Hey you. Would you please tell your friends, that you found a great site? My site?Basically, that is what viral marketing is about. Somehow. But is it that simple? I guess the motivation to promote any site is primarily dependent from one determining factor: what is in for you, if you do it?

Those benefits can be of very different nature. You could just feel superior by having found a great site that none of your friends knows about. You could really be convinced about the value the site provides so you want your friends to benefit from it too. But you also be incentivized to promote the site by getting offered a benefit for doing so. Like a referral-bonus once a referred friend signs-up.

The latter is what we will do on our site too. We will offer a sign-up bonus (1.000 StockDollars, which is our virtual currency) that is given to the referrer once a referred person signs up to mystockbet.com. Ups. I did it. I revealed the site

Well. Maybe that is the start of the virus spreading around the globe and carrying the message about the birth of our site. A $100 Dollar Amazon.com gift certificate awaits the January Stockbet winner as well as many other prizes for the daily and weekly winners.

More later, I am just interested, whether this message reaches anyone at all

Well, trafficketeering is my wordcomposition, stemming from traffic and racketeering. Or maybe trafficking? But that would make no sense at all. So forget about it. Yet, I still own it and I will probably make use of it

But regarding more important matters, like e.g. our project. Well, Today we started into what I would call the final beta phase. Only 5-6 days to go so everything we do now, should pretty much reflect the real world once the site hits live status. In fact, it is live already and just because we do not publish the link we do not get any traffic. Things could change over the next days though as I hooked the site up with feedburner today. There is a full batch of work left, as we will have to do make ourselves some thoughts about
- backup strategy (adsense backup, domain backup, mail backup) and
- building a testsystem for testing new releases

Most people forget about the importance of a security concept and are caught cold once they got hit by a hack attack.

We try to avoid this by backing up as much as possible and by having always a hot backup site running to which we can switch the domain in a couple of hours. We might lose a day or so of work but that should be it.

Besides that, what matters now is content. To get the discipline to put each and every day a new story online, to watch the markets and to maintain the quotes. Tomorrow we will have our first internal conference, which we will hold from now on each tuesday, as we want to see each other face to face at least once a week. We can pretty good work and collaborate online but if there are more or less intense discussions it is better to do this face to face in order to get a structured and moderated discussion with results

So, nothing more to say for today. I wish you a good night

… or something like that. Well, we are working hard on the mission, hence no fancy updates.

The new story we are working about is actually a very much simplified approach to our overall plan for a sophisticated stock portfoliomanagement and trading solution. In fact, it is so simplified, that anyone will love trying it, even you

The reason, that we finally took such a simplified approach is simple in itself: As we still have to learn so much about certain aspects in running a well-frequented site, we thought that it might not hurt if we start with a simple but attractive idea and give the whole thing a chance to grow evolutionary. So, we have a plan thta is looking like fun for us and hopefully fun for our visitors as well.

We aim for adsense income in the first phase but will then be on the lookout of affiliate offers and such. We will apply viral marketing techniques to do the marketing and incentivizing to keep the customers coming and coming.

Well, I certainly hope that we can put everything we learned about the web during the last month to the test and that we will be successfull.

We will go into internal beta the next week and aim for a full scope launch on the Monday thereafter. Monday, the 22nd January that is.

Maybe we will publish the link here first to get the first organic traffic. Maybe you will even get a welcome present if we do