How to make money in the dating niche?

Let me try to save you some money.

Type of Commission

There are 3 general types of commission for dating offers:

1. PPL: Pay per lead, where you earn a commission by referring free joins.
2. PPS: Pay per signup, where commission is earned from paid joins.
3. RevShare: where the affiliate receives an ongoing commission % for the life of the referral.

Which Commission Do You Pick?

The appropriate commission to select literally depends on the dating website that you intend to promote.

In exceptionally rare cases, you would choose "revshare." Why exceptional? Simple. The vast majority of mainstream and adult dating sites have weak levels of member retention. When compared, then, to your EPC (earnings per click) on PPL or PPS, your EPC on revshare tends to be much less.

If the dating site is a good one (rare), and if the PPS rate supports it, then PPS is generally the best commission plan. But, as hinted at, it depends on many factors: competing payout rates for PPL and Revshare, dating site quality, landing pages, and EPC rates for PPL and Revshare.

An inexperienced marketer is, without question, best suited to PPL. These convert very easily and quite often even veteran marketers (due to the methods they use) prefer to promote only these PPL offers. Rates fluctuate, but go usually between $3 and $12.50 (currently my highest PPL rate). When starting out, then - stick to PPL. Learn the industry and then you'll be in a position to maximize your earnings by choosing the right commission structure for each site you promote.

Niche Dating

I suggest you stick to niche dating offers. Will tell you why.

There are 2 people:

Person A: who clicks on a general dating site offer.
Person B: who clicks on a niche dating site offer.

Person B has signaled something to us. He is aware, more precisely than person A, of what he wants. Not only that, but he has actively sought out the solution to that "something I want." This makes him a stronger lead. If you present to him the right offer and in the right way, not only will he convert better for you, the affiliate, but he will represent a higher quality of member for the dating website.

Quality Traffic

Few dating promoters recognize (or understand) the importance of quality traffic. It is important. Vital.

What happens if you send low-quality traffic?

- Leads may get scrubbed;
- The incidence of shaving may increase;
- You may not get paid;
- You may get your account deleted;
- You will not be able to negotiate higher payouts.

This mostly applies to PPL affiliates, who wrongly believe that they are promoting purely free offers. Not so. Typically, you must retain a ratio better than 1:20 (paid to free) in order to remain in good standing.

Negotiating Payouts

Related to the above: keep in mind that payouts can be negotiated up. Especially in dating. Never be afraid to speak to your affiliate manager and ask him, "What do I have to do to get a pay bump?" Trust me, he'll tell you, or he'll find out. You may start out at $5 per PPL, but with volume quality traffic, this might get bumped to $6, to $7, to even higher amounts.

An Example Business Structure

Okay. All that is well and good, right? But how, in practical, action-taking terms, can you promote dating offers?

I began doing them around 19 or 20 years ago, and in those years, I've worked on both sides of the coin and still do.

From the perspective of a dating site owner, let me give you one structure that is favored; there are dozens.

1. Niche Blog.
2. Informational Articles.
3. SEO Traffic.
4. Social Traffic (going first to your blog, then to the offer).
5. Less promotion/ sales, more information, guidance.
6. Dating site reviews, as well as reviews on aspects of such sites.
7. Relevant informational articles on aspects of the niche.
8. Less banner clicks, more anchor text link clicks.
9. Longer articles preferred to short promotional ones.
10. Well designed blogs, well optimized, professional.
11. Traffic from articles as opposed to landers (plopped around socials).

Your Situation, OP.

If you lack a desire to write, that's fine. The above example is only to highlight one preferred means of sending traffic. There are plenty, plenty, plenty of ways to send quality leads without writing articles. Let give you a tip you might find useful: plop any dating sites under consideration into SimilarWeb.com. You do that, OP, and you'll see which locations refer the most traffic to those sites. Reverse engineering. You'll learn a lot.

I hope some of the above helps. It would take longer than a post to capture 2 decades of practice, but I'd be happy to keep an eye out for your questions around WF, and I'm sure others will do the same.

Best of Luck!

- Tom

The dating niche is profitable, and of course has alot of competitors. I was thinking about that niche today for some crazy reason, and i laughed to myself about how i might create an ebook about interracial dating. Anyway, for promotion, same rules apply. You get traffic the same way, email market the same way, do backend selling the same way, and getting traffic is the same way (Youtube, forums, PPC, solo ads, JV's, website advertising, etc). But since you're asking about this niche, i dont think you should enter it. WHY do you want to enter it?

Listen to what Tom says, PPL is the way to go.

