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PlentyofFish - How to Start Your Own Dating Site

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Plenty of Fish?
Plenty of Fish or plenty of people trying to do the same thing? Adult Dating Services - a lucrative home-based business or just another get-rich-quick scheme?

They say over a third of all people on the net are single. "Beauty!" you say "I'll start a dating site!" PlentyofFish founder Markus Frind is raking in over $10,000 a day from Google Adsense alone. And he's running the business on his own from his apartment. But is it as easy as all that?

PlentyofFish Start Up Costs?

Well obviously you're going to need a Domain name and a site - probably a hosted site to begin with - until you reach 10 Million Hits a Day like Marcus Frind's PlentyofFish Dating Site. You can register a Domain Name for less than ten bucks but you might want to protect your details so that'll add another ten bucks a year. Then you'll want Web hosting for around $10 per month. You can get some very good template designs from a hosted service that allows you to tweak the template - like this one I'm on - Squarespace. Click the button on the Navigation Column to the left and they'll give you a month's free trial - without even taking your credit card details. They're a good mob this one. I've been with them over two years. And here's the thing - the Search Engines love them - you'll get crawled by the spiders within hours of setting up your site. Some people wait months for Google to take notice and list them. Not with Squarespace.

So How Do You Make Money From a Dating Site Like PlentyofFish?

Possibly the easiest way is just to put some Google Adsense on your pages. But you can also make decent money from affiliate programs as well. You can always join a big dating affiliate program like Cashring or even set up your own dating site through them - "Our members get laid, our affiliates get paid". Cashring has over 4 million members worldwide. They supply the banners and marketing tools like link generators enabling you to create links for specific niche groups. This allows you to target search terms with less competition. Targeting a specific niche produces better conversion ratios. You get paid a commission every time a free member decides to purchase a premium membership.

Once you've set up your site you'll need traffic. Lots of it. And therein is the biggest problem - how to drive traffic to your site - how to get noticed. One of the best sources of free Organic traffic is search engines. You're going to need to know something about search engine optimization. Read Boost Your Google Ranking for starters.

Pay Per Click Programs on PlentyofFish

Markus Frind doesn't use any Pay-Per-Click advertising. He's built his business from word-of-mouth, organic searches and plenty of free publicity through magazine, radio and televisions stories on him. But you may have to use some pay-per-click to get your site up and running. You do this with pay-per-click search engine ads with keywords in the headline. They can be used to complement your other marketing or as a unique strategy. It can be costly but is a quick way of getting traffic to a brand new site. Especially if Google is ignoring your new site (because you didn't host it on Squarespace). Google AdWords is the main player in pay-per-click advertising and they have really good tutorials to get you started. The secret is to use Niche keywords that don't have much competition and are cheaper to bid on. And then you use arbitrage techniques - it costs you ten cents to attract the customer but he clicks on an ad that pays twenty five cents so you make fifteen cents.

Powering Up Your Dating Website

Search Engines love good content. You can get Dating Website Software to establish your home-based dating site but to make it more attractive and relevant to the search engines you might like to add some resources and a blog. There's plenty of stuff to write about. A good one is always stories about how people met through a dating site and ended up getting married and living happily ever after. But you could also cover issues like Gay Dating, Dating for Seniors, Dating for People with Disabilities, Dating for Herpes Sufferers - that kind of thing. Another article could be on How to Make the First Contact - covering pretty important personal safety issues.

Marcus Frind's free dating site PlentyofFish has rapidly become the #1 Free Dating Site because of the way he's set it up. He doesn't just let you register and find your own date - although you can do that if you want. He actually matches you up with people. He's built his own unique and sophisticated algorithms (he's a computer programmer and mathematical genius).

I've invented stuff like multi-dimensional wheel sieve. I create very advanced algorithms. The more you search and the more you use the site, the more it limits your view of the people you see. So if you only message smokers, then it doesn't matter what pages you're on, you're only going to see smokers. It generates a database on the site that's built around your preferences, which is something that no other dating site is capable of doing yet. It's technically not feasible for them at least using known algorithms. I invented algorithms that no one else thought were feasible. What you say you want and what you actually want are two different things. It hardly ever corresponds on a dating site. So I just track a user and see what they're actually doing on the site and then show them matches based on their actual surfing preferences. My site is deceptively simple but no one knows just how complex it is under the surface.

And the other thing PlentyofFish does is regularly email you. Like this - "View your latest matches here **********
Plentyoffish.com is larger than all other free dating sites combined!

1. You can now easily check your messages via a cell phone.
2. Latest signups -- > ********
3. Users online in your city -- > ********
4. If you have found your match you can delete your account in the help menu.
5. Read your new emails here --> *******
6. Who checked out your profile? -->*******
7. Compatibility Test to Measure Chemistry --> *******"

Obviously this helps maintain PlentyofFish's spectacularly high website traffic of 10 Million Hits a Day. And as Markus himself says "With that kind of traffic I could be selling dogfood off the site and still be making money".

So there you have it - How to Start Your Own Dating Site Just don't call it PlentyofFish

Posted on Friday, November 30, 2007 at 08:13AM by Registered CommenterMalcolm Lambe | Comments2 Comments

Reader Comments (2)

This is all very well, but obviously noone is going to be able to build a site to compete with plentyoffish. A better bet is to partner with a company which will provide you with a feature rich site, share the member database (no need to spend long time building to a critical mass before you can start charging) and completely cut overheads of developements, hosting, maintenance and custom support.
http://world-dating-partners.com a site I am involved in out performs any other with more features for the users, and more options for the site owners.
December 3, 2007 | Unregistered CommenterTim
There are a few up and coming new dating sites that are stating to get noticed. Its prolly really hard for them to compete against a cool domain name like pof.com , good catchy..and easy to remember. If you want another free and easy to use site, you can check out keystrokedating.com . Cool name, and the stroke does not pertain to stroking anything but keys on a keyboard, lol. I was on there and have been watching it grow since there was only 15 members. I think its around a few hundred now. Very new site, has a ways to go to catch up to any of the big guys like Plenty Of Fish. I love dating sites though, except eharmony. Tired of those dam comercials running so much on the space channel here in Canada. Cut em back a bit, will ya, lol. One thing I never understood is sharing video? Or maybe I'm just not ready for that just yet. I would feel like I am really trying to sell myself like a product, hehe. Anyways, thats just me. ;) With me, I am lucky to be right one out of ten times, lol. K, I'm out before I take up a whole page here. Sorry admin, lol.
January 7, 2009 | Unregistered CommenterGreg

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