Dating Niche [free True.com marketing ideas]
By Steve Poland • February 1, 2008
Rocket Profit has a contest going on via John Chow to win a free ticket to the Elite Retreat (April 3-4 in San Francisco, CA; $4,995 value). Basically you select an affiliate offer on Rocket Profit and explain how you would market it.
Well, I’m going to choose the True.com dating offer (pays $3.50 per completed profile, which is the highest payout on this offer I’ve seen). I’m choosing this offer, because CX Digital (Incentaclick) mentioned this was their winner for hottest affiliate offer of 2007 — and also I did some snooping to find some others are still working this offer actively, so why not hop on the band wagon now.
So here are some ideas on how I’d promote this True.com offer from Rocket Profit:
- I would use PPC/search (Google, Yahoo, MSN, Ask) to drive traffic to their landing page they have setup that is quite nice and has a video of a girl on her computer, which looks like it is live. Others are using this same landing page for this offer — I’m sure this is the money landing page that is converting for True.com, so why mess with it. Well, there’s one reason I’d mess with not using it — and that’s if the Google quality score is crap, which would mean my PPC bid minimums are too high on Google; then I may create an intermediary landing page with some good content to then get the end-user to click onto this landing page. [I do go into some scenarios in other bullet points below for landing pages that could be built]
- I would research the keyword longtails that True.com itself, and other dating sites, use by tapping SpyFu and KeyCompete — which allow me to input a domain or keyword phrase, and see the keywords that are used to market those websites. I’d also use Wordtracker and/or Wordze for further keyword research.
- I would have several different types of keyword combinations. The various types that would be mended together to create deep longtail keyword lists are: age (i.e. 30) , gender (i.e. male, female), race (i.e. asian, african american), religion (i.e. christian, jewish), and locales (i.e. las vegas, houston).
- Another run at this offer would still be PPC/search to drive traffic, but I’d have various landing pages that I’d test with A/B testing. These landing pages would be focused on reviewing True.com and on some of the landing pages, comparing the True.com site to other dating sites (which would be incentivized offers too).
- Get real people reviews of the dating sites — setup a simple wufoo survey/form with 3 quick questions and then setup some PPC ads that target actual users (or former users) of the dating sites you’re promoting. Ask them what they loved about the service; what they hated; what another service offers that is better; and then a photo/avatar of them, their first name and last initial, and their city/state/country. Offer to pay them $2-$5 depending on how well they articulate themselves (short and sweet is the goal). You might get 20 reviews at $5 each — if those are 20 authentic well-articulated reviews of True.com — that’s good, REAL stuff that other consumers will mesh with.
Have a landing page with reviews of the dating offers — why does True.com rock? why does True.com suck?
Have a landing page that has a few different offers on it, not just the True.com offer, but also some other dating offers on Rocket Profit like Singlesnet and FindRomance.com (targets 30+ age)
- Get real people reviews of the dating sites — setup a simple wufoo survey/form with 3 quick questions and then setup some PPC ads that target actual users (or former users) of the dating sites you’re promoting. Ask them what they loved about the service; what they hated; what another service offers that is better; and then a photo/avatar of them, their first name and last initial, and their city/state/country. Offer to pay them $2-$5 depending on how well they articulate themselves (short and sweet is the goal). You might get 20 reviews at $5 each — if those are 20 authentic well-articulated reviews of True.com — that’s good, REAL stuff that other consumers will mesh with.
- PPC ad copy — create ad copy geo-targeted by locale (”Date a Southern Boy in NC”).
- PPC ad copy — find out how many singles there are in a particular locale on the system (do a search yourself if needed, or use some made up numbers that are over 200), then you could say something like “450+ Single Men in Buffalo” or fine-tune it if you’re using demographic targeting, or if you’re focusing your keyword targets and specify “450+ Single Men in Buffalo, Ages 18-28″. Create ads like this for 200+ cities in the USA (thus 200+ adgroups).
- PPC — women typically date older; or they at least like older men — so you can get away with “Ages 25-45″ as a pretty broad range that most women will jump on — if their own age is younger than ~28.
- PPC — men typically like a younger woman.
- PPC and/or landing pages — focus in on race and/or religion — “400+ Single Christian Men in Buffalo” or “400+ Single Asian Men in Buffalo”.
- There are tons of people that haven’t dated before, none the less even kissed someone, so you could create a website that focuses on this niche (both male and female) — might be called ‘dating 101′ — and would include articles (or paragraph summaries that link-out to full articles) and how to videos on ‘how to take a woman’s bra off with 1 hand’, ‘how to kiss a girl’, ‘what to do on a first date’, etc. [Yes, these videos exist over at ... and ...]. There would of course be banners and links to True.com.
- People that are looking to date fall into various buckets — those that are looking for a relationship, casual dating, sex, or new friends to do things with. A lot of times online daters are shy individuals. Websites / landing pages could be built to target each of these micro-niches of online dating. By building the websites with some good content, the Sites’ Google quality score can go up and PPC prices go down. [Plus might be able to siphon off some free organic leads]
- Another way to drive traffic would be writing ads on Craigslist that shows a photo of a hot girl, writing the ad as if you’re a single girl, and then linking to a real profile on True.com (with your referral code attached in URL) — or specifying the True.com username to use and link directly to your landing page offer.
- I’d possibly do some displlay advertising with a focus on websites where people are just clicking around out of boredom, like CollegeHumor, Break.com, MySpace, etc — but likely similar, but smaller, sites like those I have mentioned, where ad inventory may not be sold out and can be had for a cheap cost (sites that may have an individual owner).
- In any landing pages that I may create, I’d use some videos — True.com has some videos on YouTube, so maybe some of these would work as good sales tools for getting an end-user to click through to the real landing page. Video sells.
Since the deadline isn’t until February 8 for this “free elite retreat ticket” contest, I may add to this post — but will clearly state “Update” with any additional ideas.
Comments
One Response to “Dating Niche [free True.com marketing ideas]”
Got something to say?
Copeac offers $3.50 on True.com. Now you play RP against Copeac as to who gets your business. Or split test them, to see if you’re getting f**** by one of them.