FabulousEntertainment

It really is a good that we don’t rely on Google for our marketing. We were on page 1 for “uk swingers” and yesterday we dropped to page 14!

This sort of thing is virtually always the result of a penalty being applied. It’s obviously not the dreaded PR0 penalty because it if was we wouldn’t even be appearing on page 14.

I have a Google Alert set up for “Fab Swingers” and this gave me a clue as to what was happening. I noticed that I was getting a lot of alerts for my content but on another domain. What’s happened is that my ISP has accidentally pointed a number of other domains to my server. Unfortunately these domains are more established than fabswingers.com so these domains have been treated as the authority for my content and the real Fab Swingers has been given a duplicate content penalty!

I’ve fixed this by changing the Apache configuration so that the Fab Swingers site is no longer the default site on the server. This means that any domain erroneously pointed to us will not get duplicate content.

I imagine that this will take a good few weeks to clear. In the meantime, I’m going to step up our non-SEO marketing to make sure that we don’t see a dip in traffic.

I’ve decided to do some off-line marketing in addition to the online we’ve been doing. Anna is working on some Credit Card Flyers, we’re going to order 20,000 and then distribute them through members of the site and clubs.

My back-of-the-envelope calculation is that we need a response rate of about 4% to make this campaign profitable.

I’ve also been considering a classified advert in the News of the World, according to the ratecard this would be £141 plus VAT (although I don’t think I’ve ever paid the ratecard price) so I would need about 500 members for it to be worthwhile. The paper has a circulation of 3.7 million and about 9.1 million readers with 60% of the readers under 45 so to meet my target I’d need 0.005% or 1 in 20,000 readers signing-up.

Both of these options are almost certain to be better value than Pay Per Click, which based on my estimates just won’t make sense at all for us.

Up to now the main focus on my SEO has simply been to get Fab Swingers out of the infamous Google sandbox and build some PageRank and authority for the site. This is now done and the site is coming up quite high on very competitive terms.

So the time has come to look at some on-page SEO. The most important page on a site is the homepage and there were a few things I hadn’t done a very good job of.

First off the title was Fab Swingers: Totally free swinging site for USA and UK which I’ve now changed to UK Swingers, Irish Swingers, 100% free swinging site. For my core UK market, “UK swingers” is definitely the main term to target, even in my present position on page 2 of Google I’m getting hundreds of visitors from it.

Ireland is the country I’m doing next best in and “Irish swingers” seems to have the highest swinging-related volume in that country.

Finally a lot of people do search for “swinging” but much less than go for “swingers” (which is of course why I called the site Fab Swingers rather than Fab Swinging) so I’ve got swinging and free into the title too. (One of my friends says that marketing is all about free, new or sex!)

The H1 title I’ve changed from Fabulous Swingers in UK and USA to Free UK Swingers, Irish Swingers. I’m afraid that no one is gong to be looking for “fabulous swingers” so I’ve just gone for my top two terms. ‘Free’ is in there largely for the human readers — it’s way too easy to focus so much on SEO that you forget about the most important visitors to the site!

I’ve also changed the meta description from “Fab Swingers is a Fun, Free and Fabulous Adult Dating for USA, UK, Australia, Canada, Ireland and New Zealand.” to “Fab Swingers is the largest completely free swingers site for UK, Ireland, USA, Canada, Australia, New Zealand”. My aim with the description tag is to increase the number of people who click on the link so this description will get chopped off at the end but hopefully it emphasises the size of the site and the free aspect.

I’m estimating search volume for “uk swingers” at about 90,000 a month across all search engines so by getting high on page one of Google we should be getting exposure to about 67,500 people and perhaps 10,000 clicks. If I can achieve a 20% conversion rate then that’s about 2,000 new members a month — conversion rates for free sites are very high! For “Irish swingers” I expect that to come in at just under 10% of the “uk swingers” numbers.

I’m delighted to say that we’re now on page 2 of both Google.com (results 15) and Google.co.uk (result 18) for swingers UK. This is another 4 places forward which is good progress for the site as it’s a relatively competitive term.

The traffic we’re getting isn’t huge though, we’ll need to be on page 1 before we see significant sign-ups.

I don’t think there’s any single reason for this progress; I suspect it’s a whole lot of factors including our low bounce rates, high traffic, increased inbound links, 10 year domain registration period, constant increases in the site content and internal links.

I guess that I really should do some other SEO too, I’d like to see some progress on Irish swingers. The Irish side of the site has been doing really well and the Alexa rank in Ireland is higher than the UK ranking too!

I’m delighted to say that we’ve made some very significant progress on Google. Search for “uk swingers” on Google.co.uk and we’re result 22 (top of page 3) and result 20 (bottom of page 2) on Google.com. This is huge move forward. There’s been quite a lot of activity recently so I’m not sure exactly what has been responsible, it could’ve been any of:

• The recent DMOZ listing.
• The large increase in traffic.
• The domain being renewed for 10 years.
• The removal of a duplicate domain.

It’s been really good to note the number of pages we’ve got indexed. We now have 8,200 indexed on Google verses Swinging Heaven who have 12,200 so we’re well on the way to passing them.

