Category: All Interviews

Tim Rees, Internet Dating Affiliate Interview

Posted on December 6, 2008

DSC00051 OPW INTERVIEW — Dec 6 — Tim Rees is the former CEO of World Dating Partners. He’s back to being an affiliate. – Mark Brooks

What are you working on these days?
Since leaving World Dating Partners I’ve gone back to what I used to do beforehand. I used to be an affiliate for lots of different sites. I’m contacting as many different sites and systems as I can, charting them out and running with the ones that are making me the most money, which currently looks to be White Label Dating.

I used to have a company doing just this about 2 or 3 years ago, and it worked quite successfully for me back then. Now I’ve got even more exposure of the market, more knowledge so I’m trying to use that to my advantage and give it a better run and make it even more successful this time around.

What did you learn while you were at WDP?
Before I had worked there I had experience of being a member on different dating sites and also having promoted them as an affiliate. I had a lot of experience as an affiliate. What I didn’t have was the missing piece of the puzzle which was working within those companies and seeing how they work behind the scenes. Now I know what I can realistically expect from service providers and affiliate programs.

What are the main types of affiliates?
In terms of generating the revenues, there are different types of affiliates that can drive big traffic. There are big publishing media companies, there are some sites that may just have a huge subscriber base of their own that they can cross promote to, then there are more stereotypical affiliates that know how to market, where to buy the traffic from, how much they can buy it for and how to optimize their campaigns, monitor their landing pages and conversion rates. These are the affiliates that are able to generate big revenues by themselves.

What are they using?
PPC is the most popular marketing method and the easiest for affiliates to monitor. You should know exactly what your margins are before you go and buy the traffic. You don’t have to spend a huge amount of time building up your sites and getting natural traffic to it. It’s very difficult these days. You can just build a campaign, turn it on, optimize it and get rid of everything that’s not working.

How about you Tim, what are you doing?
What I’ve been doing over the past couple of months is testing the various sites that I’m promoting to find out what the conversion and retention rates are like. That’s something which can be difficult to obtain because you need 6 to 9 months to understand what is happening. But you are able to get some indication from the conversion and early retention rates as to whether or not there are any trends.

What I prefer to do is run some sites with low traffic first to build up my analytics. Then use those to build out more heavily invested PPC campaigns. It’s also possible to buy and generate traffic from many other sources other than Google, you just need to search for them. Providing you can separate all your campaigns and monitor each carefully you can quickly find out which are the best areas to focus and increase your spending on. Even when I am running a heavy bias to one system or site I still continue to run campaigns with others so that I have a point of comparison and if needs be I can switch.

At the moment for my own dating projects I am working mostly with WhiteLabelDating.com. I am familiar with all providers out there but seem to be getting best results through them. They have been very helpful and flexible enough to accommodate some of my custom requests which I need to continue to grow my business as quickly as I want. It’s still early days but the revenues are exceeding my expectations.

It’s no secret that I have big plans for my own in-house developed projects, but using a 3rd party like White Label for me is the best solution; there is no development time or costs, no heavy investment needed to hit critical mass and brings my revenues forward many months, immediately on to an aggressive growth curve.

Are there any favorite resources that you use for tips for affiliate marketing?
I use WebMaster World and Revenue Magazine to stay up on the industry and occasionally extract tips for affiliate marketing. One of my favourite sites is entrepreneur.com, a great resource with articles on most areas of running any business. A good forum to also visit is affialites4u.com. I also subscribe to .net magazine in the UK which keeps me up to speed with any internet developments.

What are you going to be doing for the next few months besides your affiliate work?
I’m very excited about a few areas of technology, like video streaming, content sharing and mobile. I’m testing a few products at the moment in these areas and developing some of our own. Early 2009 I’ll have some announcements which I hope are going to provide some interesting additional services for dating, social networking and mobile companies.

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Merav Knafo, LookBetterOnline Co-Founder Interview

Posted on November 29, 2008

MeravmatchOPW INTERVIEW — Nov 29 — Merav and Dave know photography. They can help users take them, and crop them. – Mark Brooks

Can you tell us more about LookBetterOnline.com? How was the company founded?
I met my partner Dave, who used to be a photographer, on Matchmaker.com years ago. He told me how hard it was for him to find a professional photographer to take his photos. Then we started talking about it and came to the conclusion that there could be a market for a photography service just for people who date online and that’s how it started.

