How to make a profitable dating site

Hi,

I have a small spanish dating site with a nice domain, which I haven't pay much attention in several month but it still have some life and about 1000 users.

The design and code was made from scratch last year but now I think it's time to re-do the whole site with a newer, fresher and lighter design and code.

I'm thinking if I should still keep it free and throw some adsense ads or make it premium...

The redesign will cost me a couple hundred dollars... what do you guys think?

Free?
Paid?
Freemium?

 

i would keep it free ... and let it grow ..

 

Let it grow then once there is more then 5,000 start paid memberships

 

I would keep it free for a while until it grows a bit bigger

 

I say leave it alone. It's not broken, so don't fix it. Throw up some Adsense or other publisher ads, and make your money that way for now. Once you've gotten a larger member base, convert to some type of premium membership.

 

I agree 100% with this. Nobody wants to pay for a dating site when there is only 1,000 other members spread across an entire country. Also, many of these 1,000 members may never come back again. You should try to build a solid base of at least 10,000 active members. Then you can introduce some small fees for premium membership features. You will inevitably loose some members, but as long as the fee is small it should not hurt you too much.

If 5,000 members were paying just $5.00/month, that's $25,000 a month you would be making. Wow! I'm getting excited just typing those numbers. You could reinvest some of that into advertising, and live comfortably off the rest.

All the best!

 

Well my advice for you is to use SEO instead of adsense or adwork or any other related services. Cause SEO work will be benefit your website more then any advertisement things.

 

Thanks guys for the help! I will keep it free and run some ads later when the traffic grows... I think I will do a small redesign to a lighter version and more SEO friendly because when i was building this 2 years ago I didnt know much about this "SEO" thing that everyone talks about here now hehe.

i didnt even realize the importance of being featured by major tech blogs and newspapers!

 

i`m getting into an affiliate partnership in dating sites, from my point of view you can make a lot of money from charging membership fees even 1$ per a day.

 

i would build up your database then once you start charging mabey offer a 14 days free trial offer then do something like 4.99 per month. People like free things and most of them forget to cancel.

 

I'd keep it free until around 10,000 - 15,000 members then charge a fee for a upgraded account. A lot of those 10k-15k members will not even be active... you need to remember that.There are so many very large sites to compete with. You need to offer something. The free membership is one thing.

 

I'd keep it free for the whole time. Look at the site PlentyofFish.com. It's a FREE dating site that gets TONS of traffic and makes millions a year from adsense alone! Think big and start promoting it!

 

offer good service, SEO the site to have traffics and make it user friendly. Also offer free registration and some free stuff to attract users. People like FREE.

 

Plenty of Fish is indeed a remarkable success story. It's huge success, however, was largely due to the fact that it was one of the very first totally free dating sites. Now there are tens of thousands of totally free dating sites, all trying to compete for the "free dating" market.

If you aren't already making thousands of dollars a month, it's extremely difficult to compete with these huge dating sites (like Plenty of Fish). They spend thousands and thousands of dollars a month just on SEO and advertising. Yes buying links is bad, but paying an SEO company a few thousand dollars a month to acquire you quality and relevant one-way links is still totally legit. So how does the little guy compete?

I woud start charging a small fee after about 10,000 active members, and then reinvest all this money into paying a SEO company to help. Waiting to make it big off adsense could take you years and years without any guarantees.

 

I'd think that having a 'spanish' dating site with a good domain name makes this a pretty valuable commodity for adsense. Just my 2cents but I'm no expert in creating a dating website.

I would be weary of hiring an SEO company though... You can do most of that yourself as it's really just link building. Maybe hire someone to write a few good Press releases and submit to PRWeb and you'll get laughing.

 

You guys are right about every time there are more and more FREE dating sites. However if you start focusing in a target that has not been exploited in your city that's something good. For instance in you live in California a create a dating sites for Spanish people, there are not to many Spanish dating sites out there, you can start building a local Spanish dating site step by step, that's how Plentyoffish.com start doing his. The go to the next step, and so on.

 

The biggest thing to mention about these dating sites is that the number of users seems to matter more than anything, even the domain name or niche. If people see a small number of active users or very in-active current ones, they won't join. That's why it's best to keep it free until it really picks up.

 

"Freemium". Offer free accounts and then added bonuses if they upgrade to premium (more pictures, featured profile etc)

 

I'm all for finding a desireable niche. However, you need to use a variety of "key word" research tools to see if this niche will pay off. SEO (Search Engine Optimization) begins with finding the right keywords that you will optimize your site for. You need to pick keywords that get searched for a lot and don't have too much competition.

If you spend six months getting to the top for keywords that only send you a few visitors a day, most of your hard work will have been in vain.

 

Focusing on small targeted keywords, yes they are going to bring you low traffic. But because they are small targeted keywords, you won't need to spend to much time to get number one on Google and to start getting traffic. You can do several small targeted keywords for a few days and gain a top SERP, and then focus your attention right away to more heavy keywords. Now if you plan to expend all your time in small keywords, that's a no no.

My idea is this, you cannot go for instance for the Keyword Houston Dating which is a high traffic keyword and it will be hard to get if you focus on that one. What you can do is focus at the beginning with low targeted keyword like Houston Free Dating and build small traffic, momentum, and audience. Then, you will shift to Houston Dating.

Again you can not start at the top, because it will be more disappointed if you not get traffic right away.