I would just like to add one thing from my many years generating dating PPL. I have just about always had the best results with a Name Brand dating offer when promoting to a general audience.

I use email to promote PPL offers and since dating offers don't pay as much as I would like, in order to run on a front-end campaign. So, I'm always running them on the back-end and don't know what the users preference is, so a name brand dating site offers tend to get the highest conversion.

Oh, and yes dating is evergreen. I even have old general lists that I send evergreen offers to on a loop and dating consistently does well, week after week, month after month. However, as Tom said, the advertiser is going to expect a certain percentage to convert to paid accounts and if you can't deliver, they will drop you.

Make a udemy course which you could earn big buck

Go adult, that´s where the money is!

Dating is evergreen but that also means that there is a lot of competition. So choose a niche with decent number of Google searches and take it from there.

The dating niche is a profitable and fun one. However, courses aren't really niche specific. You have to learn the overall process for whatever it is you want to do, and then adapt it to the niche you're in.

Joey

Whatever you do, keep it ethical

Stay away from blackhat techniques that spam dating apps

Those apps are getting smarter

It's impossible to make more than $10K per day using BH techniques without getting caught and banned

So don't do it.

Plus, consumers are getting smarter and smarter.

Some affiliate programs are looking into banning app-based traffic due to the heat.

Yes you can that, there are 3 niche profitably : Wealth, Weight Loss, Dating .. And any one of these can give you more traffic, so more money

I concur with Tom, PPL is the way to go!

In my case, I'd rather promote dating offers through paid advertising. This way, I'll get instant result and what I am buying for cheap really is time.

At minimum, the time frame establishing a quality dating niche site is 6 Months and your potential earning is still to be tested. Whereas, promoting dating offers like in plenty of fish ad, you will get result in a matter of days.

The downside is you will spend for the ads. But hey, I'd rather lost $100 in testing my campaign and get winner ads in my next $100 spend than investing time and effort of building a dating niche site, for a minimum of 6 months without assurance that I will really earn through promoting dating offers.

PS: you cannot open plenty of fish ad account at the moment. You can either buy one or do JV with someone who have POF ad account. Do this with extreme caution though, there are lots of scammers in the field.

Thanks everyone. I signed with a white label dating site and had 44 registrations and made $0, so Im looking to leave them and try something different. Even with 18 live members on the site I still made $0 lol

Dating is a great niche, and it's certainly possible to make your own dating site (I've made one and it now has 15,000+ registrations).

Making a successful site is hard - you need to advertise to get members, or you need to launch it off the back of other sites.

On top of that, you get a lot of hassle running a dating site, with scammers, spammers and companies like payment providers who demand $$$ before you can use their services.

Run ppc ads on Plenty of Fish. test and find out best profitable campaign and let that campaign run.

finding unique & profitable dating niche is the key ...

I've been selling in the niche for 10 years now (hard to believe it's been THAT long)

In all honesty, its hard as hell to convert sales in the niche… not a lot of jv partners (if you have your own offers like I do), many mainstream traffic sources won't allow you to advertise (FB, PA, adroll etc)… so it makes things challenging for sure.

for example… my golf offer crushes on fb ads… yet my dating offer (when we could run fb ads on dating) didn't do nearly as well… I wrote both… just goes to show you the difference in niches.

you've gotten good advice here… especially from Tom Addams (good advice dude)

create a course in udemy to earn some cash

Dating niche is really competitive but that does not mean you cannot make buck from it ...

All you need to do is point enough backlinks to your site and then you should get the desired rankings - i.e. on 1st page on Google - and then drive tons of traffic that will convert!

The fastest way to generate tons of backlinks to your site is to join some backlinking generation services such as SEOLinkVine or RankCrew (not an affiliate) ...

Hope this helps

If you do decide to start a website in any niche it’s helpful to diversify your income streams with affiliate programs. Research and determine what affiliate programs are available and most importantly related to your niche. It’s more work to figure this out and set them up, but affiliate programs do pay more than AdSense.

I was working in this niche for years and there's millions of wayt to montize it.

Don't forget - girls don't pay money for registration, they could only pay money for example if they want that their photo to be on the top of the search.

Guys paying for everything, because let's be realistic, all the dating sites is full of guys and there isn so much girls, and if you see somewhere many girls, don't forget tht this is only a fakebots, nothing more.

Another fact, wisely choose location for your dating site, because for example it's much easier to start somewhere in the Baltic States rather than in USA, really. If you are thinking about an international one, don't try to take the whole world at once. Be patient.

Ah, there's so much to share about this niche, I could even write a book If you need any advice, just PM.