Now that your dating site content is optimized and ready to get indexed by search engines, it is time for a final stage – submitting your site to search databases.

Among the search engines Google certainly takes the leading position as the most ‘haunted’ one due to being relevant.  This is why I will use it as an example while defining the steps you need to take to let search engines know about your site.

So, the initial step to ‘get friends’ with Google is to be the first to introduce yourself by submitting your site URL through this link http://www.google.com/addurl.html.  If you don’t do this – the sky won’t fall over your head, and somehow or other Google spiders will find and index your website on their own… But time is precious in terms of promotion and advertising, and we all want your online dating /social community to reach the top as fast as possible. So why not take a few minutes to help the restless Google crawlers?  Good news is that you won’t need to re-submit your site URL again even if you change it – once indexed, it will be tracked and updated automatically (provided you changed only the domain name and did not alter the site content).

Next move is submitting your sitemap to Google. Basically, sitemap is a list of all the website links accessible to users organized in a hierarchical (top-to-down) manner.  It helps Google crawlers ‘understand’ the structure of your site and, thus, provide a significantly better indexation to its pages (essential for Flash or JavaScript menus not containing HTML links). SkaDate dating software team developed an integrated tool for automatic XML sitemap generation, which allows you to get a ready map of your site structure by a simple button click in the Admin Panel.

So, what happens next? I bet, most of you wonder how exactly Google (or any other search engine) ‘calculates’ the web site’s relevancy and importance for defining its position in search results, what factors it takes into account, and what is the priority of these factors for such evaluation. No one except for the Google staff members knows this mysterious algorithm. Even SEO sharks will hardly ever get close enough to understanding it, as it constantly gets updated.  But still there is some useful information for all of us to learn.

Let’s take a look at Google PageRank, often referred to as ‘PR’ (not to confuse with Public Relations). This is how Google itself describes it: ”PageRank relies on the uniquely democratic nature of the web by using its vast link structure as an indicator of an individual page’s value. In essence, Google interprets a link from page A to page B as a vote, by page A, for page B. But, Google looks at more than the sheer volume of votes, or links a page receives; it also analyzes the page that casts the vote. Votes cast by pages that are themselves “important” weigh more heavily and help to make other pages “important”.”  PageRank grades from 0 to 10. The higher your web page rank is – the better (www.yahoo.com and www.microsoft.com have PR9, www.google.com has PR10). Please, note that I mentioned a ‘web page’, not a ‘web site’. For a search engine all your site pages are ‘autonomous’ objects for indexation. So, each page will have its own PR. PageRank is invisible to Internet users in search results. But it can be seen by means of a special tool, such as Google Toolbar. It has both numerical and visual (scale bar) indicators.

As you might have understood from the PageRank description given above, it is based on the quantity and (most importantly) quality of the inbound links to your site pages. If a few web sites with good positions in search results (it is exactly high search ranks, not PR I am speaking about right now) link to your site, they give you a share of their popularity, thus, helping you to get a better PageRank too. So, you should be quite ‘picky’ while going for link exchange, since even multiple references from web sites with low Search Engine Results Placement (SERP) will not help you much in SEO.

And here comes the most important part. PageRank is just one of many components Google engine takes into consideration while ‘granting’ a search results position to your site. Which means that even if you get a PR which is 10 out of 10 – it does not guarantee you the top position in a search rank. This is proved by a number of examples when a web page with a lower PageRank got a higher SERP as compared to its competitors. Besides, PageRank is solely the Google invention, and does not affect search results positions in other search engines in any way. So, no need to focus only on this ‘magic PR’, but it’s essential to give enough attention to other important aspects, such as developing a carefully-optimized site content, choosing relevant keywords, and many more useful things mentioned in my previous articles devoted to SEO.

Search engine optimization is a science, whose motto is definitely ‘live and learn’. It’s constantly altered and updated. So take time to follow the newest SEO trends and strategies – and you will see how rewarding the results of your online business may be.

From my side, I will always be glad to answer your questions and assist in every way.

Feel free to leave your comments.

Best wishes,

Irene

Image sources: http://www.crsolutionsgroup.com , http://www.tasticproductions.com , http://icp.ge.ch

You already know what the magic ‘SEO’ abbreviation stands for. It’s for Search Engine Optimization unifying tools and methods intended to help your site get top positions in search results by means of optimizing its content strategically placing keywords and removing barriers for efficient indexation. Such methods, techniques, and traffic they generate are called ‘organic’ or ‘natural’.

