There are a lot of people making major dollars as dating site affiliates. I believe that the founder of PlentyofFish, along with several others, got their start as affiliate marketers.
I predict that at some point affiliate marketing will replace the current resurgence in starting new dating sites. We’re already seeing this with networks such as White Label Dating, which is actually more of a dating/affiliate hybrid. If all you have to do is market a dating site, you’re an affiliate marketer.
After all, why go to all the trouble to start a new dating site when you can become an affiliate of an established company and start earning money right away? Affiliate marketing could potentially be more lucrative than running a dating site, at least for small operators. This is essentially the White Label Dating model. You don’t really own anything, you’re spending your own money to promote a site that someone else runs.
In the comments of recent posts someone called me out for some things I’ve said about affiliate marketing. I wanted to clarify my position once and for all. Some affiliate marketing is brilliant. It makes you smile, resonates internally, gets you to click. The majority of the online dating affiliate marketing I’ve seen is the exact opposite.
Case in point. Look at this affiliate email I received for Singlesnet. This is the number one dating site in the US in terms of traffic. Email pulled from spam folder, printed in its entirety.
Hello and thank you so much for getting to this message as quickly as you did….if you had waited about 3 hours to read this, then you would be kicking yourself… I have a copywriter who could condense this into 100 words which would deliver a 10x more compelling value proposition.
We urgently wanted to inform today that we are giving away memberships to our online dating community right now, this very minute, as you are reading this, for NO COST at all!
Yes, we have so many single women and men in your area that we need more and more people to date them! So if you like dating attractive single women or men, then please sign up right now for a dating membership. But you need to do it as quickly as possible! We are only offering memberships on a first come first served basis!
PRESS HERE TO JOIN FOR NO COST (MUST BE 18 and OLDER):No Credit Card Required:
http://checkpointbu.com/L2wucGhwPzEzMDkzJjQ4ODcyODE0JnNiamlkPTE4NTM1JmludGlkPTM4MQWith your dating membership, which won’t cost you a dime by the way, you will have access to all of the following:
* view pictures
* send e-mails to members
* receive e-mails from members
* reply to e-mails from membersNo Credit Card Required
Now, if we had to guess why you wouldn’t want this no cost dating site membership, our simple answer would be that you either do not want to date some of the best looking singles in your city, or you just don’t like hanging around other people that like to have fun.
Now, here’s how we can clear up your concerns……
You can search through our entire database of singles to see who your EXACT match is. You won’t be wasting your time dating someone that doesn’t want the EXACT same things out of a relationship that you do. You WILL find someone that wants to do the same things you want to do, both in the BEDROOM and out of the BEDROOM!
If you’re a wild lover, then you can date another wild lover. If you’re a tame lover, then you will meet and date a tame lover! Basically, your options are wide open!
The main reason why we are offering you this membership for no cost is because we don’t want you to feel any risk. We want you to enter…
It just keeps going on and on…
A year ago Singlesnet had 8.5 monthly visitors, that number is now around 4.4 million. How much of this drop in traffic do you think is attributable to email spam like this?
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{ 15 comments… read them below or add one }
Affiliate marketing would be a nice alternative in earning money over the web specially during this time of recession.
i don’t do email marketing myself, but it is super profitable for affiliate marketers. It is important to distinguish between legitimate email marketing and spam (which this example obviously is).
I would guess that a major part of the problem is that it is difficult or impossible for the dating site to know that a lead came from spam. They would have to receive complaints and trace the affiliates links.
Affiliates mask their traffic sources and protect them like gold, so singlesnet would not know the origin of the lead in this example.
Affiliate marketing for dating is highly competitive, but there is huge money to be made by individual affiliates. You have to put in ALOT of time and stomach the financial risk to make money with it.
PS – would love to see an article on the African dating scams that seem to plague Mate1.com and Singlesnet (not singling them out, I just know they seem to have an issue with it).
I can see your point about marketing other people’s site as an affiliate rather than starting your own dating site but Its now the same thing is it? There are an awful lot of people who will not review and affiliate site or link to it as affiliate sites do not command much respect but with your own dating site, not only would you over come all the prejudice against affiliate site but should you get feed up of your dating site, provided it has a good user base, you can sell it on for profit.
I think the issue is whether you’re trying to create a dating site with unique characteristics, or if you’re going to just use an out of the box solution (thereby creating a mirror image, with a different name / logo, of hundreds of other sites).
