Wednesday, July 1st, 2009
Conducting an online business on the web, you get to understand that the main impression you make on your target audience is visual impression. ‘Clothes count…’ – this old saying is more than true when it comes to attracting potential members to a dating site or a social network. So choosing the right template is almost as important as choosing the domain name, which is going to be your website’s ‘trademark’. It will help to create a certain mood to your members – either cheerful and ready-to-make-friends or sensual and appealing – depending on the site conception. A carefully chosen social network template can make an occasional site visitor feel interest and finally stay a part of your online community for long. While a poor and tacky-colored design will definitely ‘help’ you lose a potential member in a flicker. And that’s the reason why a whole division in marketing studies the influence of various color combinations to consumers’ activity. Below you will find a few examples of what emotions people associate with different colors, and how you can use this psychological tool depending on the goals you want to achieve.
Black – is a very strong color. It is a color of authority, stability and power. It is also associated with elegance and luxurious classics. It makes other colors look ’sharer’ and helps to create an atmosphere of mystery. Since it evokes strong emotions, too much of black may be overwhelming for your site members, so try to dilute it by adding more bright colors.
White – is associated with innocence, purity and simplicity. It has a calming and stabilizing influence. It does not irritate the eye and allows for a relatively large number of colorful components (if chosen as a template background).
Red – is a color of love, passion, excitement, aggression and energy. It’s the color stimulating all kinds of appetites. So it’s an indispensable color for those creating adult websites.
Blue – is likely the world’s favorite color. It is associated with calmness and trustworthiness. The darker shades of blue are ideal for businesses, as they symbolize financial stability, professionalism and loyalty. White-and-blue templates are ideal for business networks. Light blue colors give a feeling of freshness and cleanliness and get you in the careless mood.
Yellow – implies laughter, sunshine, happiness and amusement. Yellow color helps our brain release more serotonin, which makes us feel cheerful and energetic. Using this color in the right place and amount can become a powerful tool for involving new members into your social network.
Green – is known to be a relaxing color associated with nature, money and health. It is pleasant for the senses and has a calming effect.
Orange – color is tied with fun, pleasure, energy, warmth. An interesting thing is that it can make expensive products seem more affordable. This color is sharp and vibrant and implies anything but calmness.
Golden – is considered to be a color symbolizing wealth. Having a few golden components in your design will give it a classy look drawing attention.
Grey – is associated with solid and practical things. Silver color (a hue of grey) represents high tech. Too much of grey in design will most likely leave a dull impression. But adding just a few grey components will give that necessary rock solidity to your website (especially if that is a business network).
When choosing a design for your site, give strong attention to the color combination, which should be harmonious and selected in accordance with chromatic color scheme principles.
Take a look at one of the examples of a ‘color wheel’
So, here are some basics on color combination, which will hopefully guide you in the right direction:
Monochromatic color scheme – is based on combining different shades of one color segment (for example, darker and lighter shades of blue). Such design gives a site a pleasant, clean and integral look.
Complimentary color scheme – is using contrast colors, which are opposite to each other on the ‘color wheel’. Such warm-and-cold combination will look fresh and lively. One of the best examples of such scheme is combining light green and pink.
Triple color scheme – is built on using colors equally standing out from each other in the chromatic circle (such as red, yellow and blue).
Analogue color scheme – uses three color segments neighboring each other in the color circle. Such design will be colorful and harmonious.
Also, don’t forget about your target audience ethnic habits. For example, Asian people prefer red color, while the Dutch incline to orange.
SkaDate community script offers a wide range of site templates to meet your taste and needs. But we also thought of our customers who want to be different from others. SkaDate dating software designers will be happy to assist you in giving your site a unique look either by developing a custom template or by integrating your own design into the script.
Remember that people do judge by the cover. So, give it a strong attention as this is one more step to the top of success.
As usual, you are welcome to leave your comments. I will be glad to read them.
Best wishes,
Irene
Posted in Marketing, Products, SkaDate | Tags: community script · dating software · SkaDate · social network template
Tuesday, June 2nd, 2009
Dating industry is no longer a newborn in the world of business. It has been developing for years and has obviously reached the level where we can speak about serious competition and enormous profits. So, the major question keeping the dating sites’ owners up at nights is how to fight the competition and gain profit at reasonable expenses and within a relatively short time interval.
Now that there is a number of advanced features supported by dating software (that only keep improving), a dating site owner has multiple tools for achieving the main goal of every businessman – financial benefit from strategical efforts.
Below you will find some useful tips that will guide you on how you can get your site prospering and beneficial thanks to the SkaDate software features and your will to succeed.
