Promoting a Free Online Dating Site and Keeping Clean

It’s overwhelming when you really start to think about just how much competition is out there to create websites that people actually use. I’ve been researching how I would promote a dating site since I started development oh so long ago. My problem now is that of ethics and promotion tactics. I started out with honesty on forums asking the community for feedback and I was banned for being a spammer! Start a new community page on a social site talking about how the development went or asking for suggestions and removed for being a spammer! Link exchanges for dating sites are just as nasty an area to get into. You post a link on your site to theirs but never heard from them you feel cheated out of space and time.

Dating directories aren’t any better for asking for only PR4 reciprocal links or better. How do you get PR4 anyway? I got a reply from someone with a PR5 page and they offer to put my link there. I pulled up the site but it was empty, completely empty, how did that get PR5?! What keywords could you search for to get that. Ahh, I see, PR isn’t as important anymore, it hasn’t been important for a while as it doesn’t seem to affect your SERP.

Craigslist! I heard this is where some of the giants got their start. Tried an honesty posting … SPAMMER! So I’ve used some of my own profiles to post there and link back to the website. Works fairly well and my members get more attention, win win! However in doing this I’ve realized that I am light years behind the spammers. For every post I make that is W4M it gets flagged very quickly and I check the section and see nothing but spam in the section. Each spam post is a combination of height, breast size, activity list, giggle rinse and repeat. For each post that does stay up I get dozens of emails that sound exactly the same “gee i hope your not a bot but come check out my profile” and I wonder if I should turn to the dark side.

Twitter, ahh the spam site I didn’t see coming. It’s simple, setup a twitter account, put a link back to your shady dating or sex site on your profile and then start following people! Follow them all it doesn’t matter who because when you cap out at 1000 you just create a new user and start again! Don’t believe me, tweet something with the words “online dating” and you should get a follower shortly. Or take a look at Scoopler http://www.scoopler.com/search/#free+online+dating and you can see just how many dating spam tweets there are. If you load up that Scoopler link just take a look at that unholy mess of spam on the right side too. It isn’t just the tweets.

Wait, there is nothing at all positive in this post! I haven’t figured out a sure fire way to promote my new free online dating site but I’ve uncovered many ways I don’t want to become a success.