China Search Daily

Resellers are the most powerful resources for chinese search engines, portals and their advertisements.

The only way to reach the stage of massive sale for certain advertisement is to recuit 5-10 aggresive resellers, each has 100+ sale force.

Yes, most of them use telemarketing to reach their client first, but telemarketing is just the first step. They also visit their client with marketing campain after the telemarketing.

2 years ago, most of them dealt with only CPM and ranking advertisement, not PPC. Some of the most aggresive reseller were those real name (3721) resellers. Now real name (3721) is a Yahoo China products and sure belongs to Alibaba.

So Alibaba has the chance to reach and even make use of those very aggressive resellers. Their former annual performance at real name were above 1.2 million USD each. Some even above 10 million USD.

Other good resellers works for products from Baidu, B2Bs or even for certain specific channel distributors.

The average clients for a good reseller is more than 10 thousand. Yes i am not joking. Most of their clients have stayed with them for 2+ years.

If there is a turnover rate from such small client into a real SEO/SEM client, say 0.1%, which means each good reseller can handle and serve 10 good SEO/SEM clients. Then there will be opportunities, real opportunities for SEO/SEM professionals.

How many resellers in chinese? Well, this is quite a challanging question. I believe that no one can tell it. Maybe more than 10 thousand. At the year of 2004, some reports said that there were 400,000 employees at this reseller industries.

Those top 50s are communicating with each other, some even have the idea to merge together.

Unite top resellers and combine them with good global SEM/SEO players, will be a very exciting thing for this industry. Some even can break the balance between resellers and search engines. Which means better commission policy or even stock options.

Zhongsou had already start their stock option policy for resellers, five reseller companies got their share at Zhongsou, which is a chinese search engine and has own technology.

Sogou of sohu were thinking about that too.

Here really indicated the influence of resellers union or giant reseller networks.

Al least 30 out of the top 50 resellers will come to xiamen at July. There are opportunities for global players, capitals, portals, B2Bs and search engines.

Top 50 China Resellers Forum
This event will be held at Xiamen, in July.

China Internet Conference 2006
The event will be held at Beijing, in September.

More informations and details about this two event will be update soon.

To register for this two event, you can also comtact me for help.

Baidu bought hao123.com at Sep 2004, with 50 million RMB ( about 6 million USD ) and some stocks of Baidu. That was really a big deal at that year. And the story of hao123.com and its founder Mr Li Xingping became a legend.

IDGVC invested about 20 million RMB ( about 2.5 million USD ) to 265.com at the end of 2004. And Goolge followed up and invested +10 million to 265.com at the beginning of 2006. 265.com and its founder Mr Cai Wensheng was another legend.

Both hao123 and 265 are very simple and common-looks site, initiated by their only founder. Yes, Mr Lixingping did everything related to hao123.com almost by himself. So did Mr Cai Wensheng and his 265.com.

Their Alexa traffic ranking are all among the top 100 at the year of 2004.

They are not portal or search engine. They look as simple as just only one page. We call 265.com and hao123.com as sites navigation site, or url navigation site.

They simply list all the popular site’s name with live link at just one page. But most of the internet users make them as their home page.

Why? Because it’s hard for those Chinese users to remember the urls with English characters. For them, to remember the url and type it at the browser are very challenging to them.

But they know Chinese, so one page with a directory for site name in Chinese and with live link is very convenient to them.

265 and hao123 did try very hard to modify and update their directory, and to make more clear and user-friendly categories.

Because their user friendly, they both occupied the largest share in Chinese home page market. And they brought remarkable traffics to portals and search engines. I believed that ,3 years ago, still a lager percentage of Chinese internet users got to know sites like google from them.

Traffic and user royalty are their core value. They benefited from the sort of adsense from baidu and other searh engines in china since 2003/2004. Which meant they started to turn out cash from their traffics.

Hao123 started from 1999, and 265 started from 2003. Mr Li is pretty young and Mr Cai is still at his 30s now.

Mr Li is enjoying his life Guangdong province. After baidu’s deal with hao123, Mr Cai and his 265.com grew up very fast, now became the leader and hero in Chinese internet industry, especially for those so-called independent webmasters. Thousands of creative small sites and their webmasters/founders were well-connected by MR Cai and his 265.com. He is a “traffic driver” and a “traffic broker”, because he had developed an traffic exchange center (TEC) at his 265.com. At 2004 and 2005, every of the Chinese search engines, B2Bs and B2Cs benefit a lot from this TEC.

At 2005 and 2006, the 1st and 2nd Chinese webmaster conferences were launched by Mr Cai and his partner.

More legends are coming soon.

Whenever I come across a foreign friend, “some sites were blocked at china” is one of the issue they will mention in one or two sentences.

Typically, some blog sites and bbs were blocked all the time. Such as my favorite Wordpress.com and Blogger.com.

Some times google will be down for some hours, which also happened to some foreign portals. But they appear again soon, which means they know how to do PR in China.

MSN my space also had the same experience, but they always came back in hours or not more than one day. But some free space never came back.

What happened? Why blocked?

I believed, and for sure, that all the blocked issues or contents are nothing to do with business, and are considered as evil thing in China.

Google’s informal corporate motto is “Don’e be evil.” That works in China. Evil has diferrent culture background, when you are going to make a “evil” judgement, do please “put your foot in other’s shoes”.

I would like to say something about those “blocked” issue. Be business, dont be evil.

None of the business sites and contents were blocked or forever. To buy or sale something in china is nothing to do with evil things.

Once some evil content appear at your business site, remove it as soon as possible, then you will be back. MSN my space practiced it very well.

Pure business and real business person are always welcomed in China.

This monday, Timev got its third exclusive national dealership, which is also regarded as national exclusive operatorship.

This is all about paid search, the deal is between Timev and 21CN. This deal covers banner and top 10 ranking at 21CN’s search result.

21CN.com is a stated-own company, belongs to China Telecom Group. 21CN claimed to be the largest broadband resources protal in china. They provide the widest selection of online videos and musics. So they are also regarded as a entertainment portal in china.

21CN.com launched at 1999, and located at Guzhou city, Guangdong province, which is the earliest and fastest developing area in China. Active economy, masssive internet user and great support from the China Telecom Group. Nearly one third of chinese internet users registered at 21CN as their online video members.

21CN has a search bar at its homepage, but their search, as what I had said at earlier post, is powered by Baidu.

There are normally many types of ADs at for the search result in such a portal like 21CN. Not matter sina or sohu before, their search result are far more than PPC, more colorful and graphic than Google and Yahoo. Most of the advertisers believe that the most inpressive AD is Banner at search result relevent to keyword.

Here we are.

This is a sample for Banner Ads at search result of “air ticket”. The blue color banner is a big impressive for search users when they are searching for “air ticket”.

Timev’s deal will cover this Banner ADs and 10 top ranking right below the banner. Timev believes that this two ADs will please both resellers and advertisers.

Resellers from northeast, southeast and middle area of China are very interested about for local resellership. Their interests, for sure, come from high commission and turnover rate.