Promote Your Dating Site
How Do I Market My Dating Site?
You’re asking the million dollar question
there! Despite all the hype, it can be frustratingly
difficult to make money as a dating site webmaster. That's
because you have about 60,000 competitors, all of whom think
their dating site is the best thing since sliced bread. So
how do you promote or market your dating site so that it stands
head and shoulders above the rest?
Make Money From Your Dating Site: Get
Real
First of all, delete all that spam that comes through your mail
box every day of the week, telling you to invest in this marketing scheme, that
software, and they guarantee you'll be a millionaire inside three
months. However you play it, you really can’t get away from the fact
that you have to invest a huge amount of time and work
extremely hard marketing your website to
begin making even half decent money. The plus side is that it's
definitely worth every late night, every bleary-eyed morning that
you'll put in in order to generate those first few "You Made A Sale!"
notifications. I don't think I've ever had so much fun
doing something, and I've worked for myself for 17 years!
There are basically four things you need to attend to in order to make
money on dating sites;
-
Site Optimization
Site Optimization Courses
Site optimization is the most important thing you need to concentrate on
if you're serious about promoting your dating site. It’s a minefield trying to please the search engines AND the
customer, but unless you do, you aren’t going to sell anything. I
started out by using stuff written by Ken McEvoy of SiteSell
fame – what he writes makes sense, and best of all, you can get his
most important products for free. I used the Affiliate Masters
Course and Make Your Site Sell!, and even used Site
BuildIt! (which is great for helping you create a site that
search engines adore) for a while until I became comfortable using
an HTML editor.
You can get these and other marketing courses and books for free here;
http://freetrial.sitesell.com/opendoor.html (scroll about
a third of the way down the page to get to the free stuff! )
Site BuildIt
http://buildit.sitesell.com/opendoor.html
Site Optimization Tools
Once you go beyond Site BuildIt!, there
are a myriad of software optimization tools available to a
webmaster. While you can build a web page without using
any optimization and/or reporting software, if you're new to
building websites and attempt flying solo, you're unlikely to have
very much success at attracting search engine traffic in the highly
competitive dating market, simply because there's so much to learn
and so many dating site webmasters who know more than you.
Used well, the best of these tools will teach you what you need to know to stay
ahead in the search engines - then you can use them to fine tune
your pages them. Learn More.....
Site Optimization Tips
We know that as a beginning or intermediate webmaster, there are
times when you simply feel overwhelmed by the steepness of the
learning curve you need to climb in order to start serious selling.
Daily Internet
Marketing Tips is a daily newsletter which offers both site
optimization and internet marketing advice feeds you what you need
to know know in digestable bit-sized chunks. Subscribers receive an
original, plain english, no-nonsense article about site
optimization, marketing and website promotion every day of the week
via e-mail.
Read what Chuck
McCullough, super affiliate has to say about Daily Internet
Marketing Tips.
You can't afford to ignore Planet
Ocean's Search Engine News, which is a monthly newsletter
with accompanying e-book (constantly updated) - The Unfair
Advantage
Book on Winning the Search Engine Wars.
Both are jam-packed with the latest information about how to
work with the search engines to achieve the best possible ratings,
and offer tips that you won't find in as much detail anywhere else.
I subscribe to 6-8 newsletters, but this is the only one I've
been prepared to pay for!
http://www.searchenginehelp.com/
BTW - Planet ocean have a "The Dog Ate
It" Guarantee, which means you can cancel your order at any time and
get your money back, no questions asked. I tried it out, just
for fun, and got a reply refunding my account within a couple of
hours. Needless to say, I re-ordered again!
Other site optimization
links
Search Engine Forums
Don't ignore the help and support
that's available on site optimisation and search engine forums.
My favorites are to be found in Jimsworld . These
forums are a godsend - you have a problem and no-one to turn
to...you post it to a forum, and hey, presto; an hour or so later,
you have a reply or two from someone who knows their stuff.
Thank God for JimsWorld!
www.searchengineforums.com
Link Popularity
You need this to get into Google (and therefore Yahoo). It’s
basically about getting other dating sites to link to you in exchange for
you giving them a link on your own dating site. It’s a slow process, but I
found the Zeus tool has helped speed things up a great deal,
allowing me a create the tightly themed links directory you see in
to the left of this page!
Their support guy Peter is fantastic – he’ll get back to you if you
have problems in a matter of minutes.
You can get it the free version here;
www.cyber-robotics.com
Marketing
If I’ve one complaint about Ken, it’s that he leaves a newcomer
thinking all you’ve got to do is build an optimized site and the
money will come flooding in. I’ve found it ain’t necessarily so.
You’ve probably heard of Cory Rudl – supposed to be an
internet marketing guru. He produces a course “Insider Secrets”,
which takes a different tack to Ken, providing a wider scope for
how to market your web to maximum effect, as well as how to
optimize it. I finally bought it last month, after holding out since
January when I first came across it, because I thought the $197 he
charges at bit steep. I’m still working my way though it, but the
more I read, the more I understand just why this 29-year old
has been so successful....if there's a base on his marketing
horizon, he makes sure he's got it covered!
http://www.marketingtips.com/insidersecrets/
If your budget's tight, a cheaper option is probably to look at
Cory's “Secrets To Their
Success” newsletter, which does an in-depth interview with a
webmaster who’s “made it” each month, looking at their site - what
works, what doesn’t and the mistakes they’ve made. I went and had a
look last month because he was interviewing Rosalind Gardner of
www.sage-hearts.com , who’s
apparently making $30,000 of her dating site each month. That interview was
what pulled me in, but I have to say that I got just as much out of
looking at all the other non-dating related interviews as well. I’m
not usually a raver, but this was really useful!
Read more....
You can get a free month’s membership of “Secrets To Their Success”
here;
www.marketingtips.com/secrets/
Don't forget to check out
Daily Internet
Marketing Tips as described above. At $14.99 for a 90-day
subscription, this is the cheapest resource listed here!
Other marketing links
Running An E-zine
(You should probably only consider this when you’ve got your
site optimisation up and running).
A newsletter is regarded across the internet as the turnkey to a
steady income from an established customer base. The
people who sign up for your dating newsletter do so because you have
something to offer them. Your task with a newsletter is to
keep offering them something they want, so much so that they're
prepared to pay for it.
Ultimately, you'll have to organise your own newsletter (or on
Cory's
suggestion get someone to do it for you). In my opinion, none
of the software available is much good when it comes to using it for
dating sites, but you will need an auto
responder system to make it work properly. The cheapest I’ve found
is Demandmail, which I've used to produce some great
text and HTML messages, but I have to concede that Cory Rudl's
Mailoop autoresponder system is the deluxe tool for automating
so many of your tasks as a webmaster, and unlike most autoresponder
systems, you control it from your own pc rather than a remote server;
www.demandmail.com
www.marketingtips.com/mailoop/
If you're short on time, content or ezine publishing skills,
IdeasMarketers may offer a solution.
They allow you to produce a monthly newsletter in 15-20 minutes using
their Publisher's ToolBox - you just select content that fits
your subject area, adding any affiliate links that you may
have.
www.ideasmarketers.com
There’s a fifth consideration;
URL Cloaking.
This last is a subject that is hotly debated, but it’s something
that webmasters in a competitive sector like dating need to look at,
if only to protect their HTML code from being stolen by competitors.
Be aware that there are legitimate and “illegitimate” forms of
cloaking. Find out more here;
www.kloakit.com
www.fantomaster.com
Private Sites
To learn more about private sites for internet marketers,
visit here;
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services on your dating site?
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Learn More...
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