I'm interested in other people's experience with SkaDate and how many people are signing up.  I'm only just setting up shop, and have no idea how quickly I will be able to build a user base.  Do any site admins out there have figures which you could share on:
* number of users which sign up per month
* number of users which become paying
* rate at which users abandon profiles
* what sort of total number of profiles one might expect to reach
* how much it costs (if you pay) to acquire a user

Thanks for any insights!


Hugh

Easton,

Firstly, thanks very much for your reply - it's very interesting.

Two points:
(1) Where is this "Skadate marketing board" which you talk about?  The only two boards I know about are the "Feature Suggestions" board and this "Ideas Exchange Board". 

(2) I too was intending the exact same approach you describe (Google Ads, highly concentrated geographical niche, build the database free, charge later when a sizeable database), and so your figures for numbers of members are very interesting.  I think that the worldwide market is so huge I don't think we're likely to be treading on each others toes any time soon though.  The $1,000,000 question though is how much is "very aggressive through Google Adwords" in dollar spend per month?  Or if you prefer not to answer that one, what is your approx cost per free profile acquisition (i.e. cost per click, divided by signup rate)?  This sort of spend figure would help me very much in planning.   Or maybe just your click-through cost (e.g. $0.20? $2?)?  Or maybe just your signup rate from those who actually click through (10%? 90%?)?  Thanks for any more info!

That's wonderful!  Thanks a lot for those insights.

The amount of members that your website will bring in will not be the same as another site because it is mostly likely targeting a different market or it may have a different theme. Google Adwords is good, but I highly recommend learning SEO and doing Keyword research for your websites. The best website traffic is free website traffic from the search engines. At first I spent a lot of money on Google Adwords and Adbrite and I didn't see the same results every time. If you use that option I'd recommend researching other social networks in the google adwords and adbrite content network and advertise on those sites directly as well as use targeted keywords for your site when you use those advertising networks.

When I learned SEO and how to optimize my site for the search engines my visitors based on search engine results increased 40% within a month. I have a free SEO ebook that will teach you how if interested.