How to Create a Dating Blog

Starting a blog is one of the best ways to build an audience, get your ideas out into the world, and possibly make some (or a lot) of money while doing what you love. 

Getting started and taking the first steps can feel like a huge challenge. Building a website, planning your content, and finding the right business model are just a few of the tasks you’ll need to do to succeed.

Don’t worry! By the end of this article, you should have the knowledge and tools you need to feel confident and prepared to start your dating blog today.

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What Is Your Blog About?

Since you are reading this article, the answer to this question is obvious. You are going to start a dating blog! Having a topic in mind for your blog is an important first step, but you will need to plan more thoroughly to be successful. You want to think about what you want to accomplish with your blog. Are you starting a dating blog for men? A dating blog for women? A dating blog for gender-fluid individuals? Or, maybe you want to get more specific, like a dating blog for divorced women over 50.

Knowing on a deeper level what type of content you want to create will help you focus your writing and other content, and help you stand out from other blogs.

There’s a quote that fits this situation perfectly:

"If you try to be everything for everybody, you will be nothing to no one."

Establish Your Niche

When creating a new blog, you need to find your niche. This is the corner of the market that you have the most knowledge about, the place you can establish yourself as an absolute authority. If you try to take on OK Cupid all at once, you will find yourself squarely outmatched and very disappointed.

You need to find a subject that is narrow enough to stand out from the crowd, but not one so narrow that you run out of things to say or can’t find an audience. You want something wider than “weekend dating tips for women 60-70”, but more narrow than “dating”.

Some examples of niche dating blogs are:

• Understanding Men Dating Blog - Evan Marc Katz
• International Dating Advice Blog - Digital Romance
• Cyber Dating Advice Blog - Cyber-Dating Expert

Name Your Blog

Once you’