Hello Fellow DIY-ers,
I have just joined this forum after having had a site for about a week. I thought I would join the discussions because any help that can be given to me, regarding marketing these sites, would be greatly appreciated.
You must all have had the same problems. Got a great site, but nobody seems to be interested.
I realise that one must spend money to market efficiently, but to start off, to just get a few people on the site and upgraded, to take the edge off "am I doing the right thing?" questions.
Looking at the other topics on this forum and seeing things like add banners and URL's to other people's sites, to me, a newcomer at all this, you might just as well be speaking Urdu!
Any help that is forthcoming would be greatly appreciated.
Gary

Hey,

I find links on other sites work well, find sites where singles may go and try and get involved. My site is a gay-only site and I have recently got my link added on some local gay community sites and have seen quite a sudden influx of extra members.

I did also get a group of 4 people to go out on a night out in some local venues wearing t-shirts with my site name printed on them, but unfortunetly this didn't generate much extra business... I think people actually need to be infront of thier PC's when they see the advertising. Or maybe I just should have picked hotter guys? lol

I signed up to DIY Dating with no experience at all and so far have not spent any money on advertising. I just trawled the internet looking for banner exchanges and exchanged links with directories.

Considering I haven't spent anything I'm not doing so bad.

It's all been trial and error for me, try something and if that doesn't work try something else.

Having said all that, I'm always up for a bit of advice from someone that knows what they are doing

Hi there

Dont be to down hearted that you dont see results in the first weeks. Marketing doesnt have to cost money. Read DIY datings advice on marketing your site with exchange banners. If you dont know how to do this I suggest you pop down the library or book store and get a good book on HTML and CSS and learn the basics (you dont have to be a HTML expert)

Then get some analysis tools - If you dont have Firefox then install it and search for the Web development extensions that come with it, one particular good firefox extension is called 'Checky'. These contain some very good anaysis tools, and help you analyse Web page effectively and make changes if needed, though you are limited to changes in within the 'Header and Footer's' only, so really it is upto DIYDATING whether the rest of the design is acceptable for the Search engines. These can help make your site more search engine friendly giving you advice on Meta tags, Try and get your URL posted on other related sites, and with pages that are ranked in google search engines. You can tell if they are ranked by either downloading the Google toolbar for IE, or there is a plugin for Firefox that can do exactly the same job. Once you have the Toolbar navigate to different dating sites and it should tell you how highly they are ranked, The higher they are ranked and has your linking code on it... the higher you could appear in the search engine list. Try and exchange links to as many different sites as you can, especially get listed in dating directories, as these will bring you quality traffic back too.

Dont expect to be highly ranked in google overnight even if you have hundreds of links on other sites linking back to you. The Folk at google have introduced a delay, which means that newly created sites cannot suddenly zoom to the top because they have either bought hundreds of links back to their site, or found another way of doing so. Google will still spider your site and register which links are linking back to your site, but I think that period is about 8 months, if you still have those links after 8 months then you will begin to see your ranking in the SE getting higher. This is to stop sites instantly cheating there way to the top of the SE's.

These are only a few tips, there is alot more information on the Net that can advise you on Do's and Don'ts of Internet Marketing, and SEO (Search Engine Optimisation)
Here is a good Site that contains alot of information and some good analysis tools too http://www.webmaster-toolkit.com/

Hope this was of little use to you

Hello Folks,

Thanks for the advice.

However, my site is an adult site, and I think that search engines have a block on anything that might be offensive.

Although, I am not too worried about my site at DIY-dating, at the moment, I have 19 members and 3 upgrades, so I am not doing too badly considering I have only been on it for three weeks. I know it takes time for these things to come to the fore, but it will.

I read somewhere, that if a site is for adults, and might be looked at by minors, then that site is considered offensive.

I might be wrong. I have looked and looked to see where I saw that statement, but as yet, to no avail.

I know that Yahoo has this sort of block on their search engines. I also know that PayPal will not allow money to be sent for this sort of site too.

Already, I have my own dating site, but it is a cheap affair and I have about 13 members on it with no upgrades.

I have all the powers to change whatever I want on my site, but I need to learn HTML before doing so. There are one or two errors that I need to get sorted. I am trying hard to learn, but it is like learning Russian from scratch. I will get there in the end, but it will take time.

Andy, that help was very useful. Thank you. I shall bear all what you have said, in mind.

