Everyone has a talent and our talents vary as much as the next person. For some people that talent lies in matchmaking. So why not make money out of your talent? Why not offer it to a wider spectrum and launch a dating site? When the planning is done right, these sites can be very lucrative and require minimal effort to maintain and run.
The founder and CEO of PlentyOfFish.com Marcus Frind, says that his site rakes at least 10 million dollars a year, of which half of that amount is pure profit yet he only works for an hour a day.
Here are a couple of useful strategies to make money off a matchmaking site
Find the right niche
The online dating has a lot of big players raking in the big bucks. It is a market place that is saturated and is even harder to gain traction. To be able to find the right target population one has to focus on building and marketing a site that fits their audience’s needs. It is important to note the narrower one focuses, the more limited the audience and income as well.
Decide on a business model
This can either be advertising or subscription based or a combination of the two for online dating sites. PlentyOfFish.com has attracted 30 million subscribers because it’s a free ad supported site. However it does not bring in as much money per person like a subscription based site like Match.com which has 1.3 million subscribers. If one is planning to launch a smaller site, then a subscription based site will be more profitable, though when people pay to use a site, they tend to expect more from it.
Make your algorithm just right
Most matchmaking sites ask users to fill out some questionnaires on their lifestyle, hobbies and activities. Some questionnaires are very comprehensive for example; eHarmony requires users to fill out a 400 question questionnaire on psychological profile in order to find a perfect match. It is important to consider the values that your potential audiences will be attracted to. Having determined your algorithm priorities, get a programmer to set up a perfect search tool.
Attract your customers
Everyone will go for a dating site that already has a client base. Hence it is of importance to wage a strong marketing campaign and provide attractive incentives for initial customers. Get all your friends and their friends who happen to be single to join the site. If you set up the site to be subscription based, offer discounted memberships for the first maybe 100 customers. Once the site has gained a sizeable client base, go ahead and set up a targeted advert and promote it successfully through social media sites like Facebook, Instagram and twitter.
Maintain quality control
Having an online dating site means constantly dealing with sexual predators looking to harass clients, and other people out to abuse people only. Privacy is also of importance as people will put up personal information about themselves. When setting up an online dating site it is important to allow users to flag and report others for bad behavior online and rescind membership privileges of online abusers. Since it is impossible to control what happens when matched people go out on dates, get a lawyer to set up a form of membership contract that will not hold you as the site owner liable for any terrible results arising from online matchmaking.
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