Now here’s a brief explanation of what ‘PPC ads’ is. ‘Pay Per Click’ is an advertising model used on the Internet, and based on one condition: advertisers pay the hosts for showing their ads only as they get clicked. The Cost Per Click (CPC) is usually set through a bidding system – advertisers offer the maximum price they are ready to pay per each click bringing one visitor to their site. Sometimes a flat-rate model for defining a CPC is used. It is based on rate cards – lists of pre-set CPCs for different areas of the website that hosts ads.

The most popular and efficient PPC providers are: Google AdWords, Yahoo! Search Marketing, and Microsoft adCenter.

Here is how the PPC model works… Basically, when it comes to search engines, the PPC strategy technically gets your site placed to the first page of search results almost instantly. I am talking about those few links displayed at the very top or on the right of search results also known as ’sponsored links’ or ’sponsored ads’. Benefits for advertisers are obvious – you get immediate results in the form of traffic directed to your site. Bad news is that the traffic flow comes to halt as soon as you stop paying, which brings you back to where you started.

It is not so easy to decide which way to go – whether to put maximum effort in SEO strategy, which will require time and diligence, or to just go for a paid ad campaign, which will require considerable financial investments in return to fast results. Each method has pros and cons you have to study before making a decision.

1. SEO takes time and effort. You will have to think about the website textual content very carefully, find relevant keywords and place them on your site strategically. You will need to make sure that the site content provides no barriers for search engines indexation, and that it’s really interesting and useful for your visitors. Even if all these requirements are fulfilled, it may take many months before your site gets desirable ranking in search results.

PPC ads are as effective as they can be. They guarantee quick and noticeable results. Even if your site is a newbie in the world of search engines – you have all chances to attract visitors belonging to your target audience, and thus, start building a database of members.

2. SEO strategy is a cost-saving solution as compared to a PPC model. Optimizing the site content for search engines will take some expenses from your part, no doubt. But these will be mostly one-time fee costs diminishing as the time goes, since you will need to just maintain the content you built at the start.

When it comes to PPC, you will face some totally different figures. Don’t forget that with PPC each member click will cost you money, which is fine unless you start getting hundreds to thousands visitors daily. This is why a PPC strategy requires careful estimation of a cost-revenue rate.

3. Since SEO success requires your website content to be relevant and informative, it will inspire you to work hard on it, and build something really worthy. This content optimization will help enrich your site, make it interesting and attractive. Besides, you will get a considerable experience in website promotion, and probably get closer to understanding the principles of search engines operation.

PPC will not take this much of your time and effort. But for most of us this will be an advantage rather than a drawback.

4. PPC model allows you to have full control on your advertisement content. For instance, you can change keywords any time, which will not affect your website position.

As to Search Engine Optimization, such changes may lead to your site ad content being compromised.

So, if you are planning a website with dynamic content that needs to be updated on a regular basis – SEO might not work for you.

5. Statistics shows that users tend to show more trust for natural search results rather than for sponsored links. Serious businesses also give more value to obtaining high search ranks by ‘organic’ means.

It is difficult to decide in favor of one of these promotion methods. Actually, I would recommend to go for both at a time, as this combination will surely be the most effective, and might bring you up to 3 times increase in clicks through rates.

I am sure though that each of you will make a choice based on his own vision of the site promotion strategy, and of course, on his own opportunities.

However, your opinion is very important. So, I will be grateful if you take some time and leave a comment sharing your opinion and probably experience on how to get closer to the goal – top rankings in search engines.

Best wishes,

Irene

Now that you have done a great job on selecting the relevant keywords for your site, it’s time to talk about using them on your site efficiently.  Well, the word ‘efficiency’ in the given context is something that cannot stand apart from using meta tags.

Basically, meta tags are HTML or XHTML elements used to help search engines list your site accurately in their indexes by providing structured data about your webpage content.  Other than the Title tag, meta tags are not visible to the users and serve exclusively to allow search engines and browsers to ‘deal’ with your site more easily and effectively.

Below you fill find a few tips on how to use the meta tags efficiently to make search engines (and users!) like your site.

The title tag– should contain brief information about your site; the total summary of keywords for this tag should not exceed 60 characters, but still try to make it as descriptive as you can since search engines will use it as a title for your listing. Be sure to add your main keyword to it.

Example: <title> Free  online dating service for pet lovers </title>

The meta tag – Keywords attribute – this is actually the place for ’storing’ all your keywords. You can add about 1000 characters into this section (commas and spaces count as characters too). Avoid repeating same keywords often (not more than 4-7 times). Although presently this meta tag is ignored by Google (completely ignored, according to what they say), I would still recommend to keep it ‘just in case’. If one fine morning Google decides to return to recognizing keywords meta tag – you will be armed. Plus, this tag may still be of value for other search engines.

