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