10 steps to market your dating website in 2022

Today, someone has come up with a new dating site idea that they hope will be the next big thing, just like someone did yesterday, and someone will tomorrow, but it isn’t easy to get started once you have that idea, and even harder to stay on top when you finally start to make a success from it.

With so many competitors and so many niches, it is easy to get swallowed up by your competition and struggle to make any money. So how do you make sure that you stay ahead of the rival platforms when they already have a head start? A robust marketing strategy and a strong software platform for your dating website are the key. Dating Kit provides the ideal platform with everything from customer service to payment handling, platform hosting and updates, all covered as part of a single package. But what about the part that YOU have to do, the marketing? The trick to earning money is by applying the best strategies to attract people to your dating site. Understanding what your audience wants and marketing your dating site towards that, brings you a step closer towards becoming a highly competitive service provider in the sector.

Did you know that in 2019, online dating spending reached $900 million and the number keeps growing year on year as more people, particularly during COVID-19, looked to the internet to find love.

To have any chance of taking a small slice of this spending, marketing your online dating site is essential. It is a process where you have to continuously attract new members and maintain old ones, which doesn’t ever end. Competition means you have to prove yourself to the online audience continually. Users are not afraid to move to the next big dating site if they are not finding what they are looking for with yours.

1. Define the niche you want for your site.

While it seems obvious that a dating site is about bringing two people together, there is a lot more to it than that. There are hundreds of different niches that provide different things, such as romance, adult hookups, fetish, girlfriend experience, and so many more. Research to understand your niche. The idea is to try to get as much info about your target audience.

Don’t think of setting up another Tinder or PlentyOfFish as these markets are already very saturated. Instead, think of the platform that can fulfil the demand of specific people. For example, you may want to create a dating service for only older adults, vegan couples, or a diverse site. To fully achieve success, you need to figure out what your audience will respond to and implement it into your marketing strategy. With Dating Kit, we can help you create the perfect niche and provide you with a starting point that makes it active from day one, which in turn means you have cut out a lot of the early hardship of populating your niche.

2. Search Engine Optimisation

Thanks to SEO, the websites with the most relevant content appear at the top of search engines such as Google, Bing and others. Make sure you optimize content with keywords that can boost your SEO ranking. Useful content combined with the right keywords for your niche work wonders for your marketing strategy because at the end of the day, if nobody knows how to find you, they won’t find you at all.

Use SEO tools to discover what keywords your nearest competitors use (organic and paid search), what websites refer to them (referral domains and backlinks) and think about the niche they are providing and look at ways to tweak the marketing they use to benefit your site.

Services like SEMrush will help you discover your competitors’ SEO strategy and the keywords they use but there are simpler ways to quickly check a competitor, such as visiting a couple of rival websites and checking the source code of the pages (right-button click or Ctrl+U for Windows). Examine what words were typed in those tags: title, description, H1, H2, keywords, content.

3. Advertise on Ad Networks

An ad network is a platform that links a publisher to an advertiser. Ad networks support different formats of adverts, such as videos, popups and banners. You pay ad networks for showing your ads to millions of users in a similar way that major brands pay TV companies to place their adverts amongst their programmes.

You can buy ad space to display your advertising on tens of thousands of websites that are signed up to an Ad Network and usually you can choose the budget that works for you, or, what exactly you are going to pay for: your ad views (CPM), or clicks on your ads (CPC).

Working with a good Ad Network will get your site noticed on some of the most popular sites, but make sure you set yourself a budget you can afford, and have some standout advertising content.

4. Incorporate social media

Social media is some of the most important strategies to getting your site noticed. The majority of marketing strategies just can’t work as well without social media platforms. Create a Facebook or Instagram account for your site, think of some ideas for posts that are eye-catching, link to your content and you can post regularly to keep traffic coming in. Posting original content, videos, and dating tips and tricks can keep your audience engaged. And once you win the hearts, you’ll be able to drive traffic from Facebook (or any other social platform) to your website.