We decided to create a nationwide database of photographers so people can find somebody closer to them and don’t have to drive too far or even the photographer can come to them. So it’s all about convenience about finding those photographers. I am the web developer and Dave is the ex-photographer and he’s also the project manager. So it is a good partnership.

Why do people need accurate photos?
You can’t expect to find good quality dates with a photo that doesn’t do you justice. The biggest mistake people do is they use a snapshot from a holiday or from a party and others can’t really see what they look like and tell if they like them. Therefore they will be hesitant in writing to them.

Now a key distinction here from what I understand is you don’t do glamour photographs.
We don’t. It’s very important to us and that’s how we train our photographers. We don’t want people to look over done, desperate or look like they’re trying too hard. We want them to look natural. So that’s why we train our photographers to take the photos as much as possible in natural lighting meaning outside the studios if possible, not to use any backdrops or anything cheesy.

You’ve partnered with a number of internet dating and a few social networking sites. Who are your top partners?
Our top partners are big sites like Match.com, Cupid.com, ChristianCafé, J-Date, American Singles and a bunch of others. We also partner with a lot of dating coaches who realized very quickly that their customers need good photos. Some of them include it in their package.

Why have they partnered with you? What is the deal for them?
For the dating sites it’s very simple. They want their customers to be happy on their website. If they have a good photo, they have a better experience on the site and stay longer. Also dating sites use the photos to attract new customers. The other reason is commissions which is another source of revenue.

People go onto a personal site to ‘shop’ for people so it makes sense if they look good.
Yes I think sometimes it’s just dreadful. You go to a dating site and you think should I join it or not? You do a search and you see all these ugly photos, unattractive photos and I’m sure the people are not as unattractive as their photos but it just doesn’t make a really good impression.

People are not necessarily looking for super models but they do want to know what they’re getting into. They want to know when they go on a date that the person is going to look like their photos and there is not going to be any surprises.

Another common problem is cropping the photos. A lot of times people take a photograph and they’re way off in the distance or they’ve got other people in the photograph. So you created CroppingTool.com. Tell me more about that.
Cropping Tool is a really cool tool that allows the dating site to crop the faces of the photos and leave everything else aside. I know some dating sites are doing it manually or semi-manually. They have people sitting and cropping those heads out of the photos and it just takes a long time and it costs them a lot of money. We created this tool that does it automatically based on the location of the eyes and all kinds of other parameters. It took us 2 years to develop it.

What else do you have in the pipeline for the dating and social networking industry?
We just launched a new site called BetterBusinessShots.com which is for business photos. We would like to partner with business networks such as LinkedIn, real estate agent sites and whoever needs good photos. Our prices are very reasonable starting from $99 for a photo shoot.

We are expanding to other verticals like pet photography (BetterPetShots.com), babies and couples. We have a few in the pipeline… The reason we wanted to do this is because we have a database of great photographers. They’re already trained to take the photos the way we want. It took us a long time to create this kind of database of quality photographers. So why not use them for other verticals as well. So that’s going to be rolling out in the next couple of months.

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Hannah Schwartz, RSVP CEO Interview

Posted on November 22, 2008

Hannah SchwartzOPW INTERVIEW — Nov 22 — RSVP is Australia’s favorite internet dating company. Here’s my interview with their CEO. – Mark Brooks

Do you think the Australian people are more accepting of internet dating these days? How does that compare with the USA?
There is still a lower penetration or uptake of singles who are online in Australia. We estimate that around 14% of our target audience is online and using dating sites comparing to 25+% in US.

The other thing we’re seeing now is that our members are much more comfortable talking about their experiences and saying they’re on RSVP. However we still have work to do to convince advertisers that a dating site is the right environment for their brand. About 10 to 15% of our revenue comes from advertisers. We are seeing more and more success with lead generation advertisers, those that get the fact that people come to our site and want to transact.

What kind of companies are advertising at RSVP?
The financial brands, those that are looking to get credit cards and mortgage type submissions. We’re also seeing cosmetics brands. Our biggest opportunity is around the fact that we are a very data rich site. We know a lot about our members. Of course, we don’t reveal their identity but we know their age, location, income level and we know, for example, if they’re a smoker or non-smoker or if they’re a single parent or not.

