Archive for June, 2007
When meeting people in real life, it’s possible to be wowed by a person, even though on paper he or she would have looked not quite right for us.
Online, on the other hand, we often only meet people based on a very specific set of characteristics.
A woman might think she is only interested in meeting men 6′ tall or taller, but if she ran into a 5’11″ man at a bar, she might not even notice.
A man may think he only wants to meet a woman under the age of 35, but what if the perfect 36 year old came along?
I don’t know a single person who never deviated from his or her supposed ideal at least once. The fact is, when the right person comes along, you can suddenly realise that the things that really matter to you are totally different from those you thought mattered.
Unfortunately, the limitations of the online dating world mean that you could easily become a slave of your limiting ideal, to the point where you are completely blocked to the possibility of meeting anyone else.
Obviously, there is no harm in starting your search by looking for your absolute ideal, but be aware of the limitations as you search. If your net doesn’t bring up enough potentials, expand your search and do your vetting in person rather than online. At the very worst, you will come out having learned even more about yourself and your needs.
June 26th, 2007
Seeing as most of the north of England is covered in water. It will apparently be rescheduled.
June 26th, 2007
I’ve just joined Blog Carnival and I am setting up an online dating carnival. Blog carnivals are blog-hosted columns that collect expert-written articles on a particular topic. Sort of like a little news aggregators hosted on a blog. It’s a good way to forge links with other blogs and get stuff out there. I am giving it a go to see if it turns into anything interesting. I have no idea if anyone ever looks at the thing.
If you have a blog that’s to do with online dating in any way, feel free to read all about blog carnivals and submit your own posts to be included in mine.
The first edition of this will be posted on July 10, assuming I get enough posts to include. Otherwise, I’ll just extend the deadline 
If it looks like it’s going to get any interest, I’ll move this stuff to its own page.
Seeing as I can’t seem to be able to put the widget on this blog for now, please submit via our Blog Carnival index page or email any links to info@onlinedatingbook.co.uk
June 23rd, 2007
If you own a dating site and want to run an ad campaign that will get you actual, immediate results (i.e. people signing up to your site) as opposed to branding, you’re far better off running an ad campaign online rather than offline. Online, the people you are trying to sell your services to are only a few clicks away from your site and everything is trackable, allowing you to see exactly how your campaign is performing. Online banners are interactive, giving you more options to play with compared to , say, a newspaper ad. This is not always good, though, as it seems to make some advertisers and designers lose their heads and forget the whole purpose of this exercise (i.e. getting people to sign up to the site). Manyof the world’s biggest dating sites got big not because of branding but because of direct marketing campaigns designed to bring in as many customers as possible. Direct marketing is everything branding isn’t and people who come from one discipline often find it very hard to get into the mindset. I sometimes look at other people’s campaigns and think to myself “there is no way that site is making any money from this campaign”. My campaigns, on the other hand, generally worked
Here are a few things I learned while marketing 5 of the UK’s busiest dating sites in this particular way:
Continue Reading June 23rd, 2007
I was on U105 in Belfast this Tuesday on the lunchtime show, which was cool. My mom listened in from Israel via their website and I was being interviewed from my bedroom in London (it’s the most quiet room in the house). I felt very 21st century.
We talked about the book, online dating safety, how it can help people’s love lives: all the usual stuff.
Next week I will be on a late morning show on BBC Radio Humberside on Tuesday and possibly on BBC Coventry & Warwickshire as well.
Things are slowly starting to pick up. The book is selling and seems to be picking up on Amazon. It’s all getting quite exciting
June 23rd, 2007
*** Please note, the website below no longer works. I had a look to see if there are any others and found this one, which claims to be free to use (and I just love the front page image!). In the UK, Lovestruck.com, the chic international urban dating site, were recently offering poker night singles’s events in London, in conjunction with PKR Casino. They do weekly online poker nights for registered Lovestruck members on the PKR site, which I *think* are open to Lovestruck users from all over the world. The site is free to use in many cities, but not in others (though there is a free trial going on at the moment in those, including the London one)***
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I don’t normally pick up on other people’s press releases when they’re advertising new sites unless I have a specific point to make about their workmanship (see earlier post), but this one made me laugh so much when I saw the headline in Google News, I had to blog it:
Poker-Online-Dating (www.Poker-Online-Dating.com) launches its new and exciting free dating site for online poker players. It matches poker players together from around the world who are looking for true love.
Our site provides a safe environment where people of similar interests and hobbies can meet. Imagine meeting someone online who loves playing poker as much as you. You can discuss the latest poker tournaments you’ve entered, your best poker hands, or your highest winnings without boring your date. Even better, your date understands you!
(and the rest)
Of all the niche fusion ideas in the world this one’s right up there with the Korean Pizza.
“Are you ready to combine online poker with online dating?”
I’m not sure I am, really!
June 23rd, 2007
There is a fine line between creating a newsworthy, attention-grabbing publicity pieces and making your press release seem too unlikely to be true.
Dating, love, sex, relationships: they are all hot topics that can forever be used to get journalists interested. We all know that many tabloids don’t bother checking their facts, but even the laziests, greediest journos have their limits.
Here’s an example of a pretty dodgy press release.
I got excited when I saw this headline:
Half of Brits try online dating
I started reading the full article:
More Brits than ever are turning to the internet to find love, new research has revealed.
Fifty-three per cent of Brits admit to registering on an average of two dating websites and 83 per cent have been on a dating site at some point.
This is big, big news, n’est pas? This seemed like a juicy piece for me to comment about, until, somewhere down the line, the standard press release structure came through. Turns out this was a poll of 3,000 people conducted for a certain UK dating site.
Not exactly a blinding proof, is it? Crude workmanship annoys me.
Of course, I’m just being mean. Usually, at least one tabloid would pick up on something like this. It’s just that this has not exactly been a slow news week, so the papers have mostly been talking about Gaza and Paris Hilton and Barrymore. As it stands, though, I’ve not seen this picked up yet. Am keeping my eye out though!
June 16th, 2007