Anyway, I think I need to re-visit the SEO for some particular terms. Here’s the top ten geographic locations according to Overture Inventory:

1. 4356: uk swingers
2. 3738: texas swingers
3. 3252: ohio swingers
4. 2822: florida swingers
5. 2697: michigan swingers
6. 2096: tampa swingers
7. 2036: missouri swingers
8. 1713: las vegas swingers
9. 1634: chicago swingers
10. 1489: california swingers

So the USA is bigger in total than the UK but is really a collection of local markets.

In terms of relevant subjects we’ve got this as a top ten:

1. 28841: swinger club
2. 15164: swinger party
3. 7917: mature swinger
4. 6640: swinger lifestyle
5. 5923: swinger couple
6. 5801: swingers ads
7. 5548: black swingers
8. 5437: swinger personals
9. 5415: online swingers
10. 4856: swinger site
11. 4681: local swingers

I was asked recently if I was going to expand into regular dating, without hesitating I said “no”. The reasons are:

• The dating market as a whole is shrinking. My speculation is that this is due to the rise of the social networking sites (My Space, Friendster, Facebook, etc) which are free, more fun and have many more members.
• The market is very, very competitive with really muscular players such as Yahoo! and Match.com, the latter even advertises heavily on television. I’m not that keen on going head to head with businesses like that.
• My gambit of going free wouldn’t really work as there already are free dating sites — the famous example being Plenty of Fish — but there are also a few venture-funded competitors.

So, all things considered, a shrinking market that is highly competitive and indeed already mature enough to be going through consolidation is not a market that is very attractive to enter.

To be completely honest I think you would need to be staggeringly ignorant of the market to launch from swinging into regular dating, although in another hilarious move my friends at Swinging Heaven launched Heaven Dating which, to be polite, is a brave move!

I’ve just submitted Fab Swingers to Best of the Web which is one of the more respected directories. There’s an option of paying $69.95 per year or $199.95 one-off but as I’m in Fab Swingers for the long term I’ve decided to go for the one-off fee.

The Google PageRank is quite good and its got an Alexa rank of 7,630 which is excellent so I certainly hope it will generate some members from and I’m sure it will also have an SEO benefit.

I did think quite hard about whether I should spend the $200 on PPC but I think that the problem with PPC is that I will be bidding against people who make many times more than my $0.60 ARPU so it’s going to be expensive however if I concentrate on SEO/getting the word out then I can tap into some of the huge search volume around swinging with a cheaper acquisition cost.

The Average Revenue per (active) User we’ve achieved is $0.05 per month. I actually think there’s quite a lot of room to increase this number too, through offering more variety of adverts and getting at least some advertising sold on a CPM basis rather than all PPC.

Anyway, this gives us an ARPU (active users) of approximately $0.60 per year, although the ARPU will be a bit lower as of course some of our members will become inactive over time. In fact, I think our churn may be as high as 50% per year.

So the question is: what price can we pay to acquire users through our affiliate program? Well I’m pretty happy to offer an average of $0.20 (we may pay slightly more for couples/women and less for men to try to balance out the sexes). I think that at this rate we’ll pretty much break even on a simple ARPU basis and also assuming a 25% conversion rate then we’ll be paying a competitive $0.05 per click to webmasters (I looked at our Adult Friend Finder affiliate account and we’ve averaged $0.06 per click).

However it’s not as simple as this. Each new user has an SEO benefit and we also have a very high rate of users recommending the site to others (both informally and via our recommend a friend feature).

Finally, we also have a problem that some areas of the world really need to be seeded. In particular we just don’t have enough members in the USA to make any state viable.

So I think that an investment of say $20,000 on an affiliate programme would show a positive return within about 6 months of the spend based on the straight ARPU but would also have a deeper positive effect thru SEO and getting us into new geographies.

Melanie UK Swingers was one of the first free adult social networking sites, founded in 1999 and still running today (and still free!). According to their homepage they have been featured in The Independent, News of the World, The Times, Loaded Magazine, The Observer, The Guardian, New York Times, Marie Claire, Scotland on Sunday, Talk Sport Radio and Zoo Magazine.

Here’s the interesting thing: after all this publicity and 8 years they have fewer members than Fab Swingers has after 8 months!

Proof once again that PR really doesn’t sell.

I have made the odd attempt to get some PR for Fab Swingers but I now think that it’s a complete waste of time and I’m just going to focus 100% on direct marketing which has been going great so far.

It looks like I’m going to be able to buy a domain name with my “swingers” keyword in it which was registered in 1999! From experience in my day job I am absolutely sure that old domains carry a lot of weight with Google. However I’m not very sure what to do with it.

The first option is that I could simply rebrand the whole site and shift it to the new domain. The negatives of this are that existing members and the word-of-mouth buzz would be effected, we would also lose some of the online marketing that I’ve done already and finally I’m not sure if the domain owner and servers changing may kill some of the value of the old domain so there is a possibility that by changing domain name I could end up in a worse position in the short term.

Option two is to simply create a new marketing site on the new domain. I could promote Fab Swingers and some of my affiliate links. This has the disadvantage that it’s much more work to do however as I’m writing this I think it’s clear that this is the path I have to go down. There’s no fun like work!