Dating Affiliates - 10 Tips To Be Successful

I like to study people. In fact, when I’m out and about, people-watching is almost an obsessive hobby of mine. You can learn a lot by watching how people conduct their lives. If you look on my bookshelf at home you’ll notice more than an average number of biographies. Now if we apply this obsession to dating the logical conclusion is to pick apart the top dating affiliates and attempt to isolate consistencies. I do this all the time and what follows is second nature to me. It should be the easiest blog post I ever wrote. In saying all that, I hope you find it useful too and, perhaps, become one of the people I’m studying in the future!

1. Be an SEO Expert

The top dating affiliates are invariably good at search engine optimization. In fact, if you’re going to be any kind of webmaster slash online promoter, you had better be good at SEO. One of the best pieces of advice I can give you on SEO is one that I got from an interview with Matt Cutts. Do not try to dominate for hugely saturated markets. Stay clear of trying to rank #1 for dating or personals. Instead, choose a niche, make a well optimized site and, through white hate search engine optimization, attempt dominate that niche at some time in the future. Once you have that nice dominated, move on to another one. Rinse and repeat. The best dating affiliates are those clever seo experts who dominate niches . . . one after another.

2. Be A Traffic Expert

This is, of course, related to being an SEO expert. Here, though, I’m talking about knowing every single way to get dating traffic. Most top dating affiliates have, at one time or another, tried every method of getting dating traffic. And you would be surprised at how many traffic sources exist. I wont detail them all in this article. The important thing to know is that YOU as a dating affiliate must know THEM if you want to be a top dating affiliate. Some ways to get dating traffic include blogging, article marketing, seo, ppc and paid advertising, forums, joint ventures, traffic trading, classifieds (online and offline), pic posts, tgps/mgps/legal tubes. Keep reading Promote Dating if you want to learn every single traffic technique (Kristian, that was a shameless plug).

3. Understand The Dating Sites You Promote

It amazes me that most dating promoters have not actually signed up and used their promoted sites. Now I’m not suggesting you rock out with your cock out on Fling or Amateur Match but, hell, at least join up and check it out. The top dating affiliates know every inch of the sites they promote. Let’s face it, you should really know your product - inside and out - before attempting to sell it, right? This makes sense. If you know you the product, you know what features to promote, what aspects appeal to your target audience, and you become familiar with that target audience through interaction. A great new selling feature of Amateur Match is the fact that they have photo-verified members. This is a great selling point. Top dating affiliates know this and everything else about the sites they promote.

4. Understand Your Target Audience

Knowing the target audience might well be the most important trait of a successful dating affiliate. Know your audience and you know what buttons to push. The very best way to get to know them is to interact with them. If you run blogs, chat to them in comments, read what they have to say, take it in. Likewise, do the same if you own a surfer forum or any other kind of site that offers interactions. Think about this one, folks. It makes the most sense of all. If you don’t understand online daters, singles and swingers, how will you know what appeals to them, what features get them excited, what latest trends to capitalize on?

5. Foster Good Relationships With Sponsors

Who will help you more, a stranger on the street or an old friend? Top dating affiliates foster close relationships with their sponsors. I have contacts to every one of my sponsors on both my ICQ list and email address book. I know them all very well. Heck, I even get to see photos of their families, and get invited for drinks and to come to parties and shows. Do I do this just for selfish reasons? Not at all! Having friends online makes life far more rich and interesting. Working alone at one’s desk can be a lonely occupation. But the point is that making friends with your sponsors is just good business sense. If you have a problem or need help you can go to them. If you want to negotiate a better payout, similarly, you stand a better chance if you’re on friendlier terms. But don’t just take, take, take. Remember to give back too: offer feedback on sites, be a beta tester, bump threads, etc. A relationship is a two-way street. The top dating affiliate will develop real friendships with sponsors who come to value them more as an affiliate.

6. Move With Market Trends

The dating industry is evolving every second of the day. This means, for the top dating affiliate, opportunity exists in following trends. Let me give you an example: Millionaire dating or rich / wealthy person dating. No sooner had one site sprang up but, months down the line, we now have dozens of such sites. Just imagine how much easier it would have been to rank well in the beginning if you’d got in on the ground floor of the new market trend. Recognizing new trends and, most importantly, responding to them is a trait of all top dating affiliates. You get first shot of getting a winning domain name, first crack at ranking well in SERPs, and first try at selling to an interested public. Ignore market trends at your peril. You might rank wel for a search term now, but what happens when interest in your niche has dwindled? This leads me onto my next tip . . .

