ideas worth spreading was the tag line of the TED conference, a conference that gathers one thousand of worlds greatest living minds, grate entrepreneurs and experts in their fields (such as Seth Godin, Larry Page, Sergey Brin… etc.). Enough of digression

This is an idea worth spreading: Blogorola

Blogorola is a cool Slovenian start-up (Slovenia is a neighbor country of Croatia). Blogorola is application that gathers the feeds from most of the blogs in Croatia, Slovenia, Serbia and BiH. It allows posts to be ranked via voting system and also posts can be commented on their service.

It is a win-win situation where users get backlinks and visitors for free while the service gets free content from their blogs.

The revolutionary thing about blogorola is that the service prints its own newspapers and all of their newspaper’s content is from the blogs. So bloggers get in newspapers for free right? No, bloggers also get PAID if their posts make it to the newspapers.

Services such as this one made blogging very popular in our part of Europe. How popular blogging really is in Croatia:

There is 4 500 000 people living in Croatia and there are:

552.630 blogs on blog.hr
there are nearly as much on bloger.hr
and there is a little lass on moj-blog.hr

There is also an unknown number of self-hosted weblogs.

So we’ve got a hell of a big blogosphere.

The difference between promoting an English website and some less spoken language website is huge. Let’s call thees other websites regional sites. It is much easier to promote an non English website. Let’s take Croatian language for example. The market is so undeveloped that with good on-site optimization and virtually no backlinks towards the article you can take the google-s first positions for even most targeted keywords. I have a number one spot for word “pornografija” witch means “pornography” in Croatian on an technology blog with no backlinks toward that article.

When and why should you try going in to regional markets?

1. You should do it when your budget is tight. It is easy to get number one spots in google on regional markets (compared to English websites) so you don’t need to spend lots of money.
2. You should do it when you’ve got something they don’t. You will often find some good and useful services online in English language. Some of thees don’t exist in most of the regional markets. You can try and create clones in other languages. Most of thees cool new web 2.0 services are community and UGC based so you don’t even have to speak targeted language once you setup the startup in it.
3. You should always try to expand your business on other countries and markets in their native language. Even if you are a small startup. All the big guys do it (Coca cola, Google etc.). If you are a small company it will probably be vary hard to get number one listings in google for your targeted keywords. If you try regional markets, they wont give you as many visitors as number one position on google.com would but they would give you SOME visitors and you might earn SOME money while being listed on 500th page of google.com won’t give you any.

I won’t lie to you, this is not my first blog, however it is my very first blog in English language. Why did I create it? There are several reasons… One of them is my need to practice my written English as English is in fact my third language. This seams like a good point in a post where I could say something about myself. I’m a webmaster from Croatia, it’s a small country in the middle of Europe. I’m also an authority blogger in Croatia blogging about web start-ups, web 2.0, new stuff online, online marketing and more.

In the future I plan to post some cool posts about online marketing so stay tuned if you want some wisdom for free