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 In fact, it is live already and just because we do not publish the link we do not get any traffic.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

I wish you and yours a very happy and prosperous New Year! May your year be filled with joy, laughter, and much success!

As I have some big plans for 2007 myself, I wish that for myself of course as well

I really feel, that 2007 could “the year”, especially as I have finally found the confidence to really start something going that I wanted to start for so long now. A lot of talks with a lot of people in the past days have assured me, that this idea of mine has some potential and some of them are interested in sponsoring the start-up costs. As I have not yet calculated the full development and running costs, I have to turn down these offers for the time being, but it gives me confidence, that this idea seems to be worth investing into

Besides that, I want to inject the cashflow I am getting from the adsense-arbitrage into this, so this might balance-off the expected $1.500-$2.000 costs per month which I assume during the starting phase (develoment investments excluded). In adsense-terms, this would mean, that I would have to get around 300 clicks for $0.20 a day from the new project to get a total of $1.800 per month and breaking even that way. Sounds pretty feasible.

All in all though, things will take a bit longer than expected as I am all on my own since H. has opted out of the project. I haven’t heard from him in quite a while so it has probably been a bit too much of work for some of us, so he chose to retreat. Anyway I will take on that part and I am pretty sure, that once we are online, we will get quite some volunteers willing to help out with managing and developing the community

So, to draw a resumee: 2.400 Euro made, some 400 Euro spent and pretty soon some new fascinating online business up and running. I call that a success, especially if I take into account all the things I learned during that time. Reading doesn’t make you dumber, kids

So, again:      Happy New Year to Everyone!