5. Look for low-budget opportunities like link directories and forums

Despite the opinion that link directories are extinct like the dinosaurs, they can still drive you some additional traffic. A great thing about directories is that they are usually free or very small change to advertise on them. Some of them, like Dating-List.com, ProLinkDirectory.com, OnlineDatingDirectory.net have been on the market for quite a while, and while not known for massive traffic, they often do bring the occasional customer for free.

You may also find answering topics about dating or romance on Quora to be beneficial. If you market yourself as a dating expert and drop the odd link now and again, you can quickly get people clicking at the links and joining.

6. Think outside the box

It is no lie that to be hugely successful like Tinder or Bumble, is going to require you to have a massive bank account and it is unlikely you will have the same advertising budget they have for many years, if ever. However, creativity allows you to achieve both short term and long term goals on a much smaller budget and creativity is free and plentiful.

One creative idea for marketing your dating site is to work with influencers. These are personalities who have a large amount of followers on social media. If you can partner with them, they can market your site for you on their social media to all of their followers, which can often mean advertising to hundreds of thousands of people for a fraction of the price of advertising through an Ad Network. People are more likely to respond to an influencer than a website, so you’ll see much better signup rates if you have an influencer that is really well liked and respected.

Another creative idea is advertising on a blog by writing an article about success stories from your website. A lot of people enjoy reading success stories for people and then go on to want to mimic that success for themselves. By talking about a successful romance that occurred on your site, you are more likely to attract others wanting to copy that success.

Dating often requires fresh ideas to stand out from the crowd and get noticed. Sometimes, more than any other industry. So you might need to go the extra mile to make your product stand out by looking for some brand new advertising formats and ideas that could spotlight your website.

7. Collect user feedback

Despite the huge competition it is still very possible for a small niche site to make huge profits when it comes to giving their customers what they need and desire. By talking to your users on platforms such as Social Media, you gain an insight into what they think, what they like and what they don’t like and can make small adaptions to your strategies.

Another advantage of collecting feedback is that you show your users that you value their opinion. When you communicate with users, it helps you to build a long-lasting relationship.

8. Sign up for affiliate programs

Affiliate marketing is one of the biggest methods in lead generation for most industries.

It works like this: Your site pays the affiliate a commission whenever a new customer joins your website and spends money. The affiliate uses a unique trackable link to promote your website. The advantage of this marketing strategy is that you only pay for each new member. It also helps you to boost your SEO while reducing marketing costs. With Dating Kit, we have an affiliate program already built in and ready to go as soon as you have your dating site up and running. And better than that, we pay your affiliates commission separately from the commission you earn as a Site Owner. This means you can signup lots of affiliates and no matter how successful they are, your profits are not impacted.

9. Take advantage of email marketing

Make sure your website collects the email addresses of customers right from the start. Communicating through emails in the form of a newsletter, it is an effective way of staying in contact with users and amplifying your dating website marketing.

Sending relevant emails regularly about new features of your website keeps members interested and active. You can also ask members for referrals through emails, plus you can send notifications to your members. With Dating Kit we take care of collecting your users email addresses and will market to them on your behalf.

10. Use multiple marketing strategies

Relying on one marketing strategy for a dating website won’t work. Effective marketing for a dating website involves applying multiple methods to multiple people. Be flexible and try different strategies until you find the strategies that work for you. At the start it will be a lot of trial and error and a lot of fails while you determine the best strategies to use and where to do it, but eventually, once one or two ideas start to show success, you can narrow down your best strategies and focus solely on them.

For instance, you can combine SEO, social media marketing, ad networks, and link directories. This increases your chances of attracting more users by making your site more visible from different places.

Final thoughts Applying several marketing strategies to gain members will involve careful planning. It is very possible to attract more users with the right marketing tools, strategies and techniques. However, the most crucial step is to identify your niche and then target audience’s needs for that niche.

From there, you can apply several marketing ideas, including ad networks, email and social media marketing, affiliate programs, online directories and collecting customer feedback.

But the biggest piece of advice is the simplest… do not give up. Even the greatest, richest and most powerful people in the world, have had to fail multiple times before they learned enough to succeed and you need to accept that you may not get it right the first time either, but through trial and error you will learn and discover what does work for you, and what definitely doesn’t.