I'm a Netpreneur, or at leasts that's what i like to call myself.

I have started manifold websites and applications, in china and everywhere else.

I must have failed about 10 Sites in China, but I got two other ones coming, we here also built the site for Shanghai International studies university

To bad that we can't put ads on that one :-)

 

Hurdles you'll find if you are serious about joining our Gamefield:

 

If you don't know chinese, get somebody who does. Is probably a priority to.

 

1. Servers, choose your servers carefull, if you have shared hosting it could be that your site get's blocked by the "Great Firewall" because another site on the same server has some explicit content that the chinese authorities dislike.

2. Get MIIbeian

You'll have to register there, or your site can be closed at any time, it's the government agency for the internet, and all sites need an ICP licence. 

Tip: when they ask you what your site does, you get things to choose like education, news, etc.

Don't  try that, just choose others for all these other things you need a business licence before hand , and it can drag out your registration for months.

 3. Advertisers they hate advertising approaches from websites cuz they get them everyday, if you know someone is the way to go.

If you don't little gifts to company marketing managers can do wonders.

Go out there and socialize is my mentality, you'll get somewhere talking business for fun in a pub. 

If you don't want to do that signing up at the local affiliate networks could be it like Ad4all , Hotad, or Smarttrade. All these are ok, but some advertisers choose not to pay afterwards, I would say Ad4all is the safest to go.

 4. Design,

If you looked at those Chinese sites once sina.com or 163.com you'll find that there is so much stuff it makes you want to puke.

I don't know why but people like it, I've created a social networking site here, and tried to keep it as simple as possible, I'm in the Beta and let about a hundred peeps look at it,  wohaoyou.com.

All test users where like it's to simple, i  tried to give them something that they can actually overlook , but it wasn't the way to go.

I quickly redesigned kept some things simple though and now it's better, but still to "simple" to most users.

5. Getting your site promoted.

     You know in China there is so many people all that SEO may be good, but a real   cheap way of doing things is to approach people outside on the street, collect their mails maybe by offering them photo's and send it  to them.

It'll cost you nothing but it'll do everything.

And seriously, i don't think google is anything here, you'd have to focus on yahoo and Baidu.com

Internet Cafe's are another way to go, they are everywhere, and always packed, usually you can advertise in one for about a tenth of the price for 10000 People than on Google or some other site that links to you.

 Many other things you have to be aware of, like payment method for starting a retaile-site, almost no-one has a credit card here, and people use cash.

There is paypal, and the Taobao method must be the biggest.

Cheaters and spammers are everywhere, and they will try to get to your site, if you have a big community so you should beware of that.

Another thing is the programming language, if you want to hire professional programmers here, it's quite reasonable salary, but most programm in asp and not php.

PHP hasn't taken off here yet, I have no idea why but it seems like it's just unpopular.

Designers are crazy here , but they also know their price and won't be cheap.

 I also want to make an offer to everyone,

If you have an idea, preferably if it's done already, want to make it into chinese as well , we'll do the translating, if coding is needed the idea better be good, than we'll do that too.

I myself am a copy cat, so I'd like to help out with something fresh.