Best website money making ideas for $2000?

Just Adwords on the dating sites.

When you say CPA/Afilliate marketing, you're just talking about a comparison site and filling it with offers? I'm open to that, but I can't see how to set that up with wordpress, I don't see how you get the offers actually into the site? or do you have to add them manually?

 

I advise you to start with the basics step by step explanations you can find over on the Internet and on the forums like AffiliateFix or BHW.

 

BEFORE YOU SPEND A DOLLAR....READ

Save the money until you KNOW what you need it for. Don't just come up with a reason to use it.

Creating a dating web site is a HORRIBLE idea. The only major players that make it today pump millions in to massive advertising just to roll the dice to try to steal a sliver of the pie from from Match.com, eHarmony, POF and the other Walmart of dating sites.

Look at it this way.... If you signed up 300 people every day for a year you would have over 100k members. Seems like it would be a lot of members, right? Wrong. You still wouldn't have enough people with in a 10 mile radius to keep anyone from canceling. Keep in mind you need at least dozens of blondes, brunettes, red heads, Caucasians, asians, african americans, hispanics, straights, gays, bis, etc. of various proportions, class, and styles per every couple miles of earth to retain each sign up for a couple weeks. If that doesn't scare you, you are either unrealistic, stupid or have hell of a lot more than just $2k.

The best thing you can do is use a very small portion of your mothers money for Web hosting, domains and perhaps a couple books or pieces of inexpensive software to take you to that next level. When you finally do have a web site worth visiting you won't have to come to Digital Point to ask a bunch of people who don't have $20 to their name for financial advice.

 

I appreciate the the advice. Few things though, I didn't come here for financial advice, just whether my idea of setting up a dating website was a good idea or not, and to see what the alternatives could be, it was more business advice than anything else. 2nd, I get what you're saying about dating sites, but wouldn't that apply to a general dating site? and not one which was more specific/niche? Of course I would never set up a dating site to compete with match.com etc, that would be like trying to set up a site to compete with Facebook , but if you keep it niche (very niche) then I'm hoping people would have a real reason to use it. Anyway I've decided to try a few ideas and spend a much smaller amount of the $2000 on seeing if they can go anywhere, mostly though my own hard work of building up the sites myself (articles etc), and that's something posting here has taught me, so I'm grateful for all the advice that has been given.

 

Actually you would have less audience to market to which means your battle to acquire local members all over the world would be quite a tedious task. What I originally said pertaining to 300 registrations a day failing still applies. Would you keep a membership to a dating web site that had only 15 people in your area who all matched a different criteria of what you're seeking?

Don't create a dating web site.

 

Does your argument still apply to a dating site that is just based on one place?

 

It's not an argument. This is my advice based off from personally starting a dating & social networking web site. My social networking web site achieved hundreds of thousands of members until it was infested by spammers/scammers and swallowed up by MySpace in that era. I invested a lot of money in to it. My dating web sites have always been for niche markets targeting a certain race, religion, interest or even local area. Each dating site I launched I was able to acquire members but never retained them. You still lose out to those monster dating sites because at any given moment if you want to find a christian athletic blonde ASIAN girl in dallas texas you will find dozens of them a short 5 mins away. Launching AthleticChristianBlondeAsianDatingInDallasTexas.com still would be too much of a challenge.

If you add up how much money and profit I pissed away trying to make these sites work over the years I have probably spent over $80k. The revenue that is generated from Adsense Ads and Upgraded Memberships are minimal. I think per 1,000 ad impressions I was making less than a dime and my average retained customer lasted 2 weeks on my social networking web site. It was less on the dating sites. And the work load was immense. I would literally receive alerts on my blackberry 24/7 and I would constantly wake up in the middle of the night to tend to issues. As for upgraded accounts you have to give them a reason to want to spend even a dollar on your site. Usually that reason is for extended functionality to find or interact with people they are seeking. They won't spend it unless your site is wildly successful in their local area.

