We will be using this private beta period to accomplish a number of goals

Build up listings — we already have a database of 1500 industrial zones that we will be importing this week, but a property site needs actual property listings – individual factories, warehouses and other facilities.  We expect to be able to build up a list of at least 1000 such properties between now and December 31st.

Create community content — RightSite has an extensive community section which provides users with third-party research reports, instructional articles on conducting property transactions in China, a user-generated forum, and a tradeshow calendar. But right now, we just have the framework for all this and need to actually get content into this.  Most of the research reports and articles will come from third parties so we don’t have to write them ourselves, but we still expect this section of the site to take around 30 days to fill up.

Bug testing — Although we have extensively tested the site, there are always a few things that slip through, so we will be watching for bugs, glitches and other annoyances before we open up the site to large scale traffic.

So once we have our data industrial zone data imported this week, we will start the process of inviting selected individuals to try out the site.  If you would like an invite, just leave a comment here on Mingtiandi.

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3. Fun in the Sandbox

However, after my two day jaunt to Changzhou, I’m happy to say I had some pleasant surprises about the enjoyable (if not exciting) lifestyle and the business opportunities.  Changzhou is in a lot of ways just another medium-sized city in Jiangsu, not that different from Wuxi, Nantong or several others. And that’s a good thing. There should be more places like this.

About 1,500 of us went to Changzhou for an investment promotion event, rather grandly titled the “China (Changzhou) Forum on Science & Technology, Foreign Trade and Economic Co-operation,” this forum was basically a big ad for doing business in Changzhou, and it wasn’t the worst ad I’ve ever seen.  Of course, we went to the event to tell more people about RightSite and hand out more of our flashy die-cut namecards. (Changzhou has several industrial zones, all of which are great potential RightSite customers).

Who was there:

• Foreign businesspeople — we met folks from Chicago, Silicon Valley, Hong Kong and points beyond
• Local businesspeople — by this we mean local to China, and this was the largest group.  Lots of folks from Shanghai and Beijing looking for cheaper bases for manufacturing
• Local government — reps from local and provincial governments were there to show face
• Foreign government — we shared our table at the banquet with the trade representatives for the State of Michigan, the State of Oklahoma, the New York/New Jersey Port Authority, the Port of Huntsville, Alabama and a few other points of distinction.
• Media – well, this seemed to be local media only, so I guess the guys from Reuter and Bloomberg were off covering the American financial collapse

What we found out:

• Changzhou has a museum
• Changzhou has a cool city plan
• Changzhou is signing some huge deals with foreign manufacturers to base facilities in the city
• Changzhou has a drive-thru KFC (the ultimate sign of civilisation)
• Changzhou has some serious cash — free lunch at dinner at the Traders Hotel for about 500 folks was not cheap!

Anyway, since we are not doing manufacturing here at RightSite we probably won’t be moving to Changzhou anytime soon, but I was impressed by the professionalism of the forum (keeping 86 tour buses of visitors coordinated is no small task). And while the city itself didn’t seem exciting, it did seem clean, civilised and well-organised.

And it’s only 70 minutes away on the high-speed, no spitting or smoking, train. Nice!

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