I been working online now independently for nearly 6 years and have quite a mix of different internet properties. However, dating and alternative dating sites is something completely new to me as it relates to successfully jump starting one. Although I have studied extensively many of the ones that are successful today.
It would seem one of the greatest challenges online is getting your initial members to have enough seeds to entice additional growth and then also getting early adopters to want to pay you something for your serve and then to make things even more of a challenge getting them to stay with you for the long haul.
I know some of you out there have probably contemplated these kinds of questions to and therefore I would like to open up some open discussions as it related to ideas on experiences on jump starting an online community such as these.
What I do know or should I say I think I know:
Members are shy of sites that don’t have any following yet.
I have thought about having multiple levels of membership such as
Free but limited
Upgraded option A with more features but paid with recurring billing
Upgraded option B Advanced with all the bells and whistles with recurring billing.
Possibly an introductory lifetime membership offer if you act now.
Then comes the question do you allow your future members to see other members publicly or do you make them have a membership first? It would seem that there are pros and cons both ways.
I don’t really care for the approaches that I have seen where some sites might by a bunch of fake profiles and upload them. While I fully understand the challenges it seems misleading to future real members. Most of these fake member profiles can normally easily be spotted by anyone that just uses a little observation.
Instead I wish to build something more real….! Something that its members will appreciate and tell others about and continue to stick around for the long haul because they truly enjoy being part of the community.
I seen a mod the other day that was something like invite friends on steroids that would import all kinds of friends from other sources. I thought wow!!! Now that is a great marketing tool coming from somebody experienced at marketing other kinds of services. But I see the need to take something like that to say the next level.
For example:
If you’re going to have a way to mass invite friends like that you need to have a way to also compensate them for this. For example the Dolphin product has an affiliate program built in. If a member could easily invite all their friends and get paid for it that would be very powerful incentive to invite your friends don’t you think?
Better yet if you could refer them to say your external profile url like www.mycommunitysite.com/membername this would also be most useful if the affiliate program could work from a shortened URL. Then you could also empower your members to post their external profile anywhere and everywhere they like to attract attention not only to themselves but to also make some extra cash to.
In addition; it would seems there needs to be a way to share revenue with your affiliate members so they can get some recurring revenue off members they invite. I don’t know how feasible this all is within Dolphin and the payment systems they have currently integrated yet as I have not got that far with true deployment yet. But its only one idea.
What I would love to see is for some of you out there to shed some of your ideas and experiences on best way to attract membership into a new community. I realize there are a thousand diffrent niches that one could use this software as a tool to enter into. However, it woudl see the challenge of getting intial members to sign up and then hang around because the site is continuing to grow would be a common challenge no matter what direction any of were to go. So please do share some ideas here.
Best wishes,
Zorro…………………………………….
Make Meaning Or Die
Good call! Would be interested to hear comments.
From our experiences - for a site to take off and gain a large membership base it always takes time, no matter what you do. The catch is that people do local searches - and once they can’t find anybody from their area - they run. BUT, there IS a way around…
For us - the best way to build a community was engaging people to join a discussion of mutual interest. In short - you pick a niche, set a topic and do your best to get the conversation going - this will make people come back. They don’t care about bells and whistles too much anymore - they need and want to be heard, they want an extra gratification for what they “are/know/give”. IMO The most powerful tool to keep a member ever in vented is … comments
:) 
yep, give them a chance to write, then comment - and you’re set. Let them upload a photo - and they will come to see opinions. Later on - they will become dependent on these comments and will call/invite friends.
Money don’t help - you wouldn’t pay much for friends, and most people don’t sell friends easily. Ah.. and we generally don’t have hundreds of real friends anyway.
So, I believe there are just a few ingredients that help a community site to take off, and they are (in order of importance):
1. Personal Attention (be prepared to write a lot)
2. Topic/Niche (they will write about what they care, they will join for what they need, they will look for who they are interested in)
3. Simplicity (don’t create levels, multi-levels and systems - you should be able to describe your site in 5 words)
4. Soul (no advice here, totally up to you)
5. Software (advice - BoonEx)
My 2 cents.
I could not agree more. My site is based around a radio station. This gets people from all over to come in and hang out with the DJ’s. Goof off on cams, and have a great time.
When you change the focus from ” Local meet up ” and center it on ” building a community of friends” then everyone wins, members return and remain loyal… just because of thier own interest have been met and they lose the focus on “local” attention.
Build a community focused on a common interest. try to come up with an original idea… something no one else has. Of course we all use Boonex, but we do not have to be “cookie cutter” sites. Each site can have a totally different focus and as Andrey said “Soul”
regards
Simion
Thanks guys! That is some very good feedback so far I have heard and looking for even more from many others too. I am very well connected to a local community niche so I may have a bit of an in there but I also know that is only a jump-start for the amount of members needed and need to expand geographically.
One thing I do understand very well is search strategy and so I did pick up loud and clear what you are talking about. I also have spent some time reading roadmap plans for 6.1 and it appears that Dolpin is making leaps and bounds to make some of these things much easier in the next release.
One of the things I have been struggling with is wondering when is the right time to begin to charge so the site can become profitable? And do you continue to offer a free membership and then just have upgrade levels. How do you determine the correct time to charge a fee for members seems like a challenge in itself? Is there a certain amount of free members one should have first or should a community offer a low cost one-time lifetime membership to early adopters.
I have some other unrelated sites that are more information based and are completely free to use but I make money from various referral services I provide. I am aware of Google Adsense and other forms of making profits online bt trying to do something a little diffrent. I personally am hoping to have a fee site.
What I did is I charged a large fee from the start… KNOWING that no one would do it. And only one or 2 options for that rate. Then after my member count got up I dropped it to half the price and added a few options to the list. This caused the members to jump.. and they jumped fast.
Simion,
Very nice approach not sure if I would have thought about it this way!
But what amount of members did you hold out to before you made this reduction and how hard was it to recruit the initial ones seeing you had not many to begin with?
Also did you at any time try and offer any lifetime memberships, trial memberships, or even free ones? And did you allow visitors to see who was already signed up or did you keep that from them until they registered. How many members do you currently have on your site now and how well does it perform?
Thank you for your feedback!!
Zorro……………………………………