<<< Making money online – example through online dating - part 18

Make sure to thoroughly test your website, checking every link and especially the forms page where users need to enter data which gets submitted to the server.

Try to check every possible variations of data entry to find possible bugs and remember, you want to be able to break the system when it comes to testing.

For a highly interactive site such as a dating site, you will need to have customized code that talks to the database.

Basically the database will be the repository of all the information pertaining to the user and each time you access web pages with a members profile you are simply querying the database and retrieving the information that gets displayed on the web page.

Similarly when you submit information, it will be stored in the database.

Retrieval and access to the database needs to be reasonably fast and it involves writing optimized database queries.

Making money online – example through online dating - part 20 >>>

<<< Making money online – example through online dating - part 19

(6) Pre-launch stage

At the pre-launch stage, you will need to test the entire site for full operational capability including all the features, confirmation emails that are sent out and the important back-end administrative section for managing the entire site.

Since information is stored and retrieved from databases, the administrative section are essentially web pages that are designed to extract all the relevant information from the database in the same way that a user accesses their web pages.

The administrative section is like a super user with the privilege of accessing any data under their command.

This can include any data associated with user or users and can disable users from joining or sending messages.

These are necessary controls for the administrator of the site to manage users activity and make sure that the site is operating as it is intended.

Making money online – example through online dating - part 21 >>>

<<< Making money online – example through online dating - part 20

It is also the place where you will approve or disapprove photos submitted to your dating site, filter potentially fake profiles, provide support to users, check the stats of the users activity and many other features.

In addition to the administrative section of your website, you will also need to put additional code into your web pages to monitor the traffic and analyze the web page performance.

A good tool for this is Google’s own traffic monitoring tool called Analytics.

You apply the code provided to you once you have created an Analytics account and through there you will be able to see detailed traffic information, visitors activity, referring sites and many other information to track performance.

Making money online – example through online dating - part 22 >>>

<<< Making money online – example through online dating - part 21

Depending on the revenue stream you have configured for your site, you may need to use Google Adsense code embedded in your web pages to generate advertising income.

Some school of thought advocates that if you are primarily targeting your site to be an ad. income generator, you should design your site around the banners rather than the other way around.

Some sites are designed pretty much like that, case in point Plentyoffish.com.

Whatever option you choose, keep in mind that banners need to ‘blend’ with the background of your pages so you can maximize on the click through which will generate more money for you.

Again, there are many topics on this subject and something you will need to spend more time on, since this will be your primary income stream from the site.

For subscriptions and paid based dating sites, you will need to sign up with a merchant account and setup the web pages to accept credit cards.

This can be tricky if you are new to the market and one recommendation would be to utilize Paypal’s convenient web payment system first before you move to a fully-fledged commerce system.

Making money online – example through online dating - part 23 >>>

<<< Making money online – example through online dating - part 12

This comes as no surprise, because if your website was in the area of ‘online dating’, there are literally thousands of other websites out there, why should Google position a new website amongst these aged websites that have been running for many years.

If your SEO guys were smart enough, they would have already told you how to select more appropriate keywords than the hugely competitive keywords of ‘online dating’.

However, even with the less competitive keywords, you may not come out on top because of other mature web pages out there with those keywords.

Here age of the domain name and how long pages have been in existence can have some bearing.

If at all possible, try to get a domain name that has already been registered for a number of years and one that potentially had a website.

Making money online – example through online dating - part 14 >>>