This month I had the chance to consult for one of Thailand’s largest condominium developers. The preliminary consultation for Raimon Land Plc on behalf of Bangkok startup Arctos Group focused on the development of a Russian site to target the growing number of Russians buying luxury condominiums in Thailand.
Raimon Land’s push in to Russia was recently covered in the Bangkok Post.
MOSCOW : Raimon Land Plc is confident in strong demand from Russians, planning to launch a Russian department to tap the Eastern European market after finding that 23% of its total sales from foreign buyers last year were from Russians, according to chief executive officer Nigel Cornick.
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| Russian market will be closely monitored over the current high season, says Mr Cornick. |
He said the new department would be based in Bangkok to manage increasing interest from the booming Russian market in the company’s upmarket condominium projects.
“We will see the profile of customers in Russian and CIS (the Commonwealth of Independent States) market and do market research to find which segments have purchasing power and potential to tap into,” said Mr Cornick.
In Russia, he said, there were 200,000 people with annual incomes of more than US$1 million and 170 of them were billionaires.
Since 2006 the company has sold 745 million baht worth of property to wealthy buyers in Russia and the former Soviet states. Of the figure, 426 million baht was generated last year. Their favourite destination was Pattaya, accounting for 63%, followed by Phuket with 28% and Bangkok with 9%.
Elsewhere in the Industry
Even though many industries are only beginning to Focus on SEO here in Asia, elsewhere the property search space is highly competitive and already stratified. To own a slice of the most valuable media property (a.k.a the Google front page) means serious investment, serious web development and a SEO focused business strategy. Even though some larger SE Asian enterprises are beginning to invest in SEO, as I look around the search space I still see a land of opportunities. Those who make the right investments now will be the market leaders in the near future. Those who miss the boat will face a much steeper mountain to climb when they attempt to enter a more competitive and stratified space.
An interesting graph that show the growth of SEO as a mainstream industry. No doubt there is a great deal of growth to come.
It’s that simple.
But there are some companies out there that are breaking this simple equation.
I see it all the time in Thailand and Bangkok. Web development outfits re branding Content Management Systems like Joomla and Wordpress, then selling them to businesses at a premium.
Lets look at some of the reasons this is shifty practice.
1. It shows a myopic lack of vision and creativity.
Just because you can’t make money off the CMS doesn’t mean you can’t make money. There are dozens of ways you can structure your business relationships around open source and still profit. I’m not going to go in to detail here obviously :P, but use your noggin.
2. It builds inefficiency in to your business relationships.
Taking money from a business for doing nothing, or selling them something that is free, builds inefficiency in to your relationship. Great business relationships come when two organisations really have something to offer each other, be it knowledge, skills or products. If a web developer or SEO is going to start off a business relationship by charging for an open source CMS, you’ve got to ask the question, what are they going to charge for next?
3. Open source is developed by passionate and dedicated people.
Trying to profit off other peoples work is…..not cool. Businesses that re brand and profit off open source are essentially leaches. If you dig open source, best to contribute instead of leach. Even just being an advocate of open source is a valuable contribution.
Hopefully as time goes on, open source brand recognition will go upward and more people will be able to spot open source when they see it. That day will be the downfall of the open source moochers.
Wordpress 2.5 was sneakly released today only days after Release Candidate 2 was made available.
Some business people hesitate when you offer an open source (free) web development platform and tell them that it will be good for their business.
Sounds too good to be true right? It’s SEO, it’s powerful, fast and stable like a brick….and it’s free!
If you don’t believe the hype, check out some of the other small businesses running wordpress
Ebay
Yahoo Corporation
New York Times
CNN
It’s fair to say the open source juggernaut is powering on.
The great thing about deploying wordpress for clients is, once it is configured properly and ready to run the whole focus of SEO changes.
When clients ask what they can do to get more search traffic I simply say “Start writing about your business.”
Need a custom search friendly wordpress install for your business?
Contact me.
In a rush?
Ask me about professional outsourced template design and coding to get you up and running in the space of a week.
Here are some of the sources that educated me in the month of March.
A lot of aspiring businesses want big search exposure and inevitably come up with a multiple site
strategy that involves copying sites across different domains. Copy / Paste works well in word but has some consequences if you are looking for search exposure.
Check out SEO Moz’s Quality Content vs Spam
Be familiar with the properties of spam, and then avoid a network that matches those properties. Think quality, not quantity. Google does.
Who’s managing your Pay Per Click?
Are your pay per click dollars being spent on browsers or customers? How many of your dollars are being spent on dubious clicks coming from domain parking pages? I’ll admit, I’m a big fan of pay per click. Instant traffic and widespread exposure. Even though it is satisfying to see targeted clicks coming through your site, the refinement process in Pay Per Click is complex and extensive.
Pay Per Click Hero help me keep on top of the topics. But the one stand out pay per click piece in march was from El Reg. Zeitgeist inspired Please ignore the cash machine behind the curtain gives a good analysis of how the rush to spend pay per click dollars sees a lot of advertising budgets drained on dubious keyword matches and the enigmatic content network.
Definitely some anti Google sentiment in that one. No reason to hold a grudge against the Google. Seems that pay per click gets additional refinement features as each new week roles around. Know the game before you spend big on it.
Still holding a grudge against SEOMoz for not publishing my article “Chicks don’t dig Analytics“, but I’ll get over it.
