Tired of spending £’s advertising your dating site and producing no return? Why not try focussing on a more area specific nich dating site. I find these sites convert far better than large generic dating sites and you don’t have to compete with the ‘big boys’ like Match or Eharmony with big advertising budgets.

A good example of a regional dating site is Dating in London. This local dating site caters for residents of London only and if you look at the figures they claim to have over 115,000 members, not shabby hu?

Although London is not really whay I would call a ‘micro niche’ (a small niche where clicks are cheaper and search competition is lower), it’s a good example of a niche dating site that works well. If you are not comfortable tackling such a broad area with as much competition as London why not try focusing on a smaller area within a larger city? You wont find the same search volume but as a novice at SEO or PPC you should find its an easy way to dip your toe into promoting niche dating with a small budget. Once you have cracked the smaller areas you can either “rinse and repeat” until you have covered you whole target area or gear yourself up to tackle a bigger niche. You’ll seen be ready to take the big boys on!

Ask any affiliate and they will tell you that online dating is one of the most lucrative niches as well as one of the toughest to crack. With high CPC (costs per click) if you are running paid adverts and high competition for you SEO guys. I will tell you how to start making money through online dating whether you are an experienced online marketer or new-comer.

So how can I make money?

If you look at the online dating market , it is dominated by a few big players. Globally there are several main operators who dominate the market in most countries. These can be split into free dating sites and paid. As an affiliate or someone looking to launch their own dating site these markets will be tough to break into. What you can do is to split the market into niches. These include country specific dating sites where the main players don’t have a presence or targeting smaller areas like towns within a country. These ‘local’ type dating sites tend to convert better than the more generic larger sites. Another method which I personally use to make money is by splitting your market into smaller niches. Again, niche dating sites generally convert better.

What is a niche?

A niche dating site is any dating site that caters for a specific interest, characteristic or status. Some good examples of niche dating sites would include:

• Dating for fat people otherwise known as BBW dating
• Dating for disabled people
• Dating for people of a particular religious faith such as Christian dating

How can I set up a niche dating site?

There are generally two approaches to this. Either by joining an affiliate programme by an existing niche dating site or by starting your own through what we call a white-label provider. These white-label providers provide the back-end, existing customer database, payment processing etc. All you do is provide the design, domain and marketing in exchange for a share of the profits. Personally I prefer the white-label option. Once you find a good white-label partner you will learn to scale your operation quickly.

How to promote your site

The options are endless. For volume many people opt for paid advertising such as Google AdWords or Facebook Ads. This can become expensive but the costs per click will generally be cheaper for niche dating terms. I will do a detailed post on PPC advertising at a later date. Another popular option is SEO (search engine optimisation). Again, your target keywords will generally be less competitive to rank for than more generic terms like ‘online dating’. The downside to this is volume. There will usually be less searches per month for lower completion keywords. You can compensate for this by increasing your dating portfolio. There are lots of other promotion techniques such as social media campaigns, fan pages, media buys on related websites and off-line advertising. Off-line advertising works particularly well for local dating sites. For example if you had a dating site aimed at singles in London you could by ad space on local newspapers relevant to the city of London.

That’s all for this post. Its only intended as a primer for the online dating business. I will be adding articles where I will be expanding on various topics I have already mentioned, stay tuned.