whose your target market?
Before we get in to the hard stuff, you first need to consider what sort of market you are aiming to target with your site. Its better to build a dating site that specifically targets a group or range of people with similar interests than just doing a generic dating site that appeals to everyone. There are already too many large generic dating sites with multi-million pound budgets that any new site cannot even hope to compete with.
One method I use for creating a niche is that I write 5 lists of words; Location, Gender, Age, Status and Activity Related. An example of a very short list might be:
Location (Geo): UK, England, English, US, Americans, American, States, Florida, France, French, Germany, German, Russia, Russian.
Gender Related: male, man, chap, guy, bloke, Women, woman, girl, lady,
Age Related: Teen, adult, pensioner, youth, mature, old, young, virgin, 30somethings
Status Related: Single, married, available, separated, looking, friendship
Activity Related: Drinking, Dance, theatre, eating out, clubs, music, concerts, films, staying in, horse riding, football, pop music, computer games, quiet pubs
From this group you might consider targeting “young sing male concert” goers looking for girls that are into the same thing. Or 30Somthings single again’s looking for friendship wanting to meet for a drink in a quiet pub.
By using lists of words It helps you to discover new markets that perhaps you initially wouldn’t had thought had otherwise. Its a good idea in spending a substantial amount of time at this stage as the subject or niche you choose will have a pivotal role of how your web site will perform for its life time. You want to spend time on this stage, because ideally you want to have a strong brand identity and after a while your site advertises itself through word of mouth or has a loyal affiliate manager following that are promoting your business for you.
For this tutorial I’m going to use the niche of “single 30Somethings looking for other club goers from the UK”. At this stage you may want to consider whether you want to target a particular gender (I don’t) and you’ll notice I’ve decided to specifically target a particular country. In practise this could be a little too much niche like, where as in the real world of on-line trading it would make more sense to open the side up to a slightly wider audience.
<strong>Interpreting Google Results</strong>
You may think you know how to search Google, having done so for years. When you are looking for a brand name or an idea you have to learn to interpret the results in a slightly different way. Its not just about what results you can see, but also those they are not present. After all, you are looking to fill a gap in the market and not to duplicate another site exactly, since you will fail in your aspirations of having a successful dating site.
Go to Google Search and now search for the keywords of “single 30 club uk dating” (excluding the quotes).
<a href=”http://www.sinsearch.co.uk/blog/wp-content/uploads/2008/10/googleserps1.jpg”><img class=”alignnone size-full wp-image-383″ title=”googleserps” src=”http://www.sinsearch.co.uk/blog/wp-content/uploads/2008/10/googleserps1.jpg” alt=”" width=”500″ height=”284″ /></a>
The search results includes mainly two types of web sites; existing dating sites and club/music orientated sites. This is perfect because you have the opportunity of promoting the site to two core audiences and a multitude of secondary audiences related to Music and club culture.
Another important thing you should be looking for is to see if the keywords you have used returns search results that includes advertising from the same or related industry. You can see from this results page it features an advert from match.com at the top of the page, plus also a screen full of ads down the right hand side. This should tell you something! It tells you that many dating sites consider this collection of terms to valuable to pay for advertising for.
If you read any on-line marketing book about using Adwords to promote your site, they always suggest trying to find the golden egg – ie, a popular group of keywords that no one else has thought of and use them in your Adwords campaign since the pay per click unit price will be very small. This is fine for Adwords, but in reality if you decided to base your site using the keywords of “uk dating” then you have a very small chance of getting your site to number one before you retire in 20 years time.
To be successful you need to pick a group of keywords that sit in between those that are the most popular and those that are the least popular as seen my Adword advertisers as this gives you a fair indication of how successful your web site may be in the future.
The number of search results that has been returned during your analysis is something that you should look closely at. If there’s to many then its a good indicator that the search criteria needs to be narrowed and therefore you perhaps you need to tighten your niche. If on the other hand hardly any results are being returned then its a fair indication that its not going to be popular enough and therefore not draw the sort of interest you are hoping for.
In the example above, Google is returning 299,000 results which would make it pretty easy to make it to number one without much effort. You can quite easily just create a web site, link it from a couple of locations and be number one in Google within weeks. When I am looking at creating a new niche I am generally looking for a wider audience of around 1.5 million results in the search results page. Though it should be said that I would also use “single 30 club uk dating” as well and create content that specifically targets that particular set of keywords to ensure as wider spread of traffic as possible.
If you particular search returns in excess of 10 million results then you certainly need to narrow your niche to something that gives a smaller number of results. At this point you could chose to narrow it by selecting to target your site to a particular genre of music that is played at certain clubs where the 30 somethings hang out.
