<<< Making money online – example through online dating - part 27

Marketing is happening all around us in our daily lives, we are continuously being bombarded with advertisements from TV, radio, internet (via email, web).

Over ten years ago, Yahoo/Google occupied the buzz words in the internet space, followed by MySpace and today Facebook/Tweeter.

Although, your marketing efforts are not aimed at becoming the next big Facebook icon, but more of a humble beginning with your new free dating site.

Despite the enormous growth and power of these key players in the market, they would not be where they are if they didn’t have the users.

The important point to learn from this is that these players ‘shape’ the marketing trends and smaller websites can take notice.

In the same way that the big companies such as GM, Oracle, Microsoft create a string of cottage industries through their products and services, the same is happening on the internet.

There have been countless number of people who are becoming rich from Google Adsense, Facebook applications etc. just to name a few.

So the first line of action in the initial marketing efforts is to tap into these products, services available via these mammoth portal sites.

Making money online – example through online dating - part 29 >>>

<<< Making money online – example through online dating - part 25

The reason marketing is such a ‘grey area’ is because there are no hard and fixed rules for doing something that works.

When you create something from new such as a dating website, it requires specific toolsets and a vision and the results usually speak for themselves.

However, in marketing the diversity of this area is so vast that it is impossible to dictate a unique outcome.

If this were the case, then all companies would be doing it and there would be no ups and downs that companies face during their lifetimes.

What it takes is an innate understanding of the dynamism and ‘flux’ that is shaping the market place that we see today.

This means we need to be alert to every ‘sound’ that is reverberating in the marketing world, particularly in the online marketing which growing at a phenomenal rate.

Making money online – example through online dating - part 27 >>>

<<< Making money online – example through online dating - part 26

The growth in marketing that we are witnessing again reminds me of the times over a decade ago when customers were clambering for online advertising and paying top dollars for this.

Just think, as we speak the world is going through major economic challenges but companies like Google and Apple are not feeling anything by this, in fact they are growing.

This pace of growth will happen even faster as the economic turnabouts happen and we will see a new fervor in online marketing that we have never seen before.

Look at all the major retailers such as Sears, Target, Walmart etc. and how they are clambering to get into this space.

Making money online – example through online dating - part 28 >>>

<<< Making money online – example through online dating - part 24

Online Marketing

As mentioned previously in this article, the key to success of your site will depend largely on your marketing prowess and that a large portion of the budget should be put aside for this.

Although your final product can come across as something of great visual beauty, it is not going far unless you focus your efforts in online marketing.

The key is online marketing and many people forget this and it is something you will need to do with great determination and passion.

So get busy reading, researching, analyzing, tweaking and late hours into the night!

It can be challenging but very rewarding.

Making money online – example through online dating - part 26 >>>

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

It is unlikely that users will come in droves depending on whether you have spent thousands of dollars on the PPC (pay per click) campaigns from the search engines.

You should take the opportunity to continue to look for potential bugs in the application and anything reported by the users that are now trickling through to your site.

Put your users to very good use and get them to send you feedback on the site and many of them will report errors that you were not able to capture in the testing stages.

Some will also offer their suggestions, but do not try to take every suggestion as further implementation changes, but look for suggestions that appear repeatedly.

The repeated ones are what you will need to consider before applying them to the site.

Continue to monitor the site and performance because up to now as I have mentioned earlier, the work has just begun!

Making money online – example through online dating - part 25 >>>