Online Dating Affiliates - Starting out

With my recent success in promoting Clickbank Download products, I thought it was time to step up my affiliate education and take a dive into the deep end with Online Dating. Online Dating is a well known competitive niche so no better place to learn I thought.

Apart from joining and flirting with girls online in the name of research, The amount of Online Dating Affiliates in the market suggests that Online Dating has its perks. I thought I had a good understanding of PPC from my previous research but let me tell you that to even break even in Online Dating, you need to learn every detail of search marketing to even survive. After spending over 500USD into PPC traffic I got very friendly with an increasingly annoying term called ‘Google Quality Score’.

In competitive niches, the RoI is usually low for most of the high traffic keywords and against the big boys with deep pockets and higher commission arrangements with the merchants you need an advantage or at least level the odds as much as possible. You can be assured that when they are spending thousands of dollars on their PPC campaign, their Quality Score will be optimized to be as good as they can get. For those even newer than me at this game, basically the better your QS, the cheaper it costs for your traffic. Its Google’s way to ensure that their search results are relevant or according to one of my affiliate managers, ensures that Google’s income are assured.

It seems to me that Google has a dislike to Online Dating affiliate sites and my new Online Dating domain can’t seem to get above Poor QS for any keywords however I optimize the ad or landing page. My Direct to Merchant campaign seems to do better and suggests to me that I need to start making my domain more online dating-y in the eyes of the Google gods. This goes in line with the word on the street that Google is using SEO factors in their PPC, not a bad thing in my view for a late starter like me.

My strategy at the moment is not 100% but I have a few ideas. For the new domain have just knocked up a simple comparison page on the advice of my Singlesnet affiliate manager who has been great. I have also brought another dating site at http://www.onlinedatingland.com which I’ll use for some research and alternative approach.

My return for my PPC investments isn’t that bad actually and just about breaks even so I hope once I get my campaigns set up I can make money from the niche. You can check the above sites to see what kind of stuff I have been doing in the future.