My dating website

[glennmid101]

Hi,

I am setting up, in partnership, a free dating website, for people in the UK.

Personally, I want the emphasis to be, that it is free, free to join, free to use, and so on.

Interested in any people's views.

Regards
Glenn

[fisicx]

Not exactly a new idea. Search for 'free dating websites' and there are an awful lot of well established sites. In any case, this is a very competitive field to break into. how much are you prepared to spend?

[glennmid101]

to be honest, a little as possible, the partner is a large internet radio station, but not going to rely on them, thats why i am going to use forums like this, gumtree, facebook and so on to gain traffic.

Also i am trying to get the owner of a large dating website on board, to help with members.

ps are you single lol

[Jane006]

Everyone knows that nothing worth having in life is really free ... how are you intending to make your profit?

If you are selling your site users' data, its not really 'free' and that would need to be clear. If you are a business and not a charity, presumably you will have overheads like any business, and need to make sufficient profits somehow, and people using so-called free services are wise to this. Maybe you are intending to make money via on site advertising, but that requires that you have very high volumes of traffic, so have you thought about how you would you build that up, especially in such a competitive area on the internet?

Not wishing to sound negative, just realistic, and interested to hear your responses.
Jane

[mrbigdog]

Hi Glen,

It may be an idea (as competition would be extremely high) to specialise in your local area. That may start you off small - give better search ratings for. eg. 'Free dating Yorkshire' for example...

If you want to get the site up and running with minimal costs, you could take a look at:

http://www.freewebsitetemplates.com/

This will allow you to choose a design you like to pass to a designer/web developer who could provide you with a quote for the basic engine to run the site. You can provide the text etc. and the main parts that run the site would be dynamic anyway.

A lot of competition - so would need to be focussed. Having said that, there are a huge number of people searching for these keywords. There is nothing to say you wouldn't get some good use!

All the best.

Paul.

[glennmid101]

Thanks for those who have posted, all comments appreciated, because you took the time to read the post, and wrote a comment.

The plan is to make money by having an embedded radio station, and make money by selling radio advertising.

Initally the plan would have have been to set up a radio station, but there are practically millions out there. At least with a dating website, i am going to get traffic, purely because there is always going to be single people.

Thanks again

Glenn

[fisicx]

It's not gong to work. Sorry to be so blunt but your whole approach is wrong. Dating sites costs lots of money, just building the site could cost you an arm and a leg even before you advertise. And your are not going to get many new members via forums and other social networking sites, that's not how they work. And you are competing with the big boys, they have got very deep pockets so don't think you can do this on the cheap. Even the owner of the large dating website is going to charge you for using his members (if they give permission for him to do so).

And are you sure visitors to the site really want to discover an embedded radio station?

[glennmid101]

I appreciate all comments made, and definitely enter this project with my eyes wide open.

But only time well tell

glenn

[wecando.biz]

It's certainly a hard thing to get the numbers up on Glenn, unless you specialise of course - regional is one option, the other may be people of a specific lifestyle, e.g. clubbers, cyclists, festishists, travellers, whatever.

When it's up feel welcome to come and advertise it on our site. ;-)

IH

[glennmid101]

Yes, your right there, but I am lucky, that the radio station i'm going with, are going to promote the dating website on one of their music channels. Plus they have a national reach, but it won't hurt me to pull my weight and promote the website.