New Dating Site Directory – Quickly Find Dating Affiliate Offers
As you might know I’ve been building a range of directory sites (links in sidebar). I decided to turn an old dating site tips blog into… you’ve guessed it – another directory site.
Anyway, you can visit the site here: theonlinedatingsitesguide.com. Yes there are a lot of dating site directories out there, but I hope that my automation and lessons learnt from starting FindAForum back in 2013 will give me the edge over the competition. One thing I am good at is building scaleable sites and I should comfortably be able to build a much larger directory than any of my competitors.
I’ve done pretty well with niche sites themed around online dating, and have made something like $65,000 from this niche over the years. Here are some ways of making money with dating and relationships…
Find Lucrative Dating Affiliate Offers
One really useful feature of the site is that you can view a page listing affiliate schemes in the dating niche. Check that page out if you have a dating related site in any niche. Although it’s easy enough to monetize a dating blog with AdSense or Infolinks or something you’re definitely leaving money on the table doing that.
I used to use AdSense for monetizing my dating sites. But then I realised I could gain diversification (and also more income) by putting up adverts using the dating sites’ own affiliate offers. Most of them pay up to 75% commission and on a year’s membership subscription that could end up netting you $100 – from a single user!
Relationship Blogs – Do They Still Work?
One good way of making money from dating affiliate offers is to start a blog about relationships and finding love.
Do they still work?
Dating is still a pretty good niche! It’s the ultimate evergreen niche as people want to find partners 365 days of the year, plus you get spikes of interest after Christmas and around Valentine’s Day.
There is a lot more competition these days (obviously), but what niche doesn’t have a lot of competition?
My advice would be to take a good look at my directory site and check out some of the more obscure dating niches. For example tattoo dating is a pretty competitive niche with at least well established dating sites in that niche. However I was only able to find a single piercings dating site to add to the directory so that could be a better niche to try.
You can also find a lot of relationship blogs on my blog directory FindABlog. Just search for some relationship related keywords. I’ve recently added a lot more dating and relationship blogs on there.
How About Starting a Dating Site?
I ran my own dating site from 2012 to 2018. In the end I shut it down because I was wary of getting sued should there be a data leak or something. It wasn’t worth risking my entire personal wealth for a site that made less than $200 a month.
It is worth starting a site as it can be a lot of fun running a dating site. However be aware that it’s a lot trickier than just running a WordPress blog. There are a lot of hackers, spammers and scammers out there these days, and as I just mentioned, data leaks have affected even the largest dating site operators.
Dating is also a tricky niche in that there are a lot of issues that you’ll not encounter if you’re blogging about furniture or pulled pork forks. For example MailChimp will ban your mailing list if you promote dating offers through their email service. Also if you start a dating site then sending the transactional emails is tricky to set up too.
But the biggest problem with starting a dating site is getting members to join. It’s a competitive niche and on Google you’re also competing with a lot of search results that aren’t actually dating sites. Sheesh, honestly DuckDuckGo has much better search results for dating related terms.
Well if you are interested in starting a dating site then make sure you choose a less popular niche. The categories page on my directory site is invaluable for this because it shows you how many dating sites there are in each of the niches. You could also choose a category that I haven’t actually added to the site. I’ve added most of the popular ones (although I’ve excluded NSFW niches). Another thing you could do would be to combine niches (a dating site for jazz lovers who are also vegan?).
One other thing you could try is to target the non-English speaking market as this is less competitive.
So if you’re interested in making money in the dating niche then check out my new directory site. If you have any comments or questions about dating sites then post your thoughts below.