7. Have A Diversified Portfolio

Spreading risk works for stockbrokers; it works well too for webmasters. Having all your eggs in one basket is just too risky, folks. Now this analogy applies in varies ways to dating affiliates. Do not go promote just the one niche, do not have just one dating program, do not rely on just the one traffic-source. If you have one dating program that you promote with one site by using one traffic source then you only have to lose any one of those three elements and you are out of the game. Diversify. Spread your risk. Multiple dating sponsors, multiple, sites, multiple niches, multiple traffic sources (see tip 2).

8. Be An Ad Copy Expert

This is invariably overlooked by dating affiliates and yet without knowing how to write good copy we don’t know how to press the right buttons. Just think about this: Almost everything you do involves writing advertising copy. Hell, even what I’m doing now is ad copy for the search engines, intending to attract an audience. As I write I’m conscious of my keywords and their density and the need to make the content useful yet also concise enough not to bore. I’m writing ad copy. Doing pretty well too, I think. I could recommend a few books but I have honestly never read books on ad copy. What I did, a long time ago, was read dozens of free online resources on the subject. As a future top dating affiliate, you should do the same.

9. Be In It For The Long Haul

The same question gets asked time and time again on forum: which program will make me the most money?  The answer: revshare.  If you want quick money, promote the hell out of free email signups.  That’s quick, easy money.  If you wan BIG money, promote percentage programs.  To promote percentage you need to be in it for the long haul.  I’m talking years.  It can take several months of heavy promotion before you start to see big number with revshare but it’s definitely worth it because you wont make bigger money with any other program, guaranteed.

10.  Learn From Other Dating Affiliates

I saved this one for last because it neatly wraps up our top ten list.  I cannot express passionately enough just how much more money I have earned by learning from other dating affiliates and people who work in the dating industry.  Small tips, big tips . . . they all add up.  You just never know when someone will drop a technique on you that will literally add thousands to your pocket each month (which, incidentally, I do that here on Promote Dating all the time).  Make friends, network, and always be humble enough to listen and learn.

So, what do you think.  You like that top ten list?  I wish I could have written it a little more concisely.  Other than that, I said what I wanted to say.  I hope you find it useful and it makes your pockets that bit heavier.  All the best!

Basic SEO Tips For Dating Affiliates

This post will contain nothing new for experienced SEOs. It will, however, benefit webmasters new to search engine optimization with a simple primer on the basic principles of seo.

I would estimate that 80-90% of your search engine traffic will derive from the one search engine: Google (with Yahoo and MSN taking second and third place). Accordingly, it is standard practice to optimize for Google. Having said that, if you optimize for google you will actually be optimized for other search engines. So, due to Google’s high-traffic and the knock-on optimization effects, we tend to concentrate our efforts on the big G.

1. Keyword Choice

A common mistake in choosing keywords is to isolate those which receive the largest chunk of daily traffic in your chosen niche. A thread on the forum GFY (www.gfy.com) springs to mind. A guy intends to post the results of his new seo experiment. He seems highly motivated and wishes to learn seo in a hands-on fashion. Good stuff! Unfortunately, he makes a mistake right off the bat by targeting keywords that are way too popular and unspecific: dating, love, girls, adult.

When choosing keywords you must specify exact phrases that are related to your niche. If you want to rank more easily in SERPs (search engine result pages) you choose what we call low-hanging fruit, the keyword phrases with less competition. Let me give you an example. A good free keyword tool can be found over on seobook. If we enter the keyword dating we get a ton of dating keywords with the monthly search-volumes from WordTracker, Google, Yahoo and MSN. Partway down the list we find a sub-niche: Herpes Dating. Let’s compare how many competing pages there are for dating and herpes dating.

Dating: 282,000,000 Indexed Pages.
Herpes Dating : 201,000 Indexed Pages

It is going to be easier to rank for herpes dating than dating because there is less competition.

Now let’s explore this further and look at a keyword phrase within herpes dating.

