Online Dating Industry News, Commentary & Consulting

Ugh, I feel fat and I’m crashing from my tryptophan high. I’ve got a lot of posts queued up for the next several days. Enjoy the weekend and drive/travel safe.

What are Bone Fish’s up-coming plans?

Bone Fish has very recently expanded its entire team so that it can ensure a smoother running of the entire service and affiliate program. At this moment in time, it is actually finishing off the final touches to its brand new members’ area, and hopes that this development will help to retain and capture existing and new members alike. In the same manner, it has revamped all its member communications and emails, and has taken a more hands-on approach with regard to member promotions and the like. Ultimately, Bone Fish aims to maintain as much direct contact as possible with all of its members and to increase its conversion rates as the months go by.

And it’s doubtful that it will stop there. In the coming year Bone Fish hopes to extend its platform further with a new (and much more comprehensive) admin centre, additional segmented niche networks and a ton of other new features that it can’t yet unveil to the public.

What are your main obstacles and pitfalls? How could Bone Fish perform better? What are its main problems and how is it addressing them?

I would be wrong in saying that everything works 100% of the time and never goes wrong. But having said this, at Bone Fish we have never really experienced any great problems either. But if I had to highlight two areas that occasionally cause stumbling blocks, it would have to be “hacking” and “scammers and spammers”.

Hackers- When someone attempts to hack into our system we have to temporarily restrict access to the admin centre to protect ourselves and our service. And yes, there have been times when this has severely affected our affiliates. With this in mind, back in June we installed a Cisco Firewall Module and employed tighter security measures to ensure that our system would efficiently filter these specific attacks and therefore lessen the blow to the service as a whole. And although this may not be enough in the long run, for the time being this coupled with the extreme tightening of security measures is signifying a less volatile existence of the Admin Centre, a relatively improved speed of service and less downtime. However, this issue is very much on-going so – as with many companies of this kind – it seems that we’re going to have to constantly keep looking for new ways to combat attacks on our system. To a certain extent I think that it’s always going to be an ongoing battle.

2.Scammers and Spammers – on a daily basis scammers and spammers are tracked as fast as possible and about 98% are caught and removed. However, this is not an easy feat and due to the fact that this affects our reputation with banks, members and affiliates, (the latter of which are being hit by chargebacks on a weekly basis), this issue has become our number one priority with us being forced to employ stricter and stricter measures time after time.

In an attempt to combat these issues, Bone Fish has now brought on-board a full-time Risk Manager that dedicates her time 100% to protecting members and affiliates alike. For obvious reasons we cannot specify the procedure that she undertakes, but we can tell you that since her inception the scamming rate has gone down by 80%. However, as with the issue of hacking, this is probably always going to be a constant battle.

Each company has a sweet-spot, what’s yours?

Bone Fish is renowned for its exemplary affiliate account management. It does not believe in automated email responses or even email-ONLY contact, but instead likes to get-to-know each and every affiliate and to have as much personalized 1-on-1 contact as possible. As such, Bone Fish not only assigns new affiliates a dedicated account manager that’s available nearly 24-7, but it also takes the time to phone them, send them through tips and tricks of the trade, and keep them updated via newsletters, the blog, corporate communications and the like.

What’s more, Bone Fish really does go out of its way to interact with its partners and always encourages (and of course, respects) client feedback. For example, as we mentioned before, the affiliate team has recently asked for affiliates to step forward and test out the new Bone Fish member’s area. Why, you may ask. Because Bone Fish considers its affiliates to be part of its team and because it understands that for the program to be successful, all elements of it must work 100%. And who better to test it than those that will be the harshest critiques of all?

Aside from this, Bone Fish Ltd also has a fantastic bonus scheme that has affiliates earning up to 100% commission on new sales. This is generally unheard of in the white label game but is something which really makes Bone Fish stand at the forefront of the online dating industry.

And finally, without a doubt Bone Fish has one of the most sophisticated email campaign management solutions in the world. Accredited by various white listing providers and ISPs, it serves over 6 million messages a month. As such, these member communications generate high return rates of members, which in turn convert into sales. No other management solution is quite like ours – it really is unparalleled.