… 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

Wow. 5 days no post, BUT, I have used that time really well. I had a nice christmas as my wife’s and my family was visiting us. I have setup a 3 meter high christmas tree with real candles which is bringing in the right christmas feeling

But, besides partying I have been really busy, especially for the last two days since christmas has been over. I have finally made the first steps towards starting a project that I wanted to start for a bit over a year ago. Back then, I believed I would have to spend something like 5 Mio. € to get it started but by now, after what I have learned during the previous month, I have changed my mind. I think now, that any project has to prove itself on the internet, which means, that you should rather have a lean but swift start instead of spending too much time on development if you do not know yet whether the community will grasp and accept that business idea of yours at all.

So, instead of spending a fortune on development of the functionality that the project needs to have in phase 3 or 4, I will have a shot at getting it up and running in a month time.

The project itself is simple to explain: To establish a portal, that allows for joint stock trading. Today, you still have to be a lone warrior when it comes to investment activities. But tomorrow, you can share the experience and knowledge with thousand of other users and even engage in joint portfolio management activities. Ok, that is the whole idea in a nutshell, but there are of course some more twists to it, that would first of all make things too complex at the moment being and are secondly better to be kept secret for the time being

However, as I said before, I aim for a lean start. So, the platform will basically be:

• vBulletin v3.6.4
• vbadvanced CMS for vBulletin,
• zoints and
• quotemedia.com’s suite of financial applications

I am a big fan of opensource products, but when it came to deciding which products would be the best to handle and especially the best to outsource, I finally came to those commercial products.

I have setup a development environment locally and ported that one today to the net. I will reveal the domain name at a later stage, probably in a week’s time, when I have setup the first prototype.

Besides that, I have brought online the 100th adsense site, so hopefully the cashstream to finance my activities is online as well I will start adsense optimization by the end of next week, when the first reliable datasets are available.

Have a good night!

One more strike-thorugh on the to-do-list: niche chosen.

We will attack the wedding market, as we will offer the wedding etiquette 101. Why the heck wedding etiquette? Well, first of all, people who are that crazy to get married are most likely also crazy enough to buy wedding etiquette books and secondly, women shortly before a wedding are dumber than any other living species so they probably fall for this offer even more. Right, that is sarcastic, but true nonetheless. At least we hope so.

Viral Marketing Technology

As we are not grandmasters at programming, we needed to get the software required out-of-the box and customizable.

First of all, there is now a software called “super squeeze page generator” coming into play, which I bought for 12 US-$ (instead of 137 US-$, the usual retail price that will kick in any minute again, RIGHT…probably NOT). This was one of the ugliest packaged softwares I have ever come across, as there was even a thumbs.db still included (remnant of acdsee when indexing folders) and some files were named “copy of …”. As expected, the script was NOT working, but from a first look at the software it seemed to me, that the package could be worth the work to get it working and i dug myself a bit into the code. So, I am proud to say, that I injected the sql-statements into MySQL manually, corrected some wrong path-definitions, got the database working and finally got the script into production. Great me.

So, what does this package basically do? It is the basis for our first list. There will be nothing else than the namesqueeze page for the next week or so, as H. and I start to build up attention. We will attract subscriber to the pre-launch phase by offering them a 5 part ecourse on wedding etiquette. This way, we can keep touch with them. The first part is getting sended to them after sign-up for the pre-launch and over the course of the next two weeks they get part after part and finally the upgrade offer. This software will help us, to get the mail-addresses and their interests, as there is a 5-topics poll included.
The next package is the copy of the 15k-challenge script, which I will be testing in-depth by tomorrow, as I am simply too tired today to do anything in that direction. I was just finishing the customization of the script as it required me to activate some more paypal stuff, that I had not done before so I learned a new lesson again. But as I could test the script before buying, I am very convinced about the quality and am looking forward to get this going tomorrow.
eBay is…well, I do not know what to say

eBay called me again. Only this time at 5:49 a.m. Now, do not get me wring. I would probably have gotten the call, if I would have heard it. However, it was on my mobile and i switch my mobile off, when I am sleeping. And anyway it was not anywhere near the time I gave them at which they should call me. I gave them a 16-hours window already and they even managed to miss that one.

But at least, they seem to be as frustrated as I am, as they made an alternative suggestion. I shall change my voice message on the phone into saying who I am and what my number is. Well, I did so, and this will be quite funny tomorrow, as the mobile is first of all my business mobile and now quite some people will call me tomorrow and instead of getting my name, when they will be diverted to my voice mail, they will be hearing my voice but saying the name of R. Now, normally they would probably think, that they dialed the wrong number, but R. is an external consultant for our company, so quite a lot of people know him. I will have to answer quit some questions why I changed my voice mail into pretending I am R. but we need to get over with this. I WANT TO TRADE

So, hopefully by tomorrow our import business or better to say export business is open.

Have a good night, I certainly will.