One of the best examples I can share with you is a campaign we ran for Nicabate which is a “stop smoking” product. We built a unique community for them that reached over 250 of our members who said yes they are smokers but they want to stop smoking. So that’s a perfect example of how we can take this data rich information and tailor it to an advertisers unique needs.

I think our ad opportunity is the same that the larger social networks are working towards, which is how do we utilize the information to create and target ads in a way that is appropriate? I think that we all are in this place of experimentation.

You’ve launched a number of RSVP Communities recently. Which have been the most popular?
We’ve launched over 25 communities. We just did this initiative within the last 2 months and to date 85,000 of our members have joined one of these 25 communities. Our most popular ones for example are food and wine lovers. We’re also seeing tremendous traction in adventure travelers and the dating life. Our first and foremost goal was to help our members, enable them to find like minded people. Now we are starting to get advertisers coming forward, some deals are just about finalized.

Congratulations on launching your anonymous calling product. How’s that working out for you?
We’ve worked with a 3rd party provider. It’s a way for 2 people to connect anonymously either through a land line or a mobile phone. Our members are telling us that they’re finding it very useful. It’s fair to say that predominantly those people, who are very active on the site, are using it. People who are new to the site probably are a little more cautious about it. And I think as awareness and understanding grows, its usage will continue to grow.

Who do you regard as your top competitors in Australia at this stage?
I’ve been in my role for the last 15 months and I would say the competitive landscape has changed in the last year. There is the growth of the social networks which are very popular but not necessarily a place people go to find dates.

We also see a growth of free dating sites. We’re actually benefiting from this. There is a lot of confidence around the fact that people on our site are serious about relationships. And if they’ve contacted you they’ve spent money to contact you and that gives you more trust as well.

So our membership is growing and we still remain the largest player. We’ve got 1.3 million members with 1,000 to 1,500 new members joining each day.

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Violet Lim, Co-founder Of Lunch Actually Interview

Posted on November 15, 2008

OPW INTERVIEW — Nov 15 — I met Violet at the Matchmakers Conference in September. She’s runs Lunch Actually in Singapore. – Mark Brooks

Tell me about Lunch Actually.
My husband and I started Lunch Actually in 2004. It’s a company that arranges one to one lunch dates for business professionals. Ever since we launched 2 other branches. One is in Malaysia and one in Hong Kong in additional to our office in Singapore.

How does it work?
Client comes to our office for a face to face consultation and this is when we screen them. Once they decide to join, we start looking for suitable matches for them. Once a match is found we will arrange everything from booking a restaurant to reminding them about the date. After each date we require feedback which is very important because this is how we fine-tune what they’re looking for and then we set them up with their next match.

What do you charge?
Our fee ranges from about 850 sing dollars 1650 sing dollars.

And you have another site, Interact right?
Yes that’s right. Interact is a company that does something totally different. Eteract.com is an online portal where singles can go online and interact with each other. We have online speed dating, 3D chat rooms, so singles can dress up their avatar and send gifts to each other and that has worked very well for us.

I think the government has had some involvement with that?
The government doesn’t have a stake in it but in the past years the government has been very interested in the dating industry. They have set up a funding for the dating industry. It’s called Partner Connection Fund. So new dating agencies or active dating agencies can tap onto this funding, outline what their plans are get 50,000 sing dollars max. Eteract has tapped onto this funding and received about 49,000 from the government to develop the site.

So what’s next?
We are looking to start another branch once the one stabilizes in Hong Kong. Our next destination will be in Shanghai. Eteract is currently available in Singapore and once we’re done developing it (we’re still in the Beta) we are going to grow it out regionally in Asia and eventually worldwide.

Joel D Block, Ph.D., Personality Profiling – OPW Interview

Posted on November 8, 2008

OPW INTERVIEW — Nov 8 — Dr Block does personality profiling.  He’s available to help dating sites add personality profiling. – Mark Brooks

What is your background? Tell us about yourself.
I took my PhD at Syracuse University. Since then I have about 30 years experience working exclusively with relationships. Love and sex are my specialties and my 19th book on those subjects will be out next year. I’ve been honored by a professional organization as Outstanding Couple Therapist and I am a senior psychologist at a teaching hospital as well as faculty at the Einstein College of Medicine in NY.

Would you say you’re a fan of internet dating?
A big fan. There are a lot of people that I see, single men and women, who have been very successful; sometimes they are frustrated but that’s part of the process. They are way more successful online than they would be going to a bar or just other ways of meeting people. They have wider ranges of choices; they will most likely find other singles on the dating sites rather than at the pub. It’s also more affordable.

