What a weekend, hope everyone enjoyed theirs as much as I did. First, some bittersweet business news. After 3 years, I’ve closed down ProfileDoctor. I’ve burned the entire business onto a DVD and will take some time to ponder what to do with it while I work with current consulting clients and get started on several new initiatives.
Profile writing is definitely a niche business, I never had any set expectations about the outcome, at the time when I started it in 1993, it seemed like an interesting niche opportunity in an exploding market. My idea was to systematize the entire profile writing and revision process, which we began to do until we realized there needed to be a substantial human component in order to warrant charging a reasonable amount of money.
From what I know, nobody in the biz has been able to make a full-time go it of as of yet. Today I received a press release from an Israeli company called White Smoke.
White Smoke has launched a special online ‘date profiling’ program to help single people promote themselves in a more articulate and powerful manner. The program, which can be downloaded from www.whitesmoke.com and appears as an icon at the bottom of the computer screen, helps people using internet dating programs to express themselves more eloquently and to support them with spelling, grammar and text enrichment suggestions.
This is precisely what I had been talking about doing with dating sites but never raised the funds to develop the programs to their fullest extent. Maybe they have the technology, marketing budget and contacts necessary to penetrate the dating industry. White Smoke obviously started out in the commercial and medical space and is now branching out into online dating to see if they can get any traction in the market.
White Smoke employs typical FUD (Fear Uncertainty and Doubt) marketing:
“If you have spelling or grammar mistakes you can forget about finding a high-quality date. We will provide you with a sample dating profile and you can add your own information and changes and use it online. Our templates will teach you how to write an online dating profile, and our dating dictionary contains important words to insert into a dating profile.”
Back when I was naive about online daters, I would have eaten this up. Now that the bloom is off the rose and people are savvy about online dating, I’m not so sure. I have performed exhaustive tests of headlines, grammar, photos and many other ways to try to game dating site search engines and improve results, kind of like SEO for dating profiles. I have a few ideas about what works and what doesn’t, it will be interesting to see how White Smoke goes about improving personal ads.
One thing I know is if they partner with large dating site, they automatically give up 50% of the purchase price and will have to see a heck of a lot of software to make a dent in the market. We’ll see how they fare in the coming months.
Overall White Smoke seems to have a comprehensive product. The Dating version goes for $59.95. I’ll have a demo report soon.
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