Example: <META content=”online dating, dating, matchmaking, pet lovers, pets, cat owner dating, dog owner dating, singles, animal lovers, pet dating, pet health”>

The meta tag – Description attribute – allows you to write the description of what your site is about, which is most likely to be used by  search engines while displaying the search results. About 150 characters should be enough for your description to express the site conception, but some search engines allow you for about 400.

Example: <META content=”A dating site for single pet lovers, looking for friendship and love with like-minded personals”>

It is advised that you use meta tags on each page of your site (they should be inserted inside the <HEAD> section of the page). This helps better indexation by search engines and thus, increases your chances for good ranking.

The good question is how to add meta tags to your site. Normally, this can be done through one of the HTML-editors, like Nvu or Dreamweaver. But SkaDate community software developers simplified the process of adding meta information to your dating or social networking site by bringing it to inserting codes to all the site pages right from the Admin Panel/SEO section. You can also add a unique meta title and description to each page via Admin Panel/Languages.

Now let me give you a few pieces of advice on how to get the most out of your relationship with a search engine.

• Make sure that your website textual content includes all the relevant keywords you selected for search engines. And remember that the keywords density should not exceed 5-10%.
• Check all the links on your site. There shouldn’t be any broken or irrelevant links.
• For some important site content (names, links, information) use text rather than images, since Google bots do not recognize text in images. Or at least use alt=”keyword” tag for your images.

• Each page of your site has to be reachable from a at least one static text link.
• Make sure your site is displayed correctly in all browsers.
• Be attentive when it comes to affiliate programs – try to avoid using the textual content on your site identical to content on the other web sources. This may bring you to something opposite to success.
• Be careful using other business’ trademarks among your keywords as this may lead to legal issues in regards to possible misleading the potential users.

And here come a few ‘DON’Ts’ that may not only fail to help you in SEO, but at worst will lead to search engines terminating all kinds of interaction with your site by banning it out from the search results.

• Don’t go for Black Hat SEO (Spamdexing), which includes keyword stuffing (loading pages with keywords irrelevant to the site content) and link farms (a group of websites containing hyperlinks to each-other).
• Don’t use programs sending automated queries to Google, say, for checking the site rank status in search results for various queries.
• Don’t place hidden text or links on your site pages. Here I mean text invisible to site visitors, but available to Google crawlers.
• Don’t allow duplicate content.
• Don’t use cloaking (which is displaying different page content to users and to Google bots)
• Don’t create ‘doorway’ pages intended for crawlers rather than for site users.

These simple rules for managing your site content will help you avoid common mistakes causing unwanted consequences and establish friendly and long-term relationship with search engines.

If you have something to say on this subject – don’t hesitate to leave the article comments expressing your opinion!

Best wishes,

Irene

After you have chosen the right dating software for creating a community site, thought of a good site conception, obtained a relevant domain name and design, the next crucial question is ‘How do I make people know about my network?’. The obvious answer is ‘through search engines!’. You will hear nothing new if I say that your online project success strongly depends on its position in search results. Top positions promise you thousands of members, loads of advertisers and sizable income. So you should do your best to help your site become search-engine-friendly by addressing tools and methods of Search Engine Optimization (SEO).

SEO – is the process of attracting a flow of traffic to your website from search engines based on their principles of work and on what people mostly tend to look for. The first and most important step in this compound process is choosing the right keywords for your site to be found on the web.

Think like a customer. ‘Keywords’ is what a user types in the search field hoping to find a relevant match to his expectations in search results. So, to start the suitable keywords ‘exploration’ from the right point, put yourself in your potential customer’ shoes. The question to ask is ”what words or word combinations would I use looking for an online community like mine?”. Looking for an answer, don’t forget to consider the opinion of your friends and colleagues – ask as many people as possible. Recall the words or phrases you used searching for your competitors on the web. Take into account the geographical language peculiarities (the British will definitely use the word ‘flat’ referring to mortgage instead of the traditional American ‘apartment’). Analyze the list of suggestions you’ll get. It makes sense to use keyword combinations (phrases) besides single keywords, as normally people can’t express what they look for in just one word. But keep in mind that a keyword phrase should not contain more than 3-5 main words.

Useful tip: Making a keywords list, take into account common misspellings too, especially when it comes to words with difficult orthography.