Regards to you all and may your sites boom and the money come rolling in.

Gary

Thanks Andy for that webpage link I shall now have great fun playing with it

One question folks, if you are in the middle of editing pages etc does this effect the logged in user? I have 60 users now and just managed to get 6 upgrades dont want to loose them if they cant navigate around the place when in edit mode. Any Ideas?

Cheers


Kedge

Hi,

While editing your sites inside headers/headers/footers etc the changes you make are only active after you click on the save/update button.

If you are unsure about how the changes you are making will affect your sites design then i'd suggest creating a free sub domain site to experiment on and then use the completed code on your main site.

Charles

Hi all


I have had my site for a few months now and just started off looking at link exchanges, traffic hit sites and freeads, i also have displayerd the link in my chatroom im box as an away message lol .. sneaky i know .. basically everything free i have explored which has started me off nicely, ihave now got 75 members and 13 upgrades,

have just actually given in and paid £20 for dating targetted traffic through evotraffic.co.uk as i had quite a lull in member sign ups. this is slowly paying off have had 3 upgrades last month.

Heres my story,
I have 2 sites. I almost gave up on my adult site but then realized I could possibly do more with it than I expected.

I've been trying to trade hard links, use link dumps, post in webmaster traffic exchange forums, as well as 'trying to promote' the diy partner program (with no luck). the only thing i've found that works so far is "add me" banner/link exchanges.

I find that most sites don't even give you the time of day if you aren't rated highly on google or produce atleast 1000hits a day. So it IS a waiting game..

I don't find my adult site to be a turn off, but out of over 150 clicks on a banner exchange my site only produced about 15 profiles, most of which come all at once, depending on the day... I have been changing the site alot, almost every day but I finally have it the way I like it but the only problem is in 3 months i've had about 75 users join, with only 1 upgrader!

The key to free advertising is trying to find the best search engine optimization for your site that you possibly can and hope for the best.

Hi

I'd like to add my bit because I think your all barking up the wrong tree.

I have the same site as everyone here and I've done very little to it and yet it now has 1090 users. 1 in 6.5 has upgraded. Thats in 6 months by the way.

The key is not search engines. There are hundreds of thousands of dating web sites, so the chances of getting yours into the first few pages are minus zero. It's simple not worth the effort even trying.

The real key is getting meaningful hits and by that I mean hits that originate in the UK or as a last resort USA. The reason is dead obvious when you think about it. If you get 20,000 free users from for example Tunisia, that may seem great. Trouble is, nobody in Tunisia has a credit card or for that matter the money to upgrade.

Hits from any other place other than G8 countries are a waste of bandwidth.

Try pay per click search engines. Keep the per click price to under 20p and you'll double your money. I have noticed that a few people dread the idea of paying for clicks. Why? If you spend £200 and get £400 back in two months, that's good business. A fantastic return in fact.

Try top lists but make sure they are associated to UK web sites.

Try anything from rich countries and don't waste your energy with search engines.

Hi,

You do have a valid point that profiles of people in poorer countries are a lot less lightly to upgrade.

Search engine optimization is still something we would recommend as even if you not on the first couple of pages your site will still get noticed and in most cases it’s fairly easy to do.

As for advertising your site, the pay per click do give you a lot of traffic and it’s normally from relevant searches or similar sites. There are free alternatives which work almost as well, mainly link exchanges.

Charles

Hi,

I have 2 contact sites and are both using ppc's as well as other methods.
I tried 2 different approaches with links etc to see which was the best way to go.
One site now has a Google page rank of 4 and the other site has a page rank of, er, 1
Both sites use the same keywords on index page, although worded differently and both have the same content, we all do, give or take a page or two.
The pr1 site has a pr0 on my links page but the pr4 site has a pr4 on links page. The pr4 site only has 2 links on link page and they are pr4 and pr6, whereas pr1 has more, mostly pr0's. So for those who are bothered about this then be careful who you link to as this obviously does have a big effect.

I've not received any generic hits from Google and don't even know where my sites are listed or what number they are out of 7 million pages!
Some top 5 generic results are pr0 so I don't think it really matters what pr you have, unless the 'public' have Google toolbar and think it might be better to join a pr7 site than a pr1
I used to get free hits from MSN search (UK) and still get free hits from Yahoo! but mostly foreign ones as it has picked the country names from the drop down list.