Be attractive for potential members!! Sounds pretty banal…. It is quite a logical assumption that a ‘busy’ site is a synonym to success. The more members surf through your site – the more traffic they generate, thus making the site very attractive for advertisers. Not to mention the direct flow of funds from your site members who pay for subscriptions. And behind all that stands a carefully chosen site concept that will allow you to find your niche in the competitive world of dating industry. How does SkaDate help? Well, in many ways.
Firstly, bright colors as well as stylish and functional design will make your site look professional and attractive. With an opportunity to add eye-catching videos and photos to the index page, the right template will become the first (and very important) step in involving the potential member into your website community.
Another important advantage of our script is its customizability. It is developed in a way that allows you to advance it up to the level of your dream. All you need is coding skills (or the right person who has ones) and your imagination. Our professional developers team is always there to assist in case you want to be 100% confident about the positive result. But for basic site customization (say, changing the profile field names and text areas content, adding or removing menu items) you do not need coding knowledge at all – you have the Admin Panel interface (which is very user-friendly) for this kind of adjustments.
As you can see, SkaDate offers a range of tools for making your website unique and attractive in appearance and interface, but this is just the beginning…
‘Divide and rule’ What would that mean in terms of running a dating site? Right now we are speaking about the policy of managing the membership types intended to motivate your site members for subscribing to paid plans – thus, to increasing your funds. The membership types system in SkaDate software is perfectly optimized for you to ‘play’ with site services by making some (or even all) of them available only to a certain membership. This will inspire Free members to go for subscription in order to be able to experience the full range of helpful and entertaining site features – you just need to make it something very hard to refuse from!
Advertise, Advertise and… Advertise!!! An essential part of your ‘profit-aimed’ strategy is advertising, so we have come up to the most important component of your success-building. Let’s say, your site conception does not stipulate a paid membership system, at least at the beginning when you need to get your site live and full of members. Does that mean that you will have to operate at a loss? Not at all. The Google Almighty is there to help. It offers you a tool to make your site a profitable business. That is Google AdSense. All you need to do is place the text, image or video advertisement administered by Google onto your website and get paid on a per-click or per-impression basis. Yes, it is that simple!
SkaDate did its best to simplify the process of turning views and clicks into your financial income. It has become so easy to add links and banners to your site that even a child could do that. You just need to embed the banner code via Admin Panel, choose the place on your site where the ad will be displayed… and start earning!
Time to succeed! Now that you have chosen a path of online dating industry to follow, you will see how interesting, exciting, partly complicated, but satisfying this venture can be. The main advice is ‘test and analyze’. Don’t be afraid to play with the software opportunities and ways to attract potential members. Carefully study the response to each step of your marketing strategy, make conclusions, try new advertising moves and be confident about the result.
We are not trying to assure you that conducting online dating business is easy. It will require much of your time, efforts and knowledge. It might be also risky. And you will need a well-built strategy for developing your website. And even then no one can guarantee that your site will get in a row with Match.com and eHarmony.com. But there is a number of success stories in dating industry proving that a small business can grow into a multimillion turnover venture, and why not try to add your own story into that list?
Note that according to the results of the latest economic surveys, even under the crisis unfavorable conditions the online dating industry only goes forward at a steady gait. People really prefer to get over the ills of life and fight against depressive mood next to someone ‘near and dear’. And what could be a better place for finding a soul mate than a dating website or a social network where anyone can forget about his problems? Here is the graph illustrating the trend.
I will be glad to read your comments and viewpoints on this tendency as well as thoughts and anticipation about the future of online dating industry.
Best wishes,
Irene
Posted in Marketing, Products, SkaDate | Tags: ad · attract · dating · potential · profit · software
Tuesday, October 21st, 2008
Why do you need relevant ads? The answer is that you get a target group of visitors who will more likely to respond to advertisements on a specific theme. To run advertisements on your web site is an art of strategy. You need to choose what ads you want to show to your visitors on your web site then think about the advantages and count the cost.
Let’s start with pay-per-click advertisements (PPC).
There are different companies which offer pay-per-click ads the most popular Google Adsense and Yahoo publisher network. All of them have different approaches of getting their ads relevant on content web sites. Relevant ads mean that if a visitor goes to a page for example video chat he/she will see a relevant advertisement of a video chat on an advertisers’ web site. If that visitor clicks on the advertisement the owner of the content web site will get a commission.
The following tips will help you to locate relevant ads on your web site pages:
1. Reconsider the keywords you have in the meta section, page titles and content of your web site this will help AdSense to place relevant ads.
2. If you want to get particular ads on a page which should be different from the main theme of the web site then I would recommend that you scan words which are repeated in your headers, sidebars, menus and change undesirable words.
3. Keep in mind that you may see different ads on your web site from your side because advertisers use geo targeting.
4. If you get irrelevant ads it means that your web site is not old enough and at the beginning you may get social non-paid ads. Or use a tool for blocking irrelevant ads for example Google’s Competitive Ad filter.