So while you may look as my post as someone with an "argument"... My opinion is something you don't want to hear. I am speaking from personal experience. There are a LOT better ways to spend your $2k. The last thing I want you to do is to start this money/time pit leaving you with 0 dollars and regret. But do what you want...

 

ps. if you were to tell me you already had a dating web site built around a unique concept and two million dollars for marketing I would still tell you it's rolling the dice. At lease then you would have a realistic chance of making it work.

 

Thanks again for the advice. I totally appreciate what you're saying to me and thank you for trying to warn me so I don't waste money! Part of the reason I posted on here was precisely that kind of advice. I'm still going to go ahead and setup a local based dating site, but I'm not going to spending anywhere near my original budget on it, I'm going to be setting it up for as cheap as possible, and then just seeing (and learning as I go) how it develops (or doesn't). That seems to be the main advice anyway, which is don't go big, but rather start as cheaply as possible and see if you can make something happen without really spending any money, so that's basically the plan. I don't envisage a dating site making much from ads, I suspect a website like okcupid probably still makes more from the limited number of subscriptions then it does from its ads, but of course you're right, it's all about whether users think that's any real worth upgrading, if you don't offer a compelling reason then no one will upgrade.

 

OkCupid and POF are simply great success stories. What both of these sites have in common is they started their journey when dating web sites were new and the monster sites were charging an arm and a leg. The times have shifted...they are both household names and don't need to advertise (though they do massively) to acquire new registrations.

Look at Tinder... All Tinder did was bring back an old concept (Hot Or Not) and turn it into a Mobile App and used FaceBook to see their success. They also had financial support from investors too.

If I was to do the social networking thing all over again (and I don't plan on it) I would utilize FaceBook/Twitter/Instagram and create the platform for Android and IOS.

You should advance your programming and web development skills and create a product that companies or individuals can benefit from. Find a problem in todays world and create a solution. The product I created and saw the most success with was something I could have made with $100 ($8 domain. $6 mo hosting.). I took a few short cuts and spent money on buying databases and libraries that already existed and probably spent under $1,000. The final product I was able to lease to car dealers for $499/month. I then paired up with a marketing company and started offering social media services to dealerships at $299/mo. I actually outsource and pay out $75/mo per account to post content on dealers FB walls. I found those people through Digital point. My Social Networking & Dating web sites never gave me that sort of return and ate up ALL of my time.

 

Sounds like you got a great situation going there , the dating site was just one idea I had, I'm actually a game developer by trade (mostly web games, but lately iOS) and I have some ideas in that area as well (services to game devs), which I'm going to try out as well. I'm going to spend some time learning iOS app development (whole other ball game game compared to game dev) precisely so I can create some of those types of apps you mentioned . I'm all for creating services for businesses though ,it's just finding the time to do all this!

 

First of all. Great advice from the others.
I´ll give you my 2 cents here on your questions
If it is worth making dating websites, is it better to concentrate on one website? or try to have a number of them?

• Take one at the time. And when you get traffic to your site, you can create more sites. Dating is a evergreen niche. You can build a big responsive list, and people who wants to know a lot about dating. Very good choice to start out with.

Everyone says make your dating website niche, but all the niches seem to be taken, is it worth going for a small niche?

• If you have the right way to promote and monetize a dating site, you do not have to think about competition. There are so many subniches in the dating niche, so you´ll always have something to provide your readers with.

What are the single most important aspects of promoting a dating website? is it all about getting the attractive people on there?

• Is it a dating site where people will meet and get a date or is it a site with content and products to buy?
  
  
• You do not need to go after the attractive people. Dating is for all people. You need to attract people who want to learn how to meet the right person, give them dating advice ect. Of course there are other aspects in it depending on what site you have.

How important is SEO?

• Forget about SEO if you want fast results, that comes back to you month after month. Google might turn on you and destroy your rankings and traffic from one day to another. SEO is not dead, but it takes time and is trial and error, you´ll never know if your work sends you in the top of the search engines or brings you no where, especially when you are new.

