Tips to date with confidence
Thousands of men and women enjoy the services of an online dating provider. Thankfully many end up in the “Happily Ever After” category, some the “No way“, and unfortunately, some in the “Tragic mistakes“. It is no secret that there are identity thief’s and sexual predators lurking on the Internet. Well, let them lurk. I’m going to give you some pointers on how NOT to become any body’s victim.
I first mentioned the Identity thief, why is this so important? Glad you ask. The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) released a report last year that stated in 2005, over 8.3 million Americans had their identity stolen. All it takes is your name, your Social Security Number, or date of birth for them to make your life miserable. Often the thief will sell your information to the highest bidder now many perpetrators can make your life miserable. Therefore, in your dating profile, do not put your real name (make up a catchy nickname) do not include any personal information such as your date of birth (including your “Sign“). Leave out your address (the state is O.K) or where you work. Beware of innocent leading questions such as, “I really want to know your birthday so I can send you a card or flowers.” Your personal information is no body’s business. Most (if not all ) of the dating provider web sites has a place to report abuse. Contact them if your feel you are being pressured to give out personal information.
If you decide to meet someone that you have been communicating with, arrange to meet him (or her) in a public place that you feel comfortable and safe being in. Always provide your own transportation to the date site. This puts you in charge of when you leave, and if this date is falling on the “NO WAY” category, this is a good thing. It goes without saying, do not get into this person’s vehicle or agree to go to their home until after you have gotten to know this person very well.
Tell a family member or a friend of the date arrangements (date, time, place). Ask them to call your cell (or send a text) 45 minuets to an hour after you are to meet this person. This is not only for safety reasons but can give you an excuse to end the date early if you so choose.
Getting a “pre-date” background check done before the date, just to make sure this person is not a criminal or a sexual predator, maybe a good idea. You can find dozens of “information vendor” sites on the Internet, but you must be careful, there are laws that apply to what you can and cannot access when checking into someones background. To avoid the tables being turned against you, I suggest using a licensed private investigator or a licensed background screening company. I will leave it to you to decide what techniques you use to get the information you need to do a “pre-date” check, but being honest is probably the best.
Gentlemen, while your guys probably will not fall victim to a sexual predator, you can have your identity stolen very easly if you are not careful. When ever possible use cash when paying for dinner or drinks( and no it is not a good idea for your to flash a wad of bills around to impress your date) If you must use a credit card, you hand it to the waiter, you sign the receipt, and you accept the approved copy for your records..don’t leave this priceless bit of information laying around for just anybody to copy. Remember a identity thief only needs one of the following: your date of birth, your name, or your social security number and your identity belongs to someone else.
Searching the internet to find someone who you can enjoy a relationship with is fun and exciting, and if you follow these easy steps and use your good common sence, you will have lots of excitement.
About the author:
Sandy is a retired police detective from the Metro-Atlanta area. She is not a licensed private investigator and owns her own agency that specializes in background checks for many occasions.
Dating Service Demographics Research
Who visits those dating sites? Who buys their services? I used to ask these questions browsing through thousands of profiles. It is not that easy to draw some common dating service persona profile.
But once you are a member of a few popular online dating services – you can give a try. Well, at that point I guess one does not need any research for an average online dating service visitor/ client profile. Or need it?
A rough sketch of an average dating service customer:
FEMALE AGED 30-45
MALE AGED 30-45
Female vs. male ratio: 60% vs. 40%.
There are some nice online tools that will help us to check it if I am right or wrong. Certainly, these are not 100% exact research results, but much better than nothing.
One can get idea who visits general dating services and who frequents religious or gay/ lesbian services. We will apply Quantcast & MSN AdLab Demographic Prediction tool. It is god to compare data that we will get from these tools – will they be similar? Let’s see.