Dating With Herpes: 75 Daily Google Searches / 16,600 Indexed Pages

Ranking for the term dating with herpes is going to be even easier. In fact, you could accomplish this within hours to days. This is ripe low-hanging fruit. Ripe for the plucking!

So instead of setting up a new site aimed at the entire dating community, you might choose a niche like herpes dating. When you create your site, you should use individual pages to target keywords within your chosen niche. One page, for instance, will be targeting dating with herpes. If you setup a dating blog you will, similarly, devote categories to this phrase and relevant posts.

So, to recap, we have concentrate on 3 factors when choosing keywords:

1. Specify exact keywords that get searched with regularity.
2. Supplement primary keyword choice with related keywords
3. Target keywords with less competition in the SERPs.

2. URL & Title Tag

There is some debate as to whether having a keyword in your domain is advantageous. In other words, does the Google Algorithm reward a site if it contains a keyword in the URL? My answer: Yes. If you want to establish a herpes dating site it would be advantageous to have your primary keyword, herpes dating, within the URL. This signifies to Google that your primary purpose is herpes dating. Therefore, you will be rewarded when it comes to ranking for the search term herpes dating. Another valid reason for using keywords in urls is because the anchor text in your future backlinks will reflect your chosen primary keyword and will, therefore, help you gain further rewards from Google (more about that in a minute).

Just as important as a keyword in your domain is the title tag. If you are lucky enough to secure a domain that contains your primary keyword then you can compound the positive effects by using that same keyword in your title tag; it this case it would be herpes dating. If, however, your domain does not contain the primary keyword, you can still use it in your title tag as long as it is relevant to your site as a whole; if not then add it to the title of a relevant page or section of your site.

As a general rule, the first words in your title tag are more important, so try to use them for your primary keywords.

3. H1 Tags

The Google ranking algorithm assumes that the text within H1 tags is more important than other text on your page.

The simple rule here is to include your keyword(s) within the H1 tags. An example with our herpes dating site would be a blog post entitled Herpes Dating - 10 Hot Tips.

4. Keyword Density

Keyword density is the ratio of keywords to normal words in your site’s content. A good percentage to aim for is about 10%. So 10 keywords in a 100 normal words.

There is no doubt that having good keyword density will have a positive impact on you in the SERPs for your chosen keyword terms.

It is, therefore, of utmost importance to KNOW your keywords. If someone says to me, “Hey, Kris, what are the keywords for your new herpes dating site”, I should be able to reel them off hardly without thinking; it should become second nature for you to reel off these terms.

5. Back Links

What are back links? Simply put, these are non-reciprocated inbound links; sites that link to you but you don’t link back and, thus, reciprocate the linking.

The more back links to your site, the better. Why? Google assumes that if sites are linking to you then you must be a good site. It, therefore, rewards you by better indexing.

It is not enough, however, to simply get links from other sites. The best back links are those from relevant sites with the anchor text of your chosen keyword(s).

For instance, a link from a dog food site with the anchor text a date site is not as good as a link from a high PR dating directory with the anchor text Herpes Dating.

The more inbound links you have from relevant, high PR sites with the anchor text herpes dating, the better you will do in the SERPs for the term herpes dating.

So the obvious question: How do we get back links?

Ah, the age-old question!

A full answer is beyond the scope of this article but, fear not, I have answers.

One method is what we call link-baiting. If you write a quality piece of content, people will find out about it and link to it. This makes perfect sense. Google is rewarding you by creating good content and therefore encouraging the creation of high-quality content. Clever! Good sources of link bait are highly controversial and original articles on popular topics.

Another method is to add your site to relevant directories that do not require a reciprocal link. Unless you know which sites these are it can be a time-consuming practice searching through google, but the results are well worth the effort.

Yet another method of getting link backs is writing to related (not competing) sites and asking to be included in their links. For instance, a general dating site might carry your link or, perhaps, a site about flowers (which is related to your dating niche).

Now, before I close this topic, it is highly important that your back link campaign look natural to google. Obviously, getting 100 backlinks per day is not natural. Far more natural is getting 2 today, 5 tomorrow, 3 the next day, and so on.

After reading the above basic seo tips you should be thoroughly ready to begin your own seo strategies. Best of luck and let me know how you get on!