Is online dating really on the up?


By Phil ~ March 6th, 2009. Filed under: Work.

I thought it was about time I did an update about my dating sites and in general.

There has recently been a lot in the press and on TV about the so called boom in being down to the recession and the fact that people need to be loved up to get past it. On ITV One last week there was a documentary about different ways of dating – online, personal match-making and the more traditional methods, such as approaching people in bars and speed dating.

and personal match-making performed better than the more traditional methods because they gave people the chance to plan out their dates in advance.

The biggest problem with personal match-making was the very high costs that can be found with some agencies. In the example presented by the programme the cost was astronomical and could run into thousands of pounds if you didn’t find love on the first date.

So it looks as though the future is bright for , with more and more people turning on their computers to find love.

If that’s the case then why are my dating sites performing so badly?

I took a look at the stats the other evening for the first time since before Christmas and couldn’t believe how much they had slumped. My oldest site is Gals Dating and although it has never been a big performer it’s ticked over slowly and bought a fair amount of money in.

The yearly stats of a few of the sites show a slump in the first two, and Take Me Dating, but my best performing site, Hot Mates, seems to be holding up but with all of my sites the money coming in is static and is not reflecting this so called rise in .

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galsdating_stats

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takeme_stats

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hotmates_stats

So what’s the problem? I would have thought that after getting on for two years that would have got sufficient organic to rank high enough on to see regular traffic coming to the site.

I have tried Adwords but with little success. This, I think, is down to the saturated market in and if you haven’t got thousands of pounds to throw Googles way every month then you’re not going to get the high traffic that the likes of Match.com, Loopy Love or Plenty of Fish get.

I’ve tried putting all the right search terms into my sites, made sure there are plenty of relevant keywords, all of my sites validate properly – and that’s another bug bear when you see how many of the top sites don’t even contain a Doc Type.

All of my sites have oodles of content because Content is King but yet again some high ranking sites have almost zero content. Just a page that tells you how wonderful they are and then straight into a search page that you need to register on before you can go any further.

I link all my sites to the better links pages and I won’t have anything to do with linking any of my sites to those that have hundreds of links to porn sites and Russian or Philippine girls that want to be ‘your friend’.

I’m now at my wits end trying to get these sites off the ground and I need some suggestions.

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