Trying The Online Dating Niche

I’ve been doing affiliate marketing now for a couple months and have had some limited success. I guess just the fact that I have pulled positive profits means I’m doing something right, but I’m certainly not going to get rich pulling $200/month. I want to be making at least $10,000/month. I would be completely happy in life if I could pull that off, that would make most of my dreams at least within the realm of possibility. $120,000.00/year surely isn’t unheard of, but thats all I want.

Up until this point I have really been tippy toeing around affiliate marketing, but I’m trying to get more serious. The first step I’m taking up the affiliate ladder is to setup a site that I can hopefully use for years to come to generate a stable affiliate income. I have decided to take on the “online dating” niche.

I know what your thinking…”Are you crazy?”. Maybe. Probably. I don’t know, crazy people don’t know their crazy. Now I don’t plan on just throwing up a direct linking adwords campaign and hope for the best, I’m taking this one on for the long haul.

You cant do that, your not “Super”!

Now I’m obviously not going to try and break into the “general” online dating niche, that would be affiliate suicide. Even if I was the most brilliant internet marketer to ever touch a keyboard, I simply don’t have the monetary means to do something like that. So what’s a poor affiliate marketer to do? Hit the niche at the corners.

Within the online dating niche, there are all kinds of different, target sub niches. For example, there is Christian Dating, Jewish Dating, Interracial Dating, Black, Latino and even Big Beautiful Women! All of these have affiliate programs through NeverBlueAds with moderate payouts at around $5.00/lead. This is where I’m planning my attack, on these smaller areas.

Registering the domain name

The first thing I did was register the domain name. Because I want to target a bunch of sub niches separately, I needed a fairly general domain name. I wanted a .com, and I wanted it to have the keywords “online dating” in it. I went on over to GoDaddy.com and started searching. Do you know how hard it is to find a domain name with the keywords “online dating”? Its like trying to get tickets to the superbowl. You either get them really early, or you pay $1000s of dollars for them.

I eventually settled upon http://www.online-dating-blogger.com, since I was already planning on this being a wordpress blog site, this was the best I was going to get. I proceeded to install wordpress on my server and got a “relationship” or “love” style wordpress theme up and running. I then filled the right sidebar with a variety of different offers from NeverBlueAds. I haven’t decided what I want to do with the sidebar for the long term, but this will work for now.

I suck at dating

It just so happens that I have been in a healthy, happy relationship now for the better part of six years, so you can imagine that its been a long time since I have been looking for a “date”. Even before I was in a relationship, I was terrible at dating. I’m a pretty socially awkward guy to begin with, so add in attractive females and I become borderline retarded.

How does a guy like me write blog content about online dating? I dont, I let someone else do it, and there are two ways to do that.

• Outsource
• Paraphrase

Since I know nothing about outsourcing right now (although the “4 hour work week” gives a great explanation of the process), I decided to start with the latter option (paraphrasing).

There are literally hundreds, if not thousands of articles about online dating on www.ezinearticles.com. Now I’m not going to promote copyright infringement. In fact, you should do everything you can to create unique content. However, true paraphrasing is not illegal, at least to my knowledge.

By true paraphrasing, I mean writing something in your own words, 100%. This can sometimes be hard to do, but I have found a pretty efficient way to do it. I start by reading the article full through to get the entire gist of whats going on. Next I dissect the articles paragraph by paragraph and start paraphrasing. Its often difficult to read something one way, and write it another, but here is a good trick: Copy the paragraph into your text editer, and read it through once or twice. Next, delete the entire paragraph so that you cannot see the sentence structure. Finally, write down what you remember. Doing this will ensure that you don’t copy the exact sentence structure, or use the same words as the original paragraph. You might miss a few things here and there, but thats fine because often you can include words or phrases from your own experiences!

I have paraphrased about three or four articles so far, and you would be hard pressed to notice it! Iv changed words, sentence structures, and even the order of paragraphs. I’ve probably spent just as much time doing this as I would have if I wrote the original content. The only reason I haven’t written original content is because I simply don’t know much about the subject. Plain and simple.

Making the money

My money making plans for this site are to use the various dating CPA offers that can be found on NeverBlueAds and other affiliate networks. Each blog post will act as a specific landing page for each of the various online dating niches. I have already completed my landing pages for online Christian dating and online Jewish dating, so take a look and tell me what you think!

The next step is to make at least 10 more landing pages, add in some non-landing page content (like “online dating tips”, or “how to stay safe while dating online”). Id like to be getting around 100 organic visitors per day before I even think about hitting AdWords on this one. This will more than likely take months, and some serious link building to accomplish, but Im willing to give it a try. At least that part is free!

So thats all I have so far, I’m hoping to get the rest of my landing pages up and to start building natural traffic soon. It will be an on-going learn process, so we will see how it goes. Unfortunately I have started school full time for the semester, and my course load is pretty crazy. Hopefully I can find some time to not only work on money making, but to blog about it as well. Ill do my best!