Is it worth spending money on a SEO expert to handle that side of things?

• If you have a big marketing budget you could do it, but again do not rely on that, when you are new. There are easier ways where you can get traffic for free in literally 15 minutes and get ranked as well on Google.

Is it worth spending money on ads on other sites to advertise the dating websites?

• Don´t spend money on ads. There are more effective ways to do it and for free and even faster within an hour or less you can see rankings with these methods.

Are the dating websites just a bad idea for the $2000, and there are better website ideas to generate an income?

• Dating websites are good and the same is MMO, Health and Sports niches. If you show your visitors How To do something they´ll love you.
  
  
• Do not spend all that money on one website. Buy a domain name, you can get a .com domain name for 1-3 dollars with coupons, and you can get hosting for a penny the 1st month on Hostgator.

Then invest in a autoresponder Aweber or Get Response to collect emails.
You can also use a free Blogger.com or Weebly blog and listwire as autoresponder if you want to make money without spending anything.

From there on you should/could use the fastest free way to generate 10.000´s of visitors per month with free Facebook advertising, you can rank sites and even product links in 15 minutes if you know how to do it. I use that traffic method every day, and it works great and every time.

FB is the real deal for free viral traffic in my opinion… your posts and links goes viral in minutes if done correctly. I get 10.000s of targeted traffic for free in 15 minutes with that method.

http://internetmarketingblog4noobs.blogspot.com/2014/07/how-to-get-10000s-of-targeted-traffic.html

You´ll spend some time on it but you invested $6 your first month.. then you have $1994 back for other projects.

 

I could look over your site, niche and proffer advice on what you are doing wrong,
what you need to do and where to inject the funds.

In most cases, where people fail in IM is the traffic generation area and how to convert the traffic.
Even if you have the most people powerful website and best product it's basically useless if no ones know about it.

 

If I were you, I would spend about $500-$1000 to follow a 1:1 course of making mone online (which course is about OR who the coach is - you should do your own diligence to know)
The remaining budget is for real action - $1000 for action is more than enough for most of method.
My philosophy: Without knowledge, you will soon end up burning this $2000, learning some basic lessons that you can easily learn with a far lower price.
Good luck!

 

I wonder if you already have taken the idea of blogging. Blogging will last and is a decent way to make money online, and it does not need to much money to invest. If you know not about blogging, try to search how it works.

 

Affiliating is good option. Otherwise own brand / business will be hard with only $2000.

 

Quite Yes to both questions.
The dating boom era has past and it's quite hard to make a new site and make some money. That that you can't do it, but the market is full with dating sites - so quite hard to make it.

 

get a big following on twitter and facebook
set up white label dating site, and push the programs that pay $75 dollars a head, then branch out to gambling sites

 

I would strongly consider using the $2000 to buy you the time you need to educate yourself in what it takes to start a successful business (online or otherwise). You will increase your chances of a successful business if you read about the process others have used to get that success in the past. To that end, I would recommend putting aside as much free time that $2k will buy you and reading things like:
* The 4 hour work week
* Outliers
* The art of learning
* Any stories of successful startups, etc
If you are really serious about trying an online (or offline, even) business, you need some time to learn what steps you need to take to make a good run at it. You could also do what most of us do and fail a bunch of times before having an idea stick, but it's up to you

 

If you are interested in making money from the fastest growing free money platform “The Internet” then I advise the following:

1) To sell freelance services online. There is a good list of sites here: odesk; guru.com; elance.com

2) Affiliate Marketing (directing customers to other peoples products such as online ebooks or services and getting comission from the sale)
Making a "mailing list" and sending them sales emails (you make them buy affiliated product and you get paid if they buy one)

There is a good site: http://www.internetmarketingmillions.net

3) If you ARE serious about making money online. Then there are thousands of methods, it's best to pick - just one, master that method.. either scale it or move onto the next thing.
I'd suggest definitely getting a website: http://freesoftwareguru.com/isf/optin.php