I cannot wait until social actions become the norm for organic search results. At first its going to be a big problem, but link rank has got to go away, at least in its current incarnation. Inbound Links != authority. Number of Facebook Likes, # of times song played on Myspace, # of people connected to you on LinkedIn, there are so many indicators of popularity and authenticity that we need to be paying attention to.
Sidebar: What is the equivalent of your Klout Score on dating sites? By what metrics would your Dating Klout Score be measured? Do I spam women? Do I always get a return message? How many messages am I sending to people on average? Someone should create a Klout score for dating thats usable across different sites.
You would not believe how many people email me questionable blog posts asking for links to sites like Badoo. People that don’t even seem to work for the company. And the education and finance companies writing dating blog posts and asking for a guest post and a link back.
I wish affiliate marketers had better tools to work with. If anyone is interested in doing real-time dynamic affiliate marketing with video, contact me.
If you are an all-star dating site affiliate, you’re making big coin and being given watches and cars for your efforts. There are a bunch of lead-gen and old-growth affiliate people that are killing it and doing it (mostly) with a conscience.
It’s the rest of the affiliates and “marketers” who are screwing things up for everybody. First off, only pimping sites with big payouts. And what’s with all of the dating site review sites still promoting American Singles? What decade is this? 99% of the Dating Advice sites are useless, featuring poorly-written copy wrapped around affiliate ads for the same handful of sites.
Lead-gen feels broken too. Oh it works wonders for some companies, but competing against your customers for clicks?? It does work for some sites, I’m just hearing that the competition tends to bid up keywords too much.
Buying profiles to launch your site #fail.
Zoosk, AYI, HowAboutWe, everyone who was viral is now 99% advertising based.
Facebook dating site ads? Just awful. EVERYONE in the dating industry has crappy Facebook ads. Absolutely zero innovation here. Don’t give me that line about “Teen girls with big nipples is the only way we can attract enough traffic to exist on this planet.”
When are dating sites going to start buying sponsored posts?
We are stuck in this cycle until Facebook stops popping champagne corks and creates an ad unit that doesn’t suck. Will Facebook bring the pop-under ad back into vogue?
Even TheCompleteMe is doing advertising on Facebook. There is no such thing as viral marketing on Facebook anymore.
Many casual dating sites are still convincing/tricking people into uploading address books, creating fake profiles from their Facebook friends’ profiles (ahem, Badoo) and lots of other sketchy tactics. At least creating dating site profiles from your social graph takes a bit of thinking, too bad its illegal.
I can’t believe the longevity of some of the ads in my spam filter. Its been at least a year-long run for the “Browse Match/eHarmony/whatever site for free on us!” pitch. And the big dating sites do nothing to stop them even though some of the sites they promote require a credit card to register. Free, yes, but once the site has your credit card…