Oldie:


Why last resort? The US is a massive market, it's only the fact that because there are more profiles from UK per capita than USA that the upgrade rates are better. If everyone concentrated on US as much as UK then the results would improve over time. Once the US customer base grows to a similar percentage as UK I expect that the upgrade rates would equally grow.

Okay, it'll take time but it's worth getting a smaller ROI in the short term to get a bigger share of the market in the long term is it not?

At the time of writing in the UK there are 315,918 profiles out of a population 60,441,457 (source:www.cia.gov/cia/publications/factbook/rankorder/2119rank) and in US only 138,204 out of a population of 296,822,126 (source:www.census.gov/population/www/).
If we all spend some time on US instead of looking at it as a 'last resort' then in a year or so it will start paying off and be worth the effort.

What do others think?

Vince

The US is the biggest market, but with a big market comes more competition !

I agree that the our UK presence is greater than that of US, and this is why we have more upgrades here.

Gary

I agree, but there's no harm in that.
You just have to find the right places where to promote your site.

If you've got a good product and sell it right there's no reason why it wont take off.
It just takes a little longer that's all.

If people choose your site over other sites because they feel it offers better value and quality then they'll stick with it, if they go with it because there's not much else around then they'll be off as soon as they find something they think is better. If they're happy with what they're getting then they wont even bother looking elsewhere to start with.

All sites/databases have the same problems: too many single guys (except gay sites that is!)
The real trick is to try to concentrate on getting more girls and couples to sign up, especially the ABC1's

I don't think that there's many of us, if any at all, that would be able to pay the big advertising costs:
"Advertising on handbag.com starts at a minimum of £2,000 per month on a cpm
basis."
It would be nice to be able to afford that sort of money one day.

Has anybody got an idea on how/where to target women?
C'mon girls, what's the way to go?

Vince

I think this discussion is very interesting

I started my first Adult contact site about 6 months ago and have now been getting hits of about 300 - 400 unique visitors per day, but this has taken time to build up and is still growing - and it has a PR rating of 5. I do get alot of hits from non G8 countries. Though I get a good mix of US and UK upgrades (around 20 -30 upgrades per month)

This is the irony part. I created a New site 6 days ago - submittted to google almost straight away. I started to get hits a few hours after I created the site, and am now getting more visitors per day than my original site with a PR rating of 0, and have had 8 upgrades in less than a week of creation - to put the icing on the cake - 99% of members come from the UK or USA, which means that it is bringing high quality traffic. So where is the logic in that - maybe it is because it has taken me 6 months of experimenting with my original site to be able create a successful new site straight away - Or maybe it is just luck!

I'm already thinking of my next project.

Good luck folks!!

Andy

WOW, let me know your Google secrets Andy.
You should start your own SEO company, lol

If you've put a link on your pr5 site to your new site and a 'bot follows it, which it should if you've set things up right, then if there's enough of the right mix for their algorythms then there's no reason why it wouldn't list it straight off, although it can take up to a month or so to show 1 day is not unheard of, hard to do but not unheard of. Don't be surprised if it starts slipping soon though.

2-3 days ago MSN search engine finally 'realised' that it had the wrong site listed, my dummy site for 'toying' with which showed up when people typed a 2 word search term as 1 word, in the end I removed all content and put re-directs on the index page. Guess what, it now lists both sites 1 under each search! Although the original (with no content only meta re-directs) is now no.2 instead of at the no.1 spot.
MSN.co.uk has me at no.1 out of 2.6 million pages and MSN.com at no.3 out of 2.9 million pages on one search term and I'm between no.'s 1 and 4 on 3 other terms. This is good news, as the first site was getting hits the day after it was created, (during testing no less), and the 'real' site wasn't picked up for 10 weeks even after mailing them twice, probably something to do with the simliar names and same content ('my-site.com' and 'mysite.com'). I've had 162 free hits off them in 2 days, even though they display my meta keywords in with the meta description so it reads nonsense(?), but only 15 have joined with 1 upgrade so far (I really must work on my sales pitch!), still nothing from Google though and no idea where I am on the results or under what phrases, Google tells me that my site name shows up on 114 different sites but has zero inbound links (it does have inbounds), which could be some of the ppc ad's getting read by the googlebots, while they only list 2 pages of my site when I search under my site name, MSN is showing 60 pages! They've picked up some profiles and the list is a long one when every link to the pages are named the same except for a different string at the end, also the (meta) descriptions are the same as well.
note for Charles/Gary: any update on individual page names? Is it going to happen?

