I’ve finally got round to setting up my gay dating website, for which I’ve had the domain name for months! Using the “Find Me” moniker/brand, I today launched Find Me Gay Dates. I also have Find Me Lesbian Dates to set up, but there don’t seem to be many new members joining the database, so I’m not going to rush it.

But in a mad flurry of dating action(!), I also set up Find Me Mature Singles, which is a dating site for older singles (aged 46+). I picked this age as there are a number of sites for over 40′s or over 50′s, but I think 46 is more representative of a true “middle age” )  Oh, what the hell, I just wanted to be different lol. The actual age range of members on this site is 46-80 & the mature singles market seems to be quite popular at the moment, se we’ll see if this site does better than Find Me Dates which starts from 18.

Some time ago, I set up a white label dating site, using the DIY Dating webmaster programme.

The site, Looking4Me, is still running but I have to be honest & say it was pretty much a “build & leave it” job; I really haven’t spent much effort in promoting it – added it to a couple of dating traffic exchanges and did some link exchanges, but other projects took over & I felt that the dating market was far too competitive to spend time & money on PPC. I have had 205 people sign up & few have even paid for a membership (they join the existing membership, totalling about 300000 members), but I still haven’t done much pushing of the site.

However, I recently received a brochure from White Label Dating, stating that they had a number of site owners earning considerable sums from their websites (between £20k & £30k a month!!). Obviously, I am not aiming for anything like this, but it seems that Internet Dating is still a booming industry & it would be stupid to not try & take advantage of it as an affiliate marketer!

So I decided to give it a go & set up another dating site, Find Me Dates, using the White Label Dating system. There are a number of big name companies using their system, but it seemed they were all using a landing page, rather than using the white label site as their home page. So I’ve done the same thing myself. A landing page allows you to optimise for search engines & make the site look good.

I was able to add features from the dating engine to the landing page, such as a member search & pictures of the newest members & then any click through takes the user to the membership pages. The landing page has been optimised for 10 dating keyphrases – london dating, dating agencies, dating agency, friend finder, online dating, uk singles, dating site, uk dating, internet dating, dating girls, which all had a good KEI (Keyword Effectiveness Index), which is the ration of searches to results in the search engines. I will be submitting to web directories, using combinations of these keywords to generate inbound links & will see how the rankings go.

In addition, I am considering a PPC campaign on Miva, but still need to carry out research on the cost per click for what is a competitive sector – I may have to pick some very exact, long tail phrases to start with!