How To Start A Website With A Community?

Hello, I want to start a new project. I want to build a dating site like Fling.com or FriendFinder.com but my main question is how do you start the community?

I mean, anyone is going to register in a website without users. So, how do you get the first users of your community in order to attract more users in the way?

Do you have to create fake profiles? Or pay for people to join to your website?

It would be really good if you can help to figure out this.

Thank you

 

You have to create fake profiles in order to seem like there is traffic. Either that or you pay people to make a profiles. Making a community from scratch is tough and you need to spend hours talking with yourself on the forums.

 

Never create fake profiles. Run competitions or something, if you have a forum you could use a forum promotion website.

 

I'd pay some people to post / create fake profiles. If you don't then it will take you forever to get anywhere. How are you going to run competitions when all your users bounce because you have zero content??

Building community websites are one of the hardest projects to undertake, and usually require more time and hard work to get going. If you're the sort of person that goes from 1 project to another quite easily then I wouldn't bother. I'm guessing that a decent community takes 12-24 months+ to get traction (maybe less if you really know what you're doing).

 

I think it was Mark Zuckerberg who said there is no way of builde a community the only thing to do is find a community and give it a website to come together and interact. This is the key point of building any social network or site. Also in this niche you will need plenty of ads to compete to the big players in the industry.

 

Fake profiles is the way to solve this problem.

 

I don't think that the fake profiles can solve the problem in the long run. You should rather find the unique peculiarity or feature which the users find beneficial, or at least interesting.

 

If we suppose that it is not a forum... it is like a dating site, you know, where people can meet other people to date.

 

well, again, in the long run it won't be useful, but if to start with such a strategy, it might attract more visitors. My advice - think over the unique feature, which other dating sites haven't offered yet - it would allow you to succeed

 

Stay away from FriendFinder affiliate program!!!

They will never pay you!

You will send them lots of traffic and then, once you are due a payout from all their PIDS, you will not get paid.

Instead, they will send you an email telling you that your account is banned because of fraudulent signups.

Trust me, I have been in this business for over 6 years and have a large successful social network that pays well. I have other affiliate programs that work brilliant, just stay away from FriendFinder.com affiliate program, it is a BIG scam. For more, read this thread here http://forums.digitalpoint.com/showthread.php?t=2259463

 

Have never heard of this Affiliate Program myself? But, thanks for the tip, I'll stay away from it now,for sure)

 

the easy way you can contact with colleges and school students or make pages on other social media sites like facebook twitter yahoo and you can get a good start for your website it will help you...!

 

Create fake profiles and start posting and paying others to post knowledgeable information for you. If you keep posting good info users will naturally come!

 

It shouldn't, in fact, be only informative (with interesting content). You can't but pay attention to SEO aspect to make your site more popular

 

I too have run into this problem. Just created a opinions and advice website but getting the initial users is difficult. I don't think you should have fake user accounts. What I try is to communicate with other sites. Also if you can comment on this site I recommend letting people post with out an account. Have some sort of link on the home page that broadcasts that.

 

Fake profiles do work. Spend some time chatting with youself. Sign in twice a day under 20 different accounts and create discussions. If a board is dead and there aren't recent posts, people will just cruise right by without stopping.

 

I wouldn't say that fake accounts are useless, on the contrary, they might help you attract more users to your site. On the other hand, it's mostly suitable over a short period of time in the beginning, you simply won't be able to sign in with 20 different accounts every day all the time