Business is going well :)

Wow - Our Admart classifieds site is now really starting to get more and more people placing paid advertising banners on our site. We have sales agents in a number of countries, most of whom have no sales experience, but still our team is getting better now at handling sales enquiries. Right now we are charging USD $200 per banner per month - super cheap! The banners go right under the free classified ads on the Admart.Asia site, for any particular category the advertiser wants to advertise on.

We are also getting some advertisers who are coming back and giving us repeat business and placing new banners, so that is a good sign too.

And I am getting more enquiries from media now, who want to interview me. A common response to anyone who speaks to me on the phone is that my voice sounds too young. Also common is for people to ask to speak to the owner, "Mr Chan" assuming that it must be a male. But I am a girl, and girls can create and operate website and run a business too (although it is true it is less common, especially in the area of technology). Actually, in Admart.Asia, most of the staff are females, except the programmers who are all male, and the investors who are males!

We recently saw a few articles in the media on the increasing popularity of .Asia domains. The top 5 so far are:

Discover.Asia - USD $112,111
Sex.Asia - USD $83,334
Buy.Asia - USD $73,000
Sexshop.Asia - USD $53,000
Mahjong.Asia - USD $51,000
Gold.Asia - USD $ 46.600

Notice that 2 of the top 5 are about .... sex.

And we read that famous people in Asia are now making sure they get their own .Asia domains - eg see this article about Kapil Dev (who is a famous cricket player in India) http://www.domainpulse.com/2008/02/15/kapil-dev-snares-asia-domain-name/ who has secured ownership of KapilDev.Asia for his website.

But we like our domain http://www.admart.asia/ best!

Lately I met a few old colleagues from school who I have not seen for a few years. Its funny to see their reaction when they ask what job I have, and I give them my biz card for Admart.Asia, and tell them its a company I started. Many remember me as just a little girl, so are suprised what I am doing now.

So far so good

All seems to be going well. We now have thousands of free classified listings on Admart.Asia, and lots more people are using the site each day to post free ads.

We got quite a lot of media publicity too. Here are some articles about Admart.Asia and about me, but quite a lot more things have been written about our site.


avashya.com/articles/73285/admartasia-launches-website-providing-free-classif/


marketing-interactive.com/news/8027

We are still working with our web-programmers to do the final tuning to the site. We are still making minor tweaks and improvements, but on the whole the site is functioning quite well.

We had some reports of people from various countries not being able to access the site recently. We are not sure why exactly, but it may be that this was simply due to broadband congestion with so many people on-line to watch Olympic events? Our server hosts have assured us that the server was not down, so we don't know what caused some people not being able to access the site.

Got to go now. The next topics for my blog will include how we decide what content we permit and reject on Admart.Asia, and also the topic of domain names and what domain names Admart.Asia Limited has bought and owns.

Finally, congratulations to China on hosting a wonderful and great Olympics. I loved the opening ceremony (and by the way, it was good to see that some people were using the Admart.Asia site to buy and sell tickets!)