If you’re bringing something new to the market place, I’d say “Go for it.” If you’re just looking to slap your name / brand on the same exact thing as hundreds of others, you’re far better off spending your time and effort as an affiliate. You can work with multiple dating sites, don’t have to worry about credits cards, TOS violations or the head aches. You just do some marketing and collect your checks.
Interesting post as always David!
Yes, agree.
But, if you have nothing as affiliates. Why not start a dating site? I think it is better for some online marketers, because there is no cost. And as a good marketer, you can promote your dating site through SEO, Facebook page and group, video marketing, advertising, etc. If you hate spammers, you can beat them via many non-spam methods of yourself. At the same time, you earn money.
Being primarily an affiliate marketer just isn’t appealing to anyone that enjoys the development and coding side of creating a dating site. Plus I don’t feel as in control of my business supplying another company with fresh signups. Working really hard to make someone else rich is what I’ve been trying to get away from already. (^_^)b
“Being primarily an affiliate marketer just isn’t appealing to anyone that enjoys the development and coding side of creating a dating site.”
You are 100% correct on that point, but it sure is appealing to anyone that enjoys making money while doing marketing. I’m glad both the dating site and affiliate can make good money with this model.
Barrett: it is interesting that you linked your name to a dating landing page full of affiliate links.
@jn: Controlling your exits is still part of the strategy and affiliate links are part of that pie but it won’t be the driving force of monetization of any custom built dating site, or I’m not planning on it for my own site at least. Besides, its a far stretch to say its ‘full of affiliate links’, its just part of the footer and even below the fold.
It’s a surprise to me but none of our biggest earners started out as affilliates – they may have known PPC, SEO or just had some money to invest – but typically they were not affiliates.
Affiliates seem to want a quick-fix and a quick-return, whereas the white label dating route encourages a longer-term approach (6 months onwards) as you’re building a brand, not just driving traffic.
A few of our partners have already sold their sites which they couldn’t have done if they had just been an affiliate. The white label dating route is definitely the next step for affiliates and they’ll earn more as a partner than they could as an affiliate – but relatively few affiliates have taken that step yet so there’s certainly a lot of potential.
Ross
Ross said ” Affiliates seem to want a quick-fix and a quick-return, whereas the white label dating route encourages a longer-term approach (6 months onwards) as you’re building a brand, not just driving traffic”
I think you are generalising a bit Ross, perhaps you should say “some affiliates” . I run a few affiliate websites, I an not expecting quick fix, one of the sites has been online for about 4 years. I also get your point about WLD route, its quite nice (I have one or two sites on your platform ) but one can also argue that WLD is a sort of glorified affiliates, loads of parallels in that with affiliates, you just forward leads to the brand owners, you get paid your cut if the lead converts. Exactly the same with WLD partners, you forward leads to WLD application, WLD take care of the rest and you take your cut, you have no direct interaction with the customer on any level once the customer is sent to the affiliate brand owner of WLD dating application.
I think affiliate is a good way to make money if you do not want to get too involved, same with using WLD. The strategy you take whether short term or long term is your decision.
Hi Temi,
It’s a good point re. the brand – and the experience a partner has does depend on the level of revenues they’re generating.
But our top 50 partners benefit from personalised newsletters to all their members (which they can write or we can write), blogs, twitter, facebook and much more – so it really is their brand they’re growing.
A couple of our partners are now starting TV advertising campaigns – something affiliates would never do.
There’s also some further things happening which I can’t talk about here but which our partners will find out about towards the end of October – this will really illustrate the difference between white label partners and regular affiliates.
All very healthy debate I agree!!
Great post. Affiliate marketing is really a good source of money plus you can work at home. Good advantage however you need to make effort first before you will earn. :-)
Affiliate marketing is really a perfect source 2 make money plus you can work at home. A Good advantage 2 u if u have the spare time or just a few minutes
“Being primarily an affiliate marketer just isn’t appealing to anyone that enjoys the development and coding side of creating a dating site.”
I totally agree. Some people think it’s more fun and challenging to build your own website than promoting others websites because you have full control of it. You have to rely on these websites and cross your fingers that they don’t shutdown one day and leave nothing for you and the efford you have put in will be worthless. It does not take long to build your membership base for you dating site if you can find a good dating software that comes with real profiles to get your started.
In my opinion, the dating market is huge. It doesn’t mean you can do only one of them. You can try both and see which works better for you.