Who would you say in your opinion has the best personality profiling system right now?
Oh, tough question. I really haven’t studied every single test that’s out there. But of what I’ve seen, I like mine the best.

With the rise of dating sites, there are some people who have been trying to turn romance into a branch of applied mathematics. They’ve been trying to reduce decisions about love into statistical equations. It doesn’t
work.

What some people have realized is that love is too complex to be reduced to a peer reviewed article. I bring not only scientific credibility but after 30 years of working with couples, I have a sense of the poetry needed to match couples.

I have a compatibility test that has 24 questions which takes about 15 minutes to complete. The questions are the kinds of things that are engaging because people relate to them and they strike a familiar chord. The answers go from 0 – not a chance, all the way through possibly, likely, almost certainly, or for 4 points – definitely.

I hear there are 2 schools of thought. One school of thought says that you can most easily match people based on similarity. The other school of thought says that you end up with better matches if you match based on complementary factors. What are your thoughts on that?
I agree with both. A lot of relationships work because one person is dominant and the other one is submissive. Submission and dominance are two factors that are complementary. Then there are other factors like intimacy needs and social needs such as introversion and extroversion that are similarity factors. So I think that it’s not either/or but a really good test, as mine is, has both.

Are you a fan of the Meyers-Briggs test?
Not so much. First of all, Meyers-Briggs is not quite a compatibility test and it’s a little bit of a stretch in terms of using it on a romantic basis.

There are different versions but there isn’t a “romantic” version of the Meyers-Briggs. I’m not that set against it, it’s just not something I would prefer. With my test, I do the matches and I tell you what your chances are and why this person is a good match for you.

What’s more, there is an open offer: Any dating site that uses my test and matches a couple who marry—my team will pay for a Vegas Honeymoon!

You have a new book coming out, tell us more.
The book is The Real Reasons Men Commit, Why He Will—or Won’t—Love, Honor and Marry You. It’s a book primarily for women, although I’ve had a couple of men read it and really love it. In fact, Mario Lopez, considered to be the most eligible bachelor by People magazine, wrote the cover blurb and said he learned a lot from it. But it’s mostly for women and it’s how to find a commitment oriented guy and avoid the commitment phobic guy.

I did this book with a single woman, a Broadway actress, Kimberly Dawn Neumann and we developed several new concepts. One term we came up with is vulnerphobia. These are the men who are afraid of being vulnerable. Those men don’t have a strong enough sense of “I” in terms of themselves to create a “We” in their life. The idea of sharing, losing their independence, their sense of themselves, all those things frighten them. The book really goes into detail about how to separate the commitment phobic from the commitment ready. It will be out in December.

Can internet dating services work with you?
There is a growing trend for dating sites to have a group of psychologist-coaches to help people with their relationship issues. I think that is the coming trend and its one of the things I offer. I bring 3 decades of experience to the challenge. So, it’s not just about matching, but it is also about helping couples to make their love last.

I can bring a lot of services to the dating sites, like doing webinars, answering subscriber emails, that sort of direct contact. I’ve written books on most of the couple issues. I wrote a book called “Naked Intimacy”
that has to do with openness. Another book “Broken Promises and Mended Hearts” has to do with trust. I think that dating sites would really prosper from having someone not only help with the matches but help people maintain love; keeping love alive is tough.

Liz Wasserman, Mate1.com – CEO Interview

Posted on November 5, 2008

Liz_wasserman OPW INTERVIEW — Nov 5 — I talked with Mate1.com's CEO, Liz Wasserman on the subject of scamming. – Mark Brooks

What kind of scamming activity have you encountered at Mate1?
We've encountered a wide range of scamming activity. It's evolved over time partly, I think, because people in this industry have been pretty quick to adapt. Scams fall by the wayside as people adapt to them.

In the early days, almost all of it emanated from African countries that don't have laws against wire fraud. From what I could tell, the scammers basically set up call centers full of people who created thousands of fake dating profiles. They would pretend to be very attractive women in the U.S. who were "temporarily" in some African country and needed to get home. They would try to extort money via Western Union. We saw a lot of those, even from Eastern Europe for a while. We actually have a whole catalog of these schemes that we made available on the site (link: http://www.mate1.com/fraud/fraud_warning) because we wanted to tell our members what to look out for.

