Have you ever noticed how many TV commercials you see on major networks for dating websites like Match.com? Dating affiliate programs ad spots can run six figures so that should give you an idea of how profitable the dating industry can be for website operators. With their subscription business model the average lifetime value of a customer is very high. They are getting a $20 to $100 monthly free for a service that has very little overhead to operate. The online dating industry generates about $4.5 billion dollars per year with over 50m online daters and this article we will show you how to get your share of the pie. This can be a great side hustle!
What is a dating affiliate and dating leads?
The dating industry is competitive and the cost to acquire a new customer is expensive but well worth it. So most large dating sites have their own affiliate program where they will pay you if you refer someone to sign up and become a member of their website. Most programs will give you a unique link like datingsite.com/yourname442254 that you can either email, text, or place on your website or social media page.
A dating lead is usually an email or phone number of someone who is interested in online dating.
Different types of dating affiliate offers
There are a few different types of dating affiliate offers. Many of the companies offers different ways to earn money.
CPA offers – this stands for cost per action and basically means you will get paid if someone takes an action like signs up for a paid membership. Many dating websites offer free memberships with limited benefits (you can browser members but cant email them) and then you pay to upgrade and get access to all their features. Many have different membership levels. These tend to pay the best. Most dating offers now pay between $80 and $140 per sign up on their CPA offer. We will discuss the best CPA dating offers later in this article.
Share a sale offer – Some dating affiliate program offers will provide you residual income where they give you a cut of the membership fee each month for as long as someone you referred remains a member. For example for about a ten year period I ran a program for a little known site called swinglifestyle.com which is an adult dating website. For each person you got half of the monthly fee which varied by what package. If they signed up for month to month the cost was $15 so we got $7.50 a month per user.
Cost per click offer – These type of dating affiliate programs offers are rare now but they work a lot like Google Adsense where you put the affiliate code on your website and they pay a small fee (usually less than $1) for each person who clicks on the link and visit their website.
What are the best dating affiliate offers?
Now comes the confusing part which is finding what is the most profitable dating affiliate programs to run. There are now over 1500 different dating apps now but many are small apps. There are a few major players like the Match Group which owns match.com as well as several other brands who owns 25% of the market share and eHarmony.com has 12% of the market.
There are a few factors to consider when you are choosing which dating affiliate offers are best for you.
Who is your audience – The first thing to look at is how are you going to market your offers. We will get into some ideas on how to market later in this article but if you already have ideas on how to get you offer in front of people you need to ask what type of dating they are seeking. Are they single moms, older, in a rural area think farmersonly.com.
For many years while running dating affiliate offers my business was bringing in well over $100k a month from these offers. But I was marketing the programs on craigslist in the casual encounter section so those people were just looking for a hook up and not finding someone to marry so sites like Match.com or eharmony.com did not convert well.
So I ran programs like Adultfriendfinder.com, Swinglifestyle.com, Seeking.com, ect. which are more geared towards casual hookups. If you are marketing to single moms you might want to run a match.com but if it is a early 20’s then something like tinder might be a better fit.
Payment terms – If you are running a business cashflow management is always important and if you are running paid ads it can be critical to your success. Most of the dating affiliate programs pay on net 30 terms and most pay between the 15th and 30th of the following month. What that means if if you earn $2,000 in June then they will pay you that $2,000 on the 15th (or later) of July.
Some dating websites run their own affiliate program and some hire other companies to run the program for them. Some of those companies such as Maxbounty.com and Reflexmedia.com that will pay out weekly. That is important if you are spending money on paid advertising.
If you are spending $100 a day on advertising and you start ads on the 1st of the month you will spend about $4,500 on advertising before you get paid. If you use the weekly payment programs you can manage cashflow better and grow faster. Do keep in mind most affiliate programs require one payment before you are moved to weekly so you will need to wait a month before you get weekly payments.
Subscription cost – When choosing a dating affiliate program always ask yourself if you would sign up on that website before you run their offers. Some small dating sites will offer big payouts on their dating affiliate program but they do not have many members so your conversation rates will be really low. One of our best preforming programs was swinglifestyle and the rate at which the clicks turned into membership sales was almost twice as high as other programs we ran and a lot of that was because their membership fees were only $15 vs $30 or more at competing websites.
Always check their price point and see how good of a value it is compared to similar websites. Most cost per action companies will provide you with stats on how well their offers convert. But also consider your market.
We do very well with seeking.com and sugardaddy.com and their prices start at $99 per month but most of the guys are wealthy and if you are on a shared program with them most of their members stay active for a long period of time because they are not looking to find a long term partner.
Some of the best preforming dating affiliate offers we have used in the part are:
Seeking.com – This offer is ran by Reflexmedia.com which is a Sugar Daddy/Sugar Baby type dating site. It pays $140 per sign up for males who subscribe and $1.75 for free females. This is a great site because unlike most dating site the girls actually respond to the guys. Of course it is because they are getting paid!
AshleyMadison.com -This programs is offered by Maxbounty.com and pays $131 per paid sign up. Offer converts on sale of subscription. This one converts decent and pays well but the response rate from the females is low..
Adultfriendfinder.com – AFF runs and in house dating affiliate program and they offer several different options that pay per free sign up, shared sale, or one time per sign up which can be up to $140. They have lots of members and this does well with older adults.
Swinglifestyle.com – This program pays 50% of the monthly sale every month which is one of the better pay. It does much better with couples looking for singles or other couples but once they become a member they are likely to stay for a while so this is one of our favorite adult dating affiliate programs because it offers great residual income.
Whatsyourprice.com – This is an odd one but it pays $140 per paid sign up. It is about as close to a hooker website as you can get but it converts well.
Match.com – This program is ran by cj.com and they are one of the better converting dating affiliate programs for main stream dating. They pay 75% of the sale.
EHarmony.com – This is another well branded dating affiliate program that converts well and pays well. They are also ran by cj.com and pay $10 per lead as well as other payment options.
How to get dating app sign ups
The number way question I was ask when I would go to marketing conferences is how do we get so many sign ups. Most people who try to enter this space are told all you have to do is run pay per click ads on Google, Bing, and Facebook and you will make money and that is far from the truth.
The average cost per click to run dating PPC ads is around $2.78 with main keywords running over $4 per click. So to get 1,000 visitors to your website you will need to spend $2,780 in advertising cost. If you are converting at a rate of 3% to paid dating subscriptions that means you are getting around 30 sign ups per month.
If they pay $100 then you only made a $220 gross profit and that does not account for your labor, hosting cost, ect. So you are not really turning a profit and if you have a low conversation rate you can quickly lose thousands of dollars per month.
So how have we made millions without going broke in PPC, well we have had to be creative. For the first 10 years we ran dating affiliate programs we used craigslist to generate dating leads. They had men looking for women, women for men. Couples for couples, and everything in between. They had pages for over 480 different cities we so post ads in all 400+ craigslist cities and we used those email leads that came in to market out offers.
Sure it took some work. Every day we would post ads in 50 cities and then collect the emails so it was a lot of labor but it was also very profitable. We were broke college kids at the time and did not have cash for large email marketing campaigns where you just send out millions of emails and hope people read them. Instead we posted the ads so we knew every email address was from someone looking to date. And then we set up a bunch of free emails at sites like Gmail and Hotmail and we started sending out some emails.
Email marketing that works
Not all email marketing is the same. Between spam filters and the none stop marketing that we all get in our inbox every day most users just ignore an email that is just screaming “buy something from me” and it took us several years to figure out our email marketing was not working the way it should.
So instead of actually just collecting the emails and then sending an email blast we started actually replying to each individual email (of course it was mostly automated) so they user actually took the time to read it. We did not use fancy html email, just plain text and we kept it short. Most of the emails just said something like
Hey,
thanks for the email. My name is (We used our real first name). I hope you have had better luck on here than I have. I have not meet anyone yet on here but I have a few on Myaffiliatewebsite.com
And of course the website link had our affiliate link in it. We never ask them to go sign up but we did plant a seed in their head that maybe they should check it out. And a lot of them did just that.
If you are looking for a database of emails for dating leads we have them for as little as $.05 each. Click here to learn more.
Dating leads are a numbers game
The biggest mistake I see affiliate marketers make when trying to earn money from dating affiliate programs is they give up after a week or two without making much of an effort. It is a pure numbers game. The key is fresh leads, if they leads you are buying are a year old chances are good that person is no longer looking.
We ran ads in over 400 cities. Each day our ads would get 50 to 100 emails from thirsty guys and girls so we would see 40,000 emails per day sometimes. The average day we would reply to about 8,000 emails and some days are better than others but do the math. If you sign up one person in the top 100 largest cities per month and the dating affiliate offer pays $140 that is $14,000 per month from finding just one person in that city who wants to sign up on a dating site.
That is $168,000 a year by signing up one person a month in the top 100 largest cities. Not a bad way to make a living. We did also use those emails for email blast and they were effective but be creative. We would send email blast broken down by cities and mention the city so it got peoples attention. If you are interested in email marketing we do provide a full training program to any of our clients who purchase out dating leads.
We shared to much!
We get a little carried away when we starting talking about dating leads and dating affiliate programs because we have made some great money over the years. But we try not to share to much because we do not want to saturate the methods but if you are serious about making money from dating affiliate programs contacts us at info@therevenuepost.com and let us share how we can help you start earning money today from our dating leads email program.
While things have changed a lot over the years with Craigslist removing their dating ads and phone apps taking over the dating scene we still get thousands of leads per day and we offer dating leads in the form of email addresses and cell phone numbers. We can provide help with CANSPAM compliance and share with you methods on how to convert these leads into dollars. We even offer exclusive leads that are only sold to one person to help boost conversation rates.
We have dating leads for
- Men seeking women
- Men seeking men
- Women seeking women
- Couples seeking couples
- Couples seeking women
- Couples seeking Men
And more others. Our dating leads are all fresh leads and can even be provided daily that are less than 24 hours old. Our rates are $.05 per email and $.08 per phone number. We can provide them by location as well. We can also help you select the right dating affiliate program to fit your needs.
Contact us today for more info at info@therevenuepost.com but hurry as we do only have a limited number of leads per day and there is often a waiting list.
