Hi ,

I´ve recently bought a premium domain for a dating site in Portuguese (Brazil) and setup a site trough a white label program.

I´m very happy on ho the site looks and with the quaility of the domain itself as its the exact translation of "datingbrazil" (i am portuguse myself no no language barrier).I didnt post the url cause i don´t know if it breaks the forum rules.

A litle about myself to help understand my question:

I am a 32 year old Economic´s graduate and i have an extensive knowledge working for iGaming in the past 6 years for a number of gaming companies where i have achieved positions in Senior Management in the Marketing and Afilliates areas. Also a lot of Customer Service experience (also for online gaming)

I have never had a dating website but decided to take advantage of this oportunity s the brazilian barket is a 200 M people market and its booming as never before. The middle class there is booming right now and have money to spare (literally).


Now my "situation" :I want to market my website but really don´t have the specific SEO/Adwords,etc.. knowlegde to do it myself.
My idea is to get someone to invest in adwords and doing the seo for me while i take care tradicional advertising,customer service,mass mailing etc and we split the profits 50/50 .

Does this sound logical to you? How would i go about proposing this to an investor/seo specialist and who should i target ?

Would you try a diferent approach ?

Cheers

IMO there are two businesses here:
#1 The offline marketing dating website
#2 The digital advertising website

The big issue I see as an SEO is that if you bring someone this idea and they think it is good they can just do it themselves, almost no barrier to entry. Not sure if an NDA is practical in Brazil but IMO this is probably a situation to just hire the SEO. Fortunately for you I believe SEO's outside the US run significantly cheaper (I would be budgeting $90k-$150k/year for the lead SEO and $40k-$60k for his help in the US).

Unfortunately, even if you have the capital to outsource this it is not a good idea to do so. You cannot hand half your business for someone else to handle with zero knowledge of how it works and hope for the best so you will have to learn enough that you can outsource it effectively. Based on skimming Markus Frind's blog (founder of POF) http://plentyoffish.wordpress.com/ he seems to think coding is pretty critical as well.

There is more stuff but the point is you cannot plan to outsource this. So don't do it right? Not exactly. If the opportunity is as big as you say, go out and learn this stuff yourself. Even if your first idea doesn't work if there truly is big market just figure out how to make it happen, assuming the Portuguese SEO market is less competitive than the US this is probably a huge opportunity.

Best of luck. (Ambles off to find a Portuguese Rosetta stone).

SEO/Ad Words is not difficult. You should be able to learn it fairly quickly.

Do you have the money for an ad words campaign?

I think offering 50% of the profit is insane. It might be a decent deal if you are expecting the partner to pay for all adwords, you plan to go aggressive into a competitive market and you can't afford the cost yourself. Even then I'd try to raise the money rather than give away that much of a business.

Also you should expect a barrage of SEO cold calls -- both here and by phone and e-mail. They are all scams. While legitimate SEO exists you can't afford nor do you need their services. The people who contact you are always complete garbage.

Henry, the spammer bumped a 3 year old thread so doubtful OP is going to read your advice now ...

Thanks. Wasn't paying attention.

i just spent a month in brasil

a- they all have okcupid and tinder
b- south american girls are flakey as ****

gl though

I know this is a dead thread, but I was just researching dating sites the past few days.

I'm just curious as to what experienced Internet marketers would think about a similar story as the OP, but with someone willing to invest cash in marketing and can get SEO done.

I'm a publisher and blogger and not in the position to do this now, but its interesting to me because of the conditions of the country.

I found this site for sale by a team of developers for 1100. Imo it needs a new URL and development to get to launch status, but they will provide more work to get it there and they are legit as I know a solid Cambodian investor in their operations.

I have no idea if it would better to develop from scratch, but the site would be the best Cambodian dating site out there as it is now. The other legit Cambo dating sites are part asia networks, but dont stand out.

My idea would be to invest 5k or so to get up and going. Then be on the ground and drumming up tons of legitimate hot university girls from all over the country to join at first who are dying to meet foreigners to get it going and connecting with the gazillion white dudes coming into the country for that reason.

While not sure I want to do something like this, Im personally well connected in Cambo and its so easy to do business there and is a gold mine, will only get better in a few years with mass positive political change coming.

Is there money to be made if done correctly, or a fools dream?

www.cambodiadating.net

I think it's been a diluted market for a long time now, and you'll seriously struggle to get and momentum going. Picking a niche like you have probably is the best chance you have though.

I don't think anyone here understands what a 'niche' topic is on the internet in the year 2014. If you think (Country) + "Dating" is "niche", I regret to inform that you're 14 years too late.

"Niche" in the year 2014 for a huge keyword like 'dating' would be something rendered way, way down like "Gay Cosplay Paraplegic Dating".

Also, don't bother trying to compete with something entrenched unless you offer something waaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaay better in terms of functionality and even then, you still have to let it soak and catch organically. If your plan is to Adwords your way around established competition, you're already busted, you just don't know it yet.

Thanks for your insight and the lol ...

I saw an ad on TV last week for a farmer dating website, which I would consider pretty niche - but a quick Google search shows 6 farmer dating sites on the first page.

That is funny as I saw the same commercial and did the same thing and was a little shocked farmer dating could support so many.

This seems like the exact type of industry where a company would create one site for a specific dating site and then just clone it and change the "niche" over and over and over.

It isn't that easy. With the amount of competition you need to know the niche to be successful. Technology is not the issue -- it is a marketing endeavour.

Yea, I am definitely not thinking they are all successful, but the farmer dating example reminded me of how adult content websites just skin the same template over and over and add a new niche.

I goggled poker dating sites and couldn't believe there were quite a few. Seems like it would be a little difficult to get that going unless tons of gold diggers out there or dudes dating dudes.

Most businesses do a decent to terrible job with Adwords, even huge players with multi million dollar spends. So long as they aren't a ton better at getting conversions and extracting value from them, competing on the Adwords playing field should be do-able.

And that's in big markets in English. On Google. Niche stuff, non-English, and Bing are almost always less competitive. And don't laugh at Bing - they still land something like a quarter of search plus the eyeballs are less jaded and at least in my experience convert a bit better than Google users.

We're not talking about viable operations strategically competing against their competition on the adwords playing field.

We're talking about upstards (correct spelling) who think that they can buy their way to relevance against an established competitor via going down the adwords rabbit hole.

It doesn't work.

It's how I pay bills and finance my own personal moon shots. Obviously you have to have something people like enough to use once they click the ad and land on your site or app, but that's a given.

And the dating site market might also work with PPC, given OP is going to get near instant feedback on ads and campaigns against metrics like signups and sales, also resultant ad revenue if he runs ads on his own sites. It's also pretty easy for OP to learn if he is any good at online marketing by first launching an affiliate site to learn the ropes. Maybe his own site starts out as an affiliate site IDK.

PPC is not easy, if anything because the other competing ads and organics on the screen change over time and you need to constantly adapt to not bleed money, but anyone who can study learn poker can probably do ok.

PPC could also be useful to solve the chicken and egg problem of dating sites needing enough members to be useful and it being difficult to get started with adding the first members due to this.