Tuesday, December 1, 2009

Note to Facebook Collectors of Coins, Banknotes, Stamps and other Collectibles

Stamps? Coins? Banknotes? Phone Cards? Bottle Caps? Tea Bags?

Though only recently have we publicized our FaceBook fan page for collectors, we already have to change it due to limitations with FaceBook. The former page name was "colnect.com", which is not a bad name but when searching FaceBook for "colnect" it would never appear in the search results. Contacting FaceBook's support resulted in no answer. Trying to change the name of the page also fails so we've now opened a new page "" and welcome all collectors to join us there.

Thursday, November 26, 2009

Colnect Collectors Club Thanksgiving Gift - THREE New Categories - Transportation Tickets, Hotel Key Cards and Bank Cards

Colnect is proud to announce the much-anticipated expansion of its catalogs, as collectors can now trade and manage their collections in 3 new categories: bank cards, hotel key cards, and transportation tickets. These new additions further enhance the overall variety available on Colnect and will help it appeal to an even greater number of collectors.

If you or a friend collect any of these items, feel free to check out our new online wiki catalog for bank cards, hotel key cards, and transportation tickets. You can easily start managing your personal collection on Colnect using these catalogs and easily make exchanges with other collectors.

While these categories will initially offer relatively small catalogs, they will grow over time thanks to the generous help of our dedicated collectors.

Our bank card catalog, which has launched with a few hundred items, was made possible through the tireless work of a single Colnect collector, Hendy Florez [hflorez] .

Similarly, our hotel key card catalog was contributed by the devoted efforts Colnect member Ignacio F López Vico [iflvico] and presently features 244 cards. Ignacio is also the coordinator of our world's biggest phone cards catalog and has so far tremendously helped Colnect.

And last but surely not least, Gary Hoff [gazzaoz] was responsible for creating our transportation ticket catalog that currently has 222 items now viewable on the site with all the others.



Although the work of these 3 Colnect collectors is especially noteworthy, Colnect would like to thank all the volunteer contributors who continue to ensure that our freely available collectible catalogs as comprehensive and up-to-date as they are.

If you have any suggestions for future new categories, please read here.

Colnect has the world's biggest phone card catalog, with over 200,000 currently being displayed! Colnect also features tens of thousands of items in our stamp catalog, coin catalog, bank note catalog, and bottle cap catalog. In addition, our recently-created tea bag catalog is growing rapidly and now has over 1,744 tea bags from 43 countries displayed.

So what about more categories? Well, YOU can help.

Wednesday, November 25, 2009

World's Biggest Phone Cards Catalogs Now Has Over 200,000 Phonecards Listed!



Colnect's comprehensive catalogs reached yet another milestone today, as 200,000 phonecards have now been uploaded onto the site. Perhaps even more impressively, over 4,444 phonecards were added by dedicated phone card collectors and contributors in the past month alone. More phone card collectors enjoy Colnect, with over 400 collectors currently having at least 1,000 phonecards marked in their collection (and many more with smaller but still sizable inventories). Brazil, with over 50,000 phone cards listed, is now by far the largest source of these phone cards.

Our phone card catalog is only as big and as extensive due the continuing work of contributing collectors who help us make it the best catalog out there. We would like to extend our gratitue to each and every one of and especially to our phone card coordinator, Ignacio F López Vico [iflvico].

Sunday, November 22, 2009

80,000 Stamps on Colnect's Free Stamp Catalog


Colnect's continually growing stamp catalog has eclipsed a new milestone, as 80,000 stamps are now featured on the site! This milestone could not have been reached without the unwavering support of stamp collectors and contributors, who are constantly adding to and updating the catalogs to provide the best collection experience possible. Colnect catalogs will continue to improve on the most extensive variety of collectibles through expansion into new categories and the ongoing enhancement of existing ones.

During the last month, over 4,000 stamps were added and we've like to use the opportunity to thank the collectors who have helped out by contributing content and especially to our stamps coordinator, Fabian Eicke.

Monday, November 16, 2009

3,440,000 Pages Indexed on Google - 7,000 Collectors Are Members

Colnect has reached a new milestone today by eclipsing the 7,000 collectors mark! This lucky milestone X 1000 indicates that Colnect continues to grow and reach new heights. At this rate, it won't be long before Colnect challenges E-Bay as the web's most popular collectibles site.

Remember: You can help Colnect grow while also earning money for yourself through our affiliates program.



We're also happy to let you know that Colnect has over 3.4 million pages indexed on Google. As more collectors on Colnect help out improving Colnect's catalogs by adding items, the amount of pages offered by Colnect is growing quickly.

Happy collecting! :)

Thursday, November 12, 2009

Colnect's Founder Speaks With Leadel.NET

This interview has been done a couple of months ago and published yesterday. At the time, Colnect had ~4,200 collectors and today we are nearly 7,000 strong. There are a lot of references to Colnect's winning the Startup2.0 competition but it also goes over what Colnect is and is trying to achieve.

You're welcomed to comment here or on YouTube. Enjoy :)

Monday, November 9, 2009

Colnect Finalizes the Acquisition of E-Bay (as confirmed on LinkedIn)

Colnect expanded its market reach today by acquiring the on-line startup E-Bay, in a move designed to solidify its place atop the collectibles market. The transaction was confirmed on LinkedIn, with Amir Wald taking over immediately as E-Bay's Chairman of the Board and CEO. Although the acquisition is expected to increase traffic to Colnect slightly, the real long-term benefits lie in the potential of using the Colnect brand name to rejuvenate E-Bay's (and several of its subsidiaries) fledgling operations and to eventually turn them into profitable ventures with high traffic.