I also get the occaisional non 'G8' member and these come from Yahoo! mostly, what happens is that Yahoo! reads every country in the drop down list and picks out 'wherever' and matches it with words/phrases on the index page, e.g. people searching for: 'female contacts in Bangladesh' find my site on about page 4 of the results, Dr.Bernados is well above my site but I'm fairly sure they don't do adult contacts, so relevance isn't a strong factor in some results especially with MSN,
See for yourself.
MSN search results
Look at the third site down, Chelsea football kit??? That's been there for months!
Even when there were 16,000+ results on this search (there's under 2k now).
2nd listing is my 'dead' site's payout.php page (complete with session string) which is re-directed, probably because the default content is still on there and the domain name closely matches the search. I should really take that domain name off this system and either point it to the right place or do a 301 for it, but I've 17 members on there, 1 upgrade has just ended and another has a month left.

SEO sure is a curious thing.

Vince.

Marketing?

Well personally i think the best way is text link/banner exchanges.

I started my site up around two weeks ago and i have 92 members and 3 upgrades! Not bad for a couple of weeks work (part-time).

Well done babes!!!

Text and banner links can also boost your Search Engine Page Rank also, so having the 2 systems running side by side complementing each other is a winning combo.

From the time of writing this, it has now almost been a month (minus 6 days) since the creation of my site and have accumulated 1341 members, and 115 upgrades - working part time - most of my upgrades have come from Google and am usually listed in the top 3 on my targeted keyword(s) - My Google ranking is helped by text/banner exchanges linking back to my site. I try and seek out directories or sites that hard code your HTML link back, rather than sites that use a dynamic method, as this seems to push your site further up Googles list. (though I don't rule out dynamic link/banner exchanges completely)

Hello Folks,

Just reading through all the responses and I have a few questions.....

PR's? What are they? I must have missed reading that one somewhere. I saw one with PR1, PR0 and if not stay with PR7 etc? What on earth is all that about?

As you can probably tell, I am pretty hopeless with regards to finding my way around a PC. It was one of those "It seemed like a good idea at the time" things that one does.

After trying very unsuccessfully to create my banner with the Banner Wizard, I contacted DIY Dating and they gave me some banner creating sites. I have created a banner now and would just like to know how to get them on other people's sites.

I have absolutely no idea how to get my banner on their site or vice versa. I have emailed a few with the text off the DIY dating exchange programme which reads "'Want extra traffic to your website for free?
Then why not join our link exchange program :
'http://mysite.com/exchange/' ".

If these other sites click on that, will it get my banner posted on their site and their site on mine?

You are all probably wondering what the heck I am doing on the PC if I don't know much about them, but I am an awful technophobe. Crikey, I have just learned how to programme my video with the remote control!!!!! And don't ask me to send text messages on my mobile!!!!

Slowly getting the hang of it though, and I am sure with a little perseverence I shall master it in the end. I can send emails without any help from the little ones, hahahaha.

It's great to hear that you are all doing well. Pay Per Clicks? 20p, £200 for £400. The mind boggles.

Keep it up folks,

Gary1957

P.S. I have just got it, PR = Page Rank. Dohhhh!

Well since writing this, i have over 100 members and almost ten upgrades, not bad as i haven't been working on it this much.

Keep at it Babes

Gary1957:


Once a webmaster finds that page then it's automated and they'll upload and download banners and links themselves without you needing to do anything, all you have to do is approve the 'exchange' from your 'programs' link in the admin area.

Some WM's may be a bit reluctant to link due to the low PR on that page and also that it uses a 'jump code' instead of a 'real' URL.
Jump code looks like this; as opposed to;
While you are linking for traffic first you of course want to keep improving your visibility in the eyes of search engines. They will not recognize a jump code as a link to a site so some people don't like them, also it can make it hard for some scripts to check for reciprocal linking. Whilst we check our links are still on the other site they also want to check theirs is on ours.

I hope I haven't confused you too much.

Vince

p.s. let me know how it goes, I've just started using this this week and haven't mailed anyone, I'm just waiting for 'drive bys'

hi i dont know any html but i use a program caled notetab pro i think the site is www.notetabpro.com

It's quite a useful program.