• How about struggling to make sure Hotmail accepts our newsletter. Which now seems to be the case, but recipients do need to mark us as ‘safe’ or ‘not junk’ in order to get the newsletter delivered in their inbox. Please make sure to do so if you use Hotmail?

• Secondly: meeting up with a lot of people, who have highly valuable insights in to what works best in China and/or with the Chinese. This week we added a new story to our Web site, and in this newsletter we feature Marc van der Chijs.

• We went to China, which was mind-blowing! You can find a brief account of our trip on www.chinasuccessstories.com. View some of the pictures we took on www.flickr.com/photos/how-to-china. And obviously, make sure to read the articles we will be publishing in weeks to come as a result of the interviews in Beijing and Shanghai.

• What else have we been up to? Tweaking our Web site. Making sure people know where to find us on the internet. For instance, look us up in Google: just type China Success Stories and hit enter: we are now the fourth Web site of a total of over 15 million! This SEO, Search Engine Optimization, still needs a lot of effort on a daily basis, because many other keyword searches don’t give us top listings (yet). We will share some tips and tricks on this matter soon, as we are sure your website will also benefit from it.

• More? Yep!
  
  • Writing all the articles. Making new appointments.
  • Reading, writing and sending a lot of emails.
  • Calling. Drinking coffee. Finding new colleague’s.
  • Trying to find English native writers that can help us out with interviewing, translating and proofreading, or do we mean proof_reading?
  • Visiting KLM Club China (we already have over 200 contacts/friends there!).
  • Trying to see if we can expand our network on LinkedIN as well.
  • Revealing a partnership with www.arquivochina.com.
  • Setting up a guest bloggers section on our Web site (soon to go live).  
  • Ordering new business cards since we ran out. The new ones are a lot nicer by the way (want us to send you one? ;-).
  • And… and… and… we won’t bore you any longer. Hopefully now you know what it is we have been doing and why you – or at least some of you - didn’t get word from us earlier.

Tai Chi communication

Doing business is all about communicating. And China happens to play by its own rules in this. An authority on this subject is Marc van der Chijs. In 1999 he moved to China for Daimler Chrysler and now, eight years later, he owns two successful internet companies and is managing partner of China Bay. The secret to his success? Building relations: “Don’t send your sales manager to China with the mission to ‘come back next week with a contract’. For sure he will be back with a contract, but one which won’t be of much use.”

“One of the main reasons foreign companies find it difficult to establish themselves here, is the fact that they want a quick fix to everything. They think in terms of contracts: deals have to be finalised, as quickly as possible. The rest will follow, or so they think. But in China it does not work like that. Chinese businessmen think..." Click here to read the rest of the article... 

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