An Online Dating Blog by Shimrit Elisar

Promoting your dating site: the PR trick that never gets old

May 1st, 2007

With online dating getting so competitive, it’s getting harder and harder for sites to stand out and get noticed. Companies resort to all kinds of silly and nasty tricks to get media attention, which always amazes me. Why do people go to all that trouble when any decent-sized dating site already has a readily available, massive PR resource just waiting to be used?

I’m talking users. Masses of them.
Come up with some questions, stick a poll on your site and within a short time, you’ll have yourself a nice little PR gem to sell the press. Here’s one plentyoffish made earlier.
It’s got everything:

• A “shocking” revelation

if your poll is not shocking enough on its own, you could always fiddle with the results, although that would obviously be wrong so I couldn’t possibly suggest that.

• A celebrity’s name thrown in for effect

In this case, Demi Moore. This always gets people interested. If you’re lucky, the journos will even stick a pic of said celebrity in with the article.
To encourage them to do that, make sure you pick someone hot and preferably female as your celebrity of choice. People love celebrities. If they see a picture, they will read the article.

• The cherry on top: a staggering number of research subjects, making the poll seem extra-conclusive.

Even a 1000 members make up a decent-sized poll but, obviously, the more the merrier. 50,000 users may actually be a bit much for most journalists in the UK to take seriously, though. We’re the land of understatements here. Maybe more people would buy into it in the US?

The bonus round:

Regionalisation is always nice, too. States, cities, counties: if they have their own regional papers, they’ll love free articles about themselves.

Polls are easy to do, relatively cheap and nobody will ever get tired of them. It doesn’t matter if every dating site in the world starts dishing out poll-based PR articles on a daily basis. If you can come up with good questions, journalists (and, more importantly, their readers) will keep lapping them up. Watch and learn.

Entry Filed under: Industry stuff, Marketing Dating Sites