Quantity or quality? After making a list of words and word combinations referring to your site conception, ‘examine’ them on search engines: type a word combination (say, ‘dating site’) and see how many results you get. Millions. Well, you have found the popular keyword combination… and tones of competitors as a ‘makeweight’. Check out the top 10 sites appearing in search results. I bet they have hundreds of pages and most likely thousands of incoming links. This means that winning top positions from these sites will require not less than those hundreds of pages developed and thousands of links acquired by you. If you are just starting your online dating business, remember that it’s ‘better to be the head of a dog than the tail of a lion’, so we advise to begin with more specific keywords rather than broad ones. Specific keywords will attract fewer visitors to your site, no doubts. But at the same time they will give you significantly more chances to reach top positions in search results. Another advantage of such ’specification’ is that it will more likely bring you visitors belonging to your target audience as compared to fairly competitive broad keywords attracting a number of ‘occasional guests’. So using, for instance, a ‘pet lovers dating site’ (as opposed to a ‘dating site’) keyword combination dramatically cuts down competition and increases chances to involve some really interested potential members into your online community.

Useful tip: If you are offering goods or services for some specific region, be sure to include your location to the keywords list. This will dramatically increase your competitiveness on the targeted market.

More inspiration sources. The keywords choosing strategy based only on your own thoughts and anticipation may be quite not bad, but this is surely not sufficient for a solid-foundation SEO. In order to have a more or less detailed vision of what traffic result to expect from the keywords selected by you, and to get more ideas for choosing new keywords based on some facts and statistics you will need to refer to keyword research tools. Here are just some of them, but you can always find more on the web:

Google Keyword Tool was actually developed for Google AdWords subscibers, but you can still use it for getting a free list of keywords matching your site idea with indication of search volumes.

WordTracker allows you to make a more detailed research of your keywords. For example, it can check a certain keyword’s popularity (how many times it appeared in more than 30 million search queries) and can even generate a report on maximum total predicted traffic for different search engines. Beware though, that data supplied by this resource may not always be 100% true and it is meant to give you a general view only.

Go for keyword density checkers too. They will help you analyze the ‘keyword cloud’ (visual depiction of keywords used on a website) and keywords density, which should be about 5-10%, according to common sense.

Apart from the Internet sources mentioned above, you can do the following:

Check the server log files. The information on the words used by visitors to find your site through search engines is stored in your server log files. It can be helpful for you to determine the main keywords and key phrases to target, and will probably give you inspiration for new ideas.

One more useful practice is checking what keywords were used by your competitors. For that you need to go to your rival’s site page and right-click on it, then choose the ‘view page source’ option. It will show the page in HTML format. Now you just need to find the ‘keywords’ string. Remember that you are not doing this for copying (plagiarizing) your competitor’s keywords list (if the keywords are trademarked – you could be penalized), but for learning how to choose and set them up right.

My final advice is – use only those keywords that reflect the true content of your site. Inserting simply most searched keywords and phrases may be tempting, but this will most likely lead you to being banned by search engines.

That was the basic information needed for choosing the right keywords for your site. But this is just the first step. In further posts you will find tips on how to optimize your site content, what practices to avoid, where to submit your site for search engines indexation and many more useful things.

I look forward to reading your comments!

Best wishes,
Irene

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  SkaDate dating 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 dating script 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 social networking/dating 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 community software 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 dating script 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 Team did their 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

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.

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.

At the very beginning, you need to decide who your target audience is. Believe me, this is a crucial moment, all your future actions in site promotion will be based on this thing. It is not the best idea to create just a generic dating site since too many exist already; it is much more effective concentrate promotion among specific group of people, let’s say rock music lovers. Makes sense? You may take into consideration geographical location where you are going to launch your site. It is more reasonable to target the audience from one specific place, start from one city rather then from the whole world. After becoming popular in one city you may move from one to another.

Next thing: we would strongly suggest you to register on famous dating sites to compare them with the one you have. You may get ideas in forums while participating in different discussion boards. Using these resources try to figure out what people expect from a modern dating site? All the information will give you tons of insight and may very well change your business plan.
Writing is one of the keys for success. Submit press releases and different articles about your new site to special directories, social networking, and blogs. This is called “article marketing”. You can create your own blog, too, and write about your products, become an expert in some topic, people will trust you and read your posts, then add the link to your site in all places you participate and to all emails you are sending. In addition, you can use YouTube site for submitting video about your site and services.

Many other techniques can be applied. Educate yourself on Search Engine Optimization; good news is much information can be found on the Internet. Learn about pay-per-click ads and Google Advertising Programs, search for more products specially created for web site marketing.
So, let’s conclude everything that we covered :

1) Decide who your target audience is.
2) Make comparative analysis: visit famous dating sites, see what they offer, come up with new ideas on the base of what you’ve learned.
3) Participate in different dating forums, communicate with people who date online.
4) Article marketing: press releases, articles, blog posts. Write about your services. Add links to your site in your posts and signatures.
6) Educate yourself in search engine optimization. Learn more about web site marketing products.

You are always welcome to share your thoughts about everything that was written here. Feel free to leave your comments about how you use any of the above techniques.We will supplement this blog with more materials about online marketing as time goes.

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?

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!

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.

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