And then there are the ones you can't really prepare for because they're idiosyncratic. People who are looking for love can be some of the most vulnerable people out there. Anyone who has an attractive picture and can talk their way into someone's heart, basically can very often convince them to send some money. And those often tend to be minor scams, but we do catch them more often than not simply by having undercover customer service agents trolling the site all day long.

We've also used various technologies, like matching up IP's with locations to make sure people aren't misrepresenting where they are, but for the most part it's a matter of constant communication with our customer service department to find out what the latest thing is and to quickly adapt to it.

Have you found the number of scamming incidents increasing?
I think early on we developed a reputation as being tough on scams because it used to be one of our major preoccupations. It ate up a huge amount of our resources. And as we adapted and put in more technological mechanisms to prevent it, scammers who are in-the-know went elsewhere.

Have you found any ways to catch them pre-signup?
There are ways and a lot of them revolve around IP detection – knowing where the person is half the battle. There are certain areas that these people tend to congregate. We have a couple of mechanisms in place to try to shuffle out those people who are clearly suspicious. Luckily, scammers don't tend to be extraordinarily brilliant technologically, so we're able to outsmart them.

I hear the Russians are particularly adept.
We do catch quite a few in Russia and surrounding countries. Then there are some women in Russia who are borderline. You don't know if they're a scammer or just in a really bad situation and you have to be careful to distinguish between the two.

But, yes, they're highly intelligent and highly desperate so you have to watch out for Eastern Europe, for sure. I know there are sites that have blacklists which we do refer to from time to time. I don't know, though, if they're still as good as they used to be. They used to keep fairly up-to-date lists of these personas. There was one called Russianwomenblacklist.com. I think having central repositories that could be intranet shared by people in the industry would be really useful. You just wouldn't want to share it with the scammers.

Any other thoughts on how the industry might be able to work together?
I think people are pretty forthcoming with information in this business. Whenever you meet people at industry events, people like to talk and I think that's a great thing. Anything we in the industry can do to devote and share resources would, in the end, actually be money-saving for all of us. I think it would be great if we could all collaborate and help each other create the best anti-scam systems possible. I would certainly participate in such a thing.

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Julie Ferman, Cupid’s Coach CEO Interview

Posted on November 1, 2008

OPW INTERVIEW — Nov 1 — Julie Ferman is one of my favorite matchmakers. She hosted the Matchmakers Conference in September and I interviewed her there. – Mark Brooks

How is the conference going?
Its going great. The Matchmaker’s Conference has probably been one of the highlights of my professional career. It’s like a love fest. The level of professionalism is just astounding to me.

Tell us about your company.
Cupid’s Coach is the largest personal matchmaking company in all of California now. I have over 13,000 people registered now with me. It’s free and private for people to be registered but they can’t browse. I’m the matchmaker and I have another team of people that work with me as matchmakers. They’ve been with me for a long time so we know the people.

Our clients are spending $2,900, $4,900, $8,800, $15,000 for a statewide search. And very often I will partner with some of the people here. So I’m not keeping all of that $15,000, I’m strategically placing those dollars very effectively with my buddies within the State of California and we are lining up some amazing candidates for our clients.

How can the matchmaking industry work with the internet dating industry?
They can work very well with each other. Some people on the dating dating sites need more help, so they can bounce up to the next level. Or if our clients are not ready to spend $3,000 so we’ll partner with the internet dating company and just share it back and forth.

Now if I’m not the right resource for a particular person then I’ll refer them to one of my other colleagues who is. There is more then enough business for everybody. There are so many millions of single people looking for help and complaining that they don’t know how to find each other. Then once they do find each other they don’t know how to stay together and love each other and that’s a whole other division.

Cupid’s Coach, the company’s name is really more about dating coaching then it is about matchmaking, but I ended up doing the matchmaking because that’s where the money was.

Walk me through the process, what is like for a brand new client, somebody who has just joined the service. What happens?
First they fill out their resume. Then they come in for their consultation. I’ll only accept them if they are a good fit. I will not take their money if they are not. I’ll send them back to internet dating or to the weight loss center first before they spend the money.

Then, over the phone, we explain them every step of the process including the navigation through our website. They also get their professional photo taken and have a dating/coaching consultation with my chief dating coach. I read every note of all my staff members before I go in and start the search.