5. Think about the right positions for your ads. It is simple as you see ads during a prime time on TV or listen to the radio while driving a car.
If you want to learn more about how to efficiently use advertisements on your web site then check into it here:
1. 5-factors that determine your advertising cpm rates.
2. How-to-use-adsense-custom-channels.
3. How to use channels effectively to help you increase your adsense revenue.
Share your techniques how you use online advertisements on your web site.
Posted in Marketing, Miscellaneous, SkaDate | Tags: ads · adsense · SkaDate · tips
Thursday, May 22nd, 2008
Hello all!
Promoting dating site is not an easy task; it requires a lot of time, effort and dedication. Some people say that internet marketing is not all that difficult as soon as you become aware of the most popular techniques that can be applied and how well you use them will dictate the level of your success. Let’s say you have already launched a new dating site. On this step, your site is just a nice picture on the screen and no more, nobody knows it, nobody ever heard of it. You are about to start one of the most indispensable thing: you’ve gotta bring people to your site and make them come back again and again.
read more »
Posted in Marketing, Products, SkaDate | Tags: dating · promotion · tips
Thursday, February 7th, 2008
Many people when buying a dating software think about its promotion and the different ways to earn money, of course. The common question I used to hear from customers was about membership. Should it be for free at the beginning? Isn’t it better to set a paid membership from the start? If the membership is for free, how should I earn? And so on.
There are tons of dating websites already, but as we can see they choose different business models. Let’s take a look at the most popular scenarios to understand how it works.
FREE START. Most dating web-sites start with free membership. Why? Profile database. The goal is to get as many people on the website as possible within a short period of time. The other point why it is reasonable – you put your new website online and people are joining and having fun for free while you have time to test the software, check hosting facilities, improve design, adjust admin settings, add necessary features, fix bugs if appeared. Once you are done with preparation you are ready for big promotion and to start earning money.
100% FREE. The example can be www.plentyoffish.com, which is completely free for everyone, no hidden fees and paid upgrades. The website earns on advertising. This is one model. With the right advertising strategy it can become a very profitable business.
JOIN FREE. Another way you can choose is partially free dating service. I call it “Join Free”, because usually joining (with some rare exceptions) is the only free service on such kind of websites. This is made to attract people at the beginning and shows the benefits of paid membership when they are already inside.
There can be combinations of the schemes mentioned above or some slightly modified examples, but basically the idea is like that. Which way to choose, you decide considering your target audience, promotion experience, knowledge of advertising tactics and professional preferences. Just make sure to take into consideration your clients’ perspective (think of client’s needs!).
Also, look at the article on the www.freedating-sites.com. I like the text, because the author gives some words of advice from the user’s point of view, which is very important to know before you make a decision about your marketing strategy.
So, which strategy do you choose for your website?
Posted in Marketing | Tags: income · marketing strategy
Wednesday, December 12th, 2007
Thanks, Emil! 
)) So, here we are and let’s begin!
So many questions on how to launch a dating website and no answers? We’ll start from the very beginning and provide you with some tips and recommendations of how to start your own dating or social networking web-site.
The best advice for today:
Stop thinking of big client database – start thinking of client needs!
No objections! That’s true, it works! What do I mean by that?
I used to hear from people starting dating/community website that they need a big database to become successful. They are definitely right… if this is not the first question they ask after buying software. Got it?
Your first question should be “Who is my audience?”. Who are those people I’m doing this website for? What do they like? What do they need? WHY do they need your website?
Ask as many questions as possible to find out who is “your database” before thinking of increasing it to hundreds and thousands of people.
In order to identify your clients needs you should know who your audience is. You need to “draw” the client portrait. Try to describe in details (more details – better results).
Example: My client is single man/woman living in Paris aged over 50, with high average income and passion for traveling.
If you start by taking care of people needs in real life dating you will result in big client database. There is no other way to make people stay on your site.
In our future posts we’ll cover the steps you may take to start dating/ social network web-site and costs associated with this process. Wish you to have more active and interested users on your web-site!
Posted in Marketing | Tags: clients · tips
Wednesday, December 12th, 2007
I’m glad to announce that we are opening community business marketing section on our blog. Let me introduce Uliana Kumenova – our VP Marketing and editor-in-chief. Uliana will share her thoughts and gather most useful Internet materials specific for our market.
There are certain marketing technics to promote an internet community – some of them are effective, some are not. Those technics tend to change over time, so our work is to follow them.
Not only you will be able to get help on your individual questions, we can build constructive dialogs, exchange ideas and learn to understand our customerbase better. Welcome to our discussions.
Feel free to subscribe for marketing section RSS.
Posted in Marketing, News, SkaDate | Tags: discussion · promotion