Now seriously: Linked-In should fix this bug ASAP.

Tuesday, November 3, 2009

AdSense Revenues vs. Traffic

Should more traffic bring more revenues on AdSense? Read on and you might be surprised.

Colnect is a content-rich website for collectors of stamps, coins, banknotes, Phone Cards, Bottle Caps and Tea Bags.

We use Google Analytics to measure our traffic and it's connected to the AdSense account. A comparison of Colnect's statistics for September-October 2009 reveal that in comparison to the 61 days before them, there has been a rise of 31% in AdSense Page Impressions, 36% in AdSense Unit Impressions but ONLY 3.3% in AdSense Revenues!!!

Yes, you are reading these statistics correctly. Correlation between the rise in traffic and in revenues is almost non-existent. A few reasons come to mind but let's start with your comments on the subject. What do you think?

Saturday, October 31, 2009

Collectors on FaceBook

Stamps? Coins? Banknotes? Phone Cards? Bottle Caps? Tea Bags?

Collectors from all around the world, even those not familiar with Colnect and how unique it is, are welcomed to view Colnect's fan page on FaceBook:


Special November Promotion


You can get FREE premium membership for 1 month. No payment details needed. Share your Colnect profile on your FaceBook wall and ask us for FREE membership.

Friday, October 30, 2009

6,666 collectors - 46,666 monthly visitors - 2,123,456 page views



Maybe others like to present their statistics in round numbers, but not on Colnect. Just about 2 months ago, there were 5,555 collectors who became Colnect members and now we've crossed the 6,666 mark. That's exactly 20% growth, which is unfortunately a round number ;)

Traffic from non-registered members has also grown considerably since we last reported. Over 2,123,456 pages of Colnect were presented to more than 46,666 unique visitors during the last 30 days. This is a growth of approximately 7.77% and 5.43% from the previous 30 days.

Why Should You Care?



Collector? The more Colnect members there are, the more possibilities to find other collectors to trade with. More collectors are updating our catalogs constantly.

Dealer? The more Colnect members there are, the more... OK, you already know what that means.

Advertiser? More than ever, now you can easily address a highly targeted crowd of collectors. Check our advertising page.


Why is Colnect Growing?



Colnect's website, our main product, has been constantly improving. Responding to demands by collectors, the system is becoming easier and more functional to use. This encourages "word of mouth" viral spreading. Yes, it's a bit of a pat on the back but we know there's still a lot of work ahead.
Since the winning of the Startup2.0 competition, media attention has helped the growth as well.
Some non-professional SEO has helped as well. Colnect contains a lot of original content and should be favored by search engines, given that they are properly presented with it. As the content of Colnect's catalogs is constantly growing (soon we'll cross the 200,000 phonecards mark), search engines have more Colnect pages to index.

Wednesday, October 14, 2009

Over 2 Million Monthly Page Views

As previously reported, Colnect's traffic keeps growing nicely and we've recently passed the mark of over 2 Million page views during the last 30 days. As new collectors join Colnect and discover how it benefits them, existing members use the site extensively to manage their personal collection, which explains the rise in seen page views. This increase in site use is much bigger than the increase in page views since many actions which formerly required the whole page to be refreshed are now easily performed with Ajax requests and are thus NOT counted as page views anymore.

Sunday, September 20, 2009

6,000 Registered Collectors on Colnect - Over 44,000 People Visited Colnect Last Month

During the last month, over 44,000 people have visited Colnect. Colnect's community has been growing rapidly recently and we're now over 6,000 collectors, coming from 98 different countries and using Colnect in 38 languages. Less than two month ago Colnect has passed the 5,000 collectors mark and the road to 7,000 is expected to be shorter :)

Colnect enables collectors to easily manage their personal collection and coordinate swaps ans sales. Many collectors choose to display their collections on Colnect and so you can easily see our active Stamp collectors, Coin collectors, Banknote collectors, Bottle Cap collectors and Phonecard collectors.

In addition to Colnect's unique services to collectors, it offers relevant social networking features to allow members to communicate, become friends, rate each other and more.

Tuesday, September 8, 2009

Opera 10 is Opera 9.8?! A user-agent Identity Crisis

Opera 10 has been released and naturally Colnect has to be tested with it. Although all of today's browsers are "complaint", they all produce different results for the same pages.

On Colnect, there are CSS pop-up menus for both the top menu and side menu. Perhaps not the best design decision, they are yet very functional to members browsing the site. So far, only Internet Explorer (IE) was not responding properly to the top menus. IE6 or lesser doesn't support them. IE7 does support them but displays them in the wrong position for right-to-left languages. IE8 does the job properly, as well as FireFox, Chrome and Opera. Actually, that was until the new Opera 10 came out and now the right-to-left languages display the popup CSS menus displaced and unusable. Only on Opera 10 the side menu pop-ups now have problems as well.

To ensure people choosing problematic browsers don't suffer, Colnect's code checks the browser by using its USER-AGENT string. When a problematic browser is encountered, the pop-up menus will simply not appear. That's how I found out that the brand new Opera 10 tells web server it's actually Opera 9.8 engine. See for yourself:



Identity crisis for Opera?

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