I will check a number of services reviewed at this website and you can go on if you find this research interesting and, most importantly, useful:
|
Dating Service |
Quantcast |
MSN AdLab Demographic Prediction |
|
US traffic: 651.5K Males: 55% Females: 45% Popular Age Group: 35-49 |
Males: 56% Females: 44% Popular Age Group: 35-49 |
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US traffic: 7.8M Males: 57% Females: 43% Popular Age Group: 35-49 |
Males: 47% Females: 53% Popular Age Group: 35-49 |
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US traffic: 302.9K Males: 43% Females: 57% Popular Age Group: 35-49 |
Males: 40% Females: 60% Popular Age Group: 35-49 |
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US traffic: 657.2K Males: 47% Females: 53% Popular Age Group: 35-49 |
Males: 43% Females: 57% Popular Age Group: 35-49 |
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US traffic: 550.0K Males: 41% Females: 59% Popular Age Group: 35-49 |
Males: 35% Females: 65% Popular Age Group: 35-49 |
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US traffic: 7.5M Males: 45% Females: 55% Popular Age Group: 35-49 |
Males: 44% Females: 56% Popular Age Group: 35-49 |
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US traffic: 998.0K Males: 82% Females: 18% Popular Age Group: 35-49 |
Males: 86% Females: 14% Popular Age Group: 35-49 |
Well, I was quite right about age, but mistaken about male vs. female ratio in certain cases. And it is a surprise that some dating services (see AmericanSingles) can boast of large male customer bases (I do not speak of Gay.com)
Another surprise – most data that come from two tools are nearly identical – and we can accept this as a sign that these tools are reliable sources for research and competitive intelligence.
You can certainly use these tools for much deeper research – for examining dating services or other sites. Quantcast provides heaps of valuable data to analyze:
- Traffic
- Demographic
- Business
- Lifestyle
- Geographic
Nice charts, cool interface and all FREE. I really enjoy this service and I think you will find it useful also.
Dating Services: What Are Heaviest PPC Spenders?
Online dating services are nowadays focused primarily on marketing their services, not developing extra complicated technology (though it should be really good). This is my opinion, it might be wrong.
There are many ways for online companies to market their services including offline marketing - it is a matter of budget.
If you think about online marketing techniques – you should mention:
- SEO/ SEM (search engine optimization/ search engine marketing including social media optimization),
- e-mail marketing,
- affiliate programs,
- CPM (impression advertising) ads
- PPC (pay-per-click engines)
There are more techniques – like text link purchases, sponsorships, etc, but those mentioned are key online marketing techniques that can pull considerable traffic to the dating services sites.
It is hard (next to impossible) to measure amounts of money dating services spend on SEO/ SEM, CPM – we can just judge by their search engine results to make some guesses or get some insider’s information leakage.
But there are some tools – not 100% exact – that allow us to see PPC budget of companies including online dating services. We can see the amount they spend with one, but top PPC platform – Google AdWords
There are a few online tools that enable us to get this info. I have chosen SpyFu for our test.
What is remarkable about these services is that they allow you also to see what keywords those dating companies buy, what ad copies they use. Also it is an excellent marketing tool to research the competition scene in any niche where you need to get competitive intelligence. I just want to repeat that data you get is not 100% exact and might be not up-to-date. Just keep this in mind when you do some serious market research.
I will cover in this article PPC budgets by general dating services and some niche focused Let’s see who has money to burn with PPC advertising :
|
Dating Service |
Avg Daily Budget |
Avg Monthly Budget |
|
3.58-15.8K |
28.5K (April 08) |
|
|
0.8-5.35K |
4.0K (April 08) |
|
|
0.25-2.97K |
3.3K (April 08) |
|
|
2.17-21.2K |
14.0K (April 08) |
|
|
1.0-16.0K |
16.5K (April 08) |
|
|
1.3-7.4K |
8.4K (April 08) |
|
|
1.1-11K |
1.7K (April 08) |
|
|
1.4-9.7K |
11.3K (April 08) |
And now, let’s compare religious dating services budgets spend for PPC:
|
Dating Service |
Avg Daily Budget |
Avg Monthly Budget |
|
0.1-0.7K |
1.0K (April 08) |
|
|
0.2-2.2K |
2.3K (April 08) |
|
|
0.3-2.0K |
2.0K (April 08) |
Hopefully, you enjoyed this post and have more ideas how to use the information you can extract from this source.