I search for men differently then I search for women because you guys are visual and you want to see photos. So if you’re my client and you’re a guy I’m going to present you my top 5 candidates, their detailed resume with photos. When I’m picking those 5, it’s always based on who you are, who you’re hoping to meet and who I think you have a shot at because I know her preferences too.

So I’m going to present you my top 5 candidates and maybe you pick 3 or 4 of them. Then I pick up the phone and call them to tell them about you. When she agrees to meet you, you’ll call her and invite her out for a date number one.

Then we do a lot of follow up, we want post date evaluations from both people and you are going to hear the feedback.

So it’s very organic and my relationship with each client is organic and we learn. My home run is to get an active search client connected with another active search client and they go off into a relationship and we go on vacation. That’s our favorite thing to do. But I will also refer my active search clients to somebody I recruited and they’re not spending any money at all. That’s okay in my model because I know I recruited him specifically for her.

I treat men and women exactly the same. They can be clients or members and members don’t pay. I don’t hide my fees, they’re right on the website, http://www.CupidsCoach.com. We’re doing very well, our revenue has doubled or tripled over last year.

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Paul Falzone, The Right One & Together Dating CEO Interview

Posted on October 18, 2008

OPW INTERVIEW — Oct 18 — I interviewed Paul Falzone, CEO/Founder of The Right One and Together Dating at The Matchmakers Conference last month. We were in New Jersey, with NYC as the backdrop. Paul has been busy acquiring and merging with companies and building International Dating Venture. (Full Disclosure: International Dating Ventures is a client of Courtland Brooks). – Mark Brooks

Paul can you tell us a little bit more about International Dating Ventures and the acquisitions you’re working on?
International Dating Ventures is a holding company that we established this year. We are aggressively acquiring companies. We just acquired LoveAccess.com, which will be changing its name to eLove.com. The reason we bought the online company was to show the online world that we can convert online leads at a large price point. Its worked out incredibly so we’re very fortunate so far to have LoveAccess to make our business models much more efficient.

We’re also expanding our footprint across the US. We just finished an acquisition with another offline service, increasing us by 11 locations. We’re in about 35 cities across the US now and by the end of the year we’re looking at being in about 50 cities across the US. My goal is to continue to make our footprint larger and take online leads and convert them to paying members in the offline space at probably 100 times the price point the online company can.

How are you expanding? What kind of companies are you focusing on?
We’re focusing on well run, efficient, small locations. 9 or 10 services in all different parts of the US. And I’m focusing on taking the matchmaking end of it and bringing our management teams in and making these companies much more profitable. And so by year end these people will be happy they joined part of our team. They will be reporting on our CRM systems. We have got the metrics of this industry down. We know exactly how many minutes it takes to convert an online lead to be an offline appointment. We know how many leads we need to bring in for a location to make that a profitable location. We know what multiples we need to use. It’s all mathematical equations and its all part of lead flow.

Everybody is talking about a recession in 2008 and thank goodness this is a very recession proof business and our cash flow has never been stronger.

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David Cliff, Internet Dating Affiliate – OPW Interview

Posted on October 11, 2008

Davesmallercopy OPW INTERVIEW — Oct 11 — David Cliff is an internet dating affiliate. Rather than just be an affiliate of traditional dating sites, he’s started up his own sites under a white labeler. Its going well for him. Here’s his story. – Mark Brooks

David, tell us how you got started in the online dating industry and how your business has been performing since then?
I joined a dating site myself as I was interested to see how the site worked. I joined Singles365.com which is run by WhiteLabelDating.com.

There was a box in the corner of the page inviting people to start their own dating site. So I thought this was a good idea because if I start my own dating site it would be cheaper for me to be a member. I started up my own site and invested about 100 pounds on some ads with Google in the UK. There was only 30 or 40 pounds return after the first month so I thought it didn’t work too well and I wasn’t going to invest any more. Then more revenue came in as people, once they joined, stayed for a second month and then a third month. So I thought it might not be so bad after all. I got some advice from WhiteLabelDating.com and started investing more money.

InstantFriends.co.uk went from strength to strength and I started setting up some more sites from other markets which WhiteLabelDating.com offered, including adult dating. InstantHotDates.co.uk was the next one I set up, then InstantGayFriends.co.uk and a few more. I also did one for military dating and one for senior dating.

