I think I would like to start a dating site in a select niche as I think I saw a gap in the market for an ALL FREE site. I'd like to hear some expertise from dating site owners such as how long it took you to get 20k+ pageviews a day, how you actually advertise it? Is most of the traffic coming from Google? I looked up some search terms using Google trends but even the word 'dating' doesn't get that many hits daily, so what would be a different way of looking at the keywords someone would type in? I've developed lots of sites before but this niche seems to be giving me headaches now that I want to find some good keywords. Say for example the site is focused around "black dating". Sure, most people would search for that term alone, but what others would there be? Things like "meet black girl" or "find black girl"? I don't understand how this works as I've never used these dating sites. Anyways, I think I'm more into this for experience rather than money alone so I think that's important in a website's success. I've developed lots of other sites and currently earning $70+/ day from a combination so we could help each other as I'm not a complete newbie; I'd just like a bump start into developing such a site where the actual members make the content and website worthy.
GAP in the market? Are you kidding... It is not a GAP...After plentyoffish got popular, every niche has been filled by big and small players alike.... ALL FREE is hardly a Gap.. I am not being cynical, but just saying that what you are saying is not actually a gap.. A Gap is when there is no one serving a Niche.. I mean when you start seeing free scripts for a particular app, that area is finished... But if your ambition is 20,000 PV, it is be achievable.. because there are many affiliate marketers that does much more than that using Landing Pages.. I have 5-6K PV on a site attracting visitors looking for dating.... I sell then dating ebooks.. No memberships
I have owned and operated 2 dating sites in the last couple of years, to be honest they were not really a success for me. The biggest problem was gaining enough traffic for them to be viable, up against the free biggies (plentyoffish etc) its very hard to gain ground. Whilst I had considered the traffic problem before running the sites, I had not considered the number of fraudulent paid sign ups once I was getting traffic, I was having to refund (or PayPal did it for me) around 50% of all paid memberships as they were either fraudulent, or the user had used the site for what they wanted, then did a chargeback and got their money back. Adsense and affiliates didn't prove great either, even when traffic was reasonable. For what its worth, I wouldn't run another dating site as it was too much time (and trouble) for too little return, however the experience of others will be different and there are a few who make a very good living from dating sites so don't be put off, if you work hard and make all the right moves you may do OK. Good luck.
Everyone has had similar experience as Wayner there.. I mean 20 PV is hardly anything for a proper dating site and will make you little money from Adsense or adsense.. You need hundreds of thousands of visitors... My example was of content sites sucking people looking for Dating.. If you have extra time and effort, you have a great start at your sig.. I would make it in to a general papers site and you can serve papers of EVERY competitive or Certification exam in the world... Maybe create more niche sites like MSCE papers, GRE papers etc and link to the mother site... What I am saying is Dating is already beaten to death. Sorry for discouraging you..
Right, thanks for the feedback. Blogspotter, it is not necessarily a gap but when searching for the main keywords I would use for that niche, all the top 5 sites were not completely free. Sure, plentyoffish is a great alternative but it doesn't even come on the front page. So the reason I said a gap in the market is that after registering to a few of these sites for which you had to pay to send messages, I felt that a lot of the members would benefit more from an 100% free site. Thanks Wayner, I didn't even consider the fact that the customers could do chargebacks after getting the details of a certain member. However, this doesn't apply as I am looking to make the site free. Did you use social bookmarking or social networks advertising and link building for most of your traffic or you ranked well for the search terms in Google? Thanks for the advice nonetheless. EDIT: Blogspotter second response: It's actually good that you're saying this as I'm sure you're more experienced than me so it's good getting some expertise. Hundreds of thousands of visitors could indeed be a problem as I'm not even sure where I would get the visitors from at the moment, other than rank well in Google, using white hat techniques which I'm not bad at.
I have a 100% free datingsite and it is doing fine actually. Thing is; ads make very little without *immense* traffic, so making money is a problem. And if you do not like to hear crap from really stupid people all day, you wont like running that without getting serious income out of it
So what do you think are your main sources of traffic generation, if you don't mind me asking? Hearing crap from people? You mean getting e-mails or complaints? Think I could get used to that as I always try my best to rectify things.
usually a free dating website it's free of spammers...i have some dating sites and it's hard to manage this problem.. so introducing payment..will make the users fell more secure in online dating
Yes, that could be a problem I guess.. but there are other ways of ensuring security other than making them pay for contacting a member.. I think .
Sounds like hard work and late nights for minimal profit. That's a bit like trying to start a new niche in the lawn mowing or yard care market when there are fleets of lawn maintenance companies blanketing the streets. One thing about gaps these days, the gaps are smaller, and smaller, and smaller. GAP has a new meaning these days. Years back, a GAP was an opening that you could walk through. Later, a GAP became a gap. Now, it's more like a slit or tiny crevice. A microscopic fissure.