COURTLAND BROOKS - Oct 3 - Starting up your own internet dating site has become something that almost anyone can do. Its really not to difficult to buy software and fire up a site. But the road to success is a lengthy and difficult one. In your startup days you may decide to give away free memberships to encourage people to use the site. These members need to be informed that they are ambassadors and therefore deserve to be well looked after and given plenty of attention.
You'll generally need to run extensive advertising and marketing, well selected, negotiated, tested and honed. You really have to get the word out to attract people to come to your dating site.
It's becoming apparent that some dating websites are choosing not to follow the usual steps when staring up their site. Instead they are opting to buy profiles to boost their member numbers on the site and therefore surpassing the need to give away free memberships. It's not just new sites that are using this practice but also existing ones that have seen their numbers drop and need to boost their members. But is this a good idea?
We thought we'd talk to some of the companies that sell profiles. Courtland brooks conducted a survey of 6 companies who claim to sell active profiles to online dating sites. The companies we contacted were;
- SalesProfiles.com
- Evercurrent.com
- Saledatingprofiles.com
- Saledatingprofiles.net
- Buyprofiles.com
- and Profilenetwork.com
We asked each company a series of questions including where they got their profiles from. The overall conclusion was that buying-in profiles from these vendors for your dating site is a bad idea.
The majority of the profile sellers refused to say where they get their profiles from and one even became aggressive and left the chat when I tried to push the issue. This was Saledatingprofiles.net. We noticed that 4 of the 6 profile sellers could only be contacted through private email addresses such as yahoo. Therefore if anything was to go wrong then it would be very difficult to contact them as they could just choose to create another email and not be traced. The fore mentioned Saledatingprofiles.net and Profilenetwork.com both have very bad reputations. Saledatingprofiles.net even claimed to have 40 million active profiles in the USA. Where are they trawling to get so many profiles? Could these be computer generated/fake profiles?
Of all of these providers, only one is worthy of any attention, Buyprofiles.com. They were able to tell us in detail how they get their profiles and informed us that they only sell each profile to one buyer. However, this is on a cost per head basis so may work out being very expensive.
We DO NOT recommend buying in mass profiles. But if you succumb to buy profiles you should only keep them on your site for 3-4 weeks in conjunction with a considerable advertising and marketing campaign. Then cull profiles that are unresponsive from the profiles that you bought-in.
We should clarify at this stage. We DO recommend doing co-reg deals with other sites, and even buying profiles from existing dating sites. But watch you don't break any Terms & Conditions from the site you're buying profiles from.
There are many risks involved in buying profiles. You could lose your money to a scammer. There's a good chance the cheap profiles you buy-in are either entirely bogus or have been trawled from existing dating sites. Are you prepared to take a (deserved) hit on your site's reputation? This also affects the industry reputation. There has been a backlash in the media recently among users who are getting frustrated about going to dating websites and finding bogus profiles.
You cannot build a healthy brand on deception and that is why Courtland Brooks does not recommend buying profiles. Free memberships and aggressive marketing strategies may seem costly to begin with but it is the best way to build a strong, honest brand and the results will follow.
When Wal-Mart builds a store, they have to spend a lot of money to stock the shelves. Same deal with internet dating sites. You need to be ready to spend some money to stock the shelves with people, real people, before you'll be able to sell anything and start making money.
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Posted by: Social networking | February 01, 2012 at 09:26 PM