When WhiteLabelDating.com got into the U.S I thought well let’s give this a go as well. So we’ve now got InstantFriends.us, Dates4Sex.us, SeniorDating4Fun.us and MilitaryDating4Fun.us. There are now 15 sites in total.

What are your thoughts on WhiteLabelDating.com? How they worked out for you personally?
After I set up the first site InstantFriends.co.uk with WhiteLabelDating.com, I looked at other providers. One of them was the FriendFinder Network. I did see some quite favorable results but the big difference I experienced with the WhiteLabelDating sites was in the retention rates. The members were staying for much longer. I was receiving a residual income each month from the WLD sites which I wasn’t receiving from any of the others.

Are you happy with the support the company provides you?
I’m very happy. I’ll be 55 in November and I was 50 before I sent my first email. So computers are all rather new to me although I have a sales and marketing background. I didn’t know anything about computers so the support that I received from WhiteLabelDating.com was excellent.

Is the online dating business a hobby or is it your primary income?
This has now become the largest part of my income. We’re looking at about $20,000 a month from InstantFriends.co.uk of which I’m receiving about $10,000. And that’s just from one site. I do also work in a local radio station in London which is very much a hobby and I love doing it. My income is coming from the dating sites.

What made you decide to enter the U.S. market?
I had seen the success of the sites I’m operating in the UK and I’ve seen a lot of the American sites trying to get subscribers in the UK. So I thought it would be interesting to see what happens with a British site in the U.S. We have to wait and see what the results are because its too early, it’s only been 14 days. In the first month of operating InstantFriends in the U.K., I thought it was a waste of time. I have to give it a couple of months, certainly 3 months before I know whether I’m going to make it in America or not.    

Hannah Schwartz, RSVP – CEO Interview

Posted on October 8, 2008

Hannah_schwartzInside Internet Dating Show includes interview with the co-Founder of RSVP.com.au.

 OPW INTERVIEW — Oct 8 — I interviewed Hannah Schwartz, CEO of RSVP in Australia, on the subject of scamming. – Mark Brooks

What kind of scamming have you encountered in the past on RSVP?
We've seen two types of scamming. The first tries to take advantage of a potentially lonely person. I think we tend to call that the Nigerian scam.  We also see a lot of scams originating from Africa.  It usually involves a network of people abroad putting up fake profiles. The profiles are usually of women who court the men and pretend great interest. They talk of a life of wanting to move to Australia and plan to come visit, but at the last minute they unfortunately can't make it. They email the prospect and say their brother-in-law couldn't get the ticket. "Can you wire the money instead?"  Women and men are just as likely to be the target of these scams and what we see is that trust (via email and phone) is built over 3-6 months before the request for money comes into play.

Another type of scam we get involves our hybrid payment plan, where you pay as you go. We've received attempts to scam the model by buying large numbers of the stamps upfront. We now have triggers in place that tell us if a certain level of purchase has happened. We search the IP address of where the purchase originated and have even gone so far as to not allow credit cards that are foreign issues.

Is there anything else you do to try to beat the scammers?
We've spent a lot of time on our site educating our members about these types of scams, but we're not done. We have to constantly educate our users, as well as innovate our back-end systems. We work very closely with authorities, when appropriate. But we also have our own protocols in place where we know some of the telltale signs and bring down suspicious profiles before scammers can make contact with our members. We work very closely with the payment processors who keep master lists of bogus credit cards. We maintain records of anybody we've deemed criminal or suspect and have instituted a warning system when such persons return to the site.

It sounds like you've found a way to catch scammers pre-signup?
Every profile that goes up on our site does not go live instantly. It is proofed by us first. So, you can join up but that doesn't mean we'll bring you live. In essence, we prevent scammers from becoming viewable to the public.

In general, have you seen the number of scamming incidents or scamming attempts increase or decrease?
I would say scamming has leveled.  I don't think we've seen any indication that it's on the rise. I think there is just a steady trickle and because we've put in more and more controls, we actually are getting smarter at preventing it.

How would you like to encourage the Internet dating industry to work together to combat scamming?
It would be terrific if, in the future, the dating industry had a master suspect list that included IP addresses. It would be great if we could share that, as well as develop a means of communicating with each other quickly when new scams crop up. There are security programs out there, like McAfee, that post the latest types of viruses and spyware. It would be terrific if we had something similar – a central place where scams are posted.

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