Article # 5 – “Niche” your Niche Dating Site

In his article last week, Mark talks about the struggle the “generalist” sites are now having to “please all the people all of the time”, and your opportunity to “go niche”.

In this article, I thought it’d be worth taking this one step further and make sure that even your niche does not become too generalist…if that makes sense!?

Let’s take a niche site (let’s say Single Parent Dating) as an example. Dating for single parents is a niche that’s growing around Europe. But when you create your site and marketing campaign, a true niche marketer will recognise that:

• People are single parents for different reasons
• Single parents are looking to date for different reasons
• They will therefore be looking for different things from a dating site
• They’re likely to use different search terms in order to find your site (ie not just “single parent dating” – although wouldn’t life just be so much EASIER if they did!)
• They’re going to have to find engaging content on your site (that relates to their search) if they’re going to join
• They need to have an ongoing positive experience if they’re going to stay.

Starting to think in this way enables you to start segmenting your market (finding the niches within your niche), so that you can create a site that is relevant and engaging for your members.

Break your market down into Segments

When you started with AdWords, you will have generated your core keywords list from which to build your campaigns and ad groups. These AdGroups are a great place to start for niching the pages and content on your site.

Look at which ones are currently working hardest for you (choose the top 3 to start with), and decide which search terms seem to be the most popular (in terms of traffic and time-on-site) and effective (in terms of sales and lifetime value).

Create specific landing pages for each segment

In Article #3, we showed you how to use some DatingFactory tools to create search term-specific content on your landing pages. If you want to go one further, create three different landing pages (one for each top-performing ad group), and make sure that the entire content of the page is relevant to the search term in question.

When doing this, bear in mind the following:

• Make sure the url you use is relevant to the search term (eg http://www.yoursite.com/single-parent-dating.html) rather than some gobbledygook like .com/103947_fooel40.html (nobody’s going to find that page again, are they?)
• Ensure all div tags and your Header1 are related to the search terms (this is more for Google than for the users!)
• Write between 400-450 words of content on your homepage that is relevant and unique (again good for Google, but written with the user in mind first and foremost)
• If you use any images, again make sure that the file name and alt text is relevant to the content on the page.

Add these top 3 categories to your blog

Running a blog on your site is a great way to engage regularly with your members, and to update your site with fresh content.

If you have a blog, use your top 3 performing adgroups as a guide for what you should write articles about. If, for example, one of your top themes is “divorced dating”, set it up as a category within your blog, and then get your creative juices flowing to write regular, interesting, engaging and useful articles on “divorced dating”.

If you don’t have a blog, you really should get one going.

The Result?

Even though you may run  niche site, it’s a mistake to assume that everyone is joining for the same reason. By spending some time and effort to understand your market in more detail, you will be rewarded many times over in the long term:

• Your cost per registration will drop as a higher percentage of visitors will decide to engage and join
• Your cost per acquisition will reduce too, as more people decide to subscribe
• Their lifetime value is likely to increase as members decide to stay with yu longer
• You’ll enjoy your online more, as you start engaging with your members.

Once you’ve seen some success in your first three specific pages and you know what you’re doing, you can expand from there, all the time increasing the relevancy and reach of your site.

If you want help with targeting your sites or improving your online marketing, contact timtaylor@t3active.co.uk.