How can I get a daddy/bears personals site off the ground?

[Marc]

Hi all,

I want to make a personals site for older guys, similar to bear411, bearwww and silverdaddies. I know it took years for those sites to get to where they are today.

My 2 questions are:

1. How can I get some starter profiles to get it going? If people log in and see no one in their city it will go nowhere.
2. Can anyone recommend some great personals software to use?

Ive always wanted to do this and for now Im treating it more like a hobby than a business, but maybe a few years down the road if there are a lot of people on it could turn into a business.

Thanks for any ideas.

[LavenderLounge]

I just launched a free personals section on MuscleBearCub.com and I've been approaching it from a more traditional marketing angle - advertising in print and outreach to bars.

I've been getting a lot of free signups, but for some reason, no one wants to add their picture! I keep writing to the mailing list telling them they're not going to get laid if they don't show a photo!

The whole site was built with Joomla, and the personals software was a plugin.

[Bec]

Some other software to look at:

www.i-rater.com
www.invisionpower.com
www.buildacommunity.com
www.subdreamer.com

[Marc]

Thanks for software the tips all.

So you didnt have any problems getting members to sign up even when there were no members to start with?

I figured people would log in and do a search, see theres no one online, no one in their city, and no one in the entire world, , and decide not to join.

[LavenderLounge]

MuscleBearCub.com is probably not a good example to answer your question about starting from scratch. I had a "placeholder" version of the site I was promoting for a long time before the site got re-built with the personals.

Unless you are willing to buy an existing personals site, you gotta start somewhere.

[DonMike]

People love free stuff. How about offering free one year premium memberships to the first 200 members. It'll populate the site and get people buzzin' about it. Then, as the site grows those members will rejoin after a year while they made it interesting for other people to join.

I have no experience in this, just an idea.

[Marc]

People love free stuff. How about offering free one year premium memberships to the first 200 members. It'll populate the site and get people buzzin' about it. Then, as the site grows those members will rejoin after a year while they made it interesting for other people to join.

I have no experience in this, just an idea.

Thats a good idea. It made me think gof another good idea, I could offer cash in a lottery system, for every 100 people who sign up we'll give away $50, or something. Or offer a cash bonus to those who bring their friends, that would help a lot.

Also I would make it totally free to register with no premium features. Kind of like how Manhunt started out, they waited until they had a ton of members before they started.

[DonMike]

Thats a good idea. It made me think gof another good idea, I could offer cash in a lottery system, for every 100 people who sign up we'll give away $50, or something. Or offer a cash bonus to those who bring their friends, that would help a lot.

Also I would make it totally free to register with no premium features. Kind of like how Manhunt started out, they waited until they had a ton of members before they started.

Good idea but make sure when you go to a pay system you only add features rather than take away. Hold back the really good stuff until you are charging. People would be really angry if they could chat and share pics and stuff and then one day you began charging for all of that.

[tombarr]

make some free bear sites, link back to your domain.

have some fake profiles on the site made from content you license.

add your site to directories, Link lists in this niche.

add a blog, add a rating script.

this will seed your site.