Making money online: irish online dating
Making money with Irish dating online
After a recent post in one of the blogs that I read often it got me inspired, even watching Markus the guy from plentyoffish.com and what he said about niche dating, there is piles of opportunity out there to still create great money from the online dating game.
Although Irish dating may not be the niche that some have thought of, usually when think of niches you think about Latino gay dating or African American dating in Florida, my niche is Irish. I sat down and looked through all the top search results for the term Irish dating and there was no definitive site that I could say, yes, that is the market leader for dating in Ireland, plentyoffish does have a few thousand Irish profiles but when you check the search term for “Irish dating” on the Google keyword tool you realise that with over 5000 searches for this term a month the potential is there to make some real money.
With a decent website that has some great promotions and nice back links you could easily pull 10k+ hits a month to such a website from the search engines alone. Of course with such a great product, lets not underestimate the viral element where the community could potentially adopt such a website and make it their own.
The business model
How will I make money from this, of course the website will be 100% free and run as an ad supported website, the website will be limited to over 18’s which means people with money to spend and access to credit cards, research has shown that the major social networks are finding it hard to convert their website traffic into a revenue source, but the problem with these social networks such as bebo, facebook and myspace is that most of the profiles are junk teenage profiles with little or no spending power as they done own credit or debit cards therefore they will fall into less demographics that advertisers are targeting. Of course targeting kids and teenagers has been a massive business for many years but for the creation of leads online am not so sure.
Adsense is the business model I will be choosing, of course this means keeping a tight grip on what content will be displayed on the website, meaning non nude profiles only, any naked or pornographic pictures must be removed or I will be breaking the google terms of service. Once the site does race to a level that I never thought was possible advertisers will come looking for me, well that is the hope anyway. Like other websites I will not be dabbling in the sex finding market, this will be a fun and almost family friendly website, I’ll leave the nympho matching to a host of advertiser who I will test individually and see what the returns are like.
Adsense is supposed to be advertisements for content, this limiteds what we can sell on other pages as the content on dating website can be seen to be just the profiles and the search/listings page, we also have signup pages, about us pages, terms of service pages etc etc, other advertisers allow you to display their ads on these pages so it will be a mixture of both adsense and others which I have signed up for.
The website
The website I am going to use is custom built in CakePHP. There are tones of websites out there offering to sell you the best dating script with the most features but I’m a believer in KISS which stands for keep it simple stupid. Having a bloated website with every feature you could think of will mean the user gets caught up in pages and pages of information when really they just want to find someone to have fun with and maybe an intimate relationship with.
The first feature I have built is to do with the login and logout procedures, I read over a few tutorials on access control in cake and found one that seemed simple and which I could build on at a later date which is very important. The next item I done was to define what columns I would need in the database, I looked round other dating sites for what information people searched for and I drew up a list of 15 things, I included these along with a column for the login/email/password plus a column for a biography. These items are listed below.
Hair color
Height
Religion
Star sign
Do you have children
Do you want children
Do you drink?
Do you do drugs?
Do you own a car
Marital status
Education level
Job
What are you seeking?
What are you seeking the person for
The next part of the website that I built was the messaging system which is just like memo between to people or a private messages where they can arrange meet ups and dates. Next item on the list was the views page where I listed every one of the people in the target age range by county, as the site grows I hopefully will create a very advanced search which will allow people to really target the partners that they are looking for.
Future features
Some of the features I would like to include in the future but just don’t have the time at the minute would be things like personality tests which all the major dating websites have, I don’t believe in them personally but am sure they are just for fun.
Another feature which I would build using AJAX to allow in the browser chatting with no need for flash or a java download would be live chat with the other people that you are involved with on the website, this would not be a major features as a lot of people still prefer to use their ICQ, MSN, Jabber and yahoo instant messengers
Some of the web2 stuff would be great to interact with like using twitter from your account to have replies coming from texts or status updates.
Without over doing it there is a lot of things you can do with the website. But doing this on your is difficult and thats where other sites are lacking.
Promotion of the website
So I have my shiny new dating website online, what do I do with it and where do I go from here? Search engine optimization will always be a key part to any website but targeting the major dating keywords will be pointless if my website is based in Ireland, therefore my main keyword will be irish dating with Irish singles, dating Ireland and a few others. Building the back links will be an important thing, finding places which will link to website will always be difficult as its pretty much every man for himself and linking to other websites would be seen as helping the competition.
Adwords will be my main source of advertising and the great thing about this is that you can direct every surfer you get from adwords straight onto your registration page and with a great registration page my signup rate will fly through the roof.
Targeting keywords on adwords will be difficult as I’m not willing pay more than $0.05 a click limited me to certain keywords, but my test is going to be the towns and villages of Ireland! Im going to target every villages and town that I now off, I might even get a map out and target every place on the map. Filtering the traffic will be done through the ad, everyone’s up for a bit of a fling especially the Irish and hitting the registration pages straight away will show this, plus we can target by country which is a great feature which targets the ads based on the surfers IP address.
When getting $0.05 a click and spending a hundred dollars this works out at 2000 clicks onto the website and with an optimistic conversion rate of 25clicks:1signup this means I will have 80 members for every 100 dollars spent which isn’t great but will give me instant recognition and will be aided by my own SEO work and offline promotion
But this does mean with and Adwords campaign at 25 clicks per signup would mean our cost per acquisition would be $1.25 and you have to realize will we be able to make $1.25 back from each user? This is a tough decision to go with! But really without a few major ads in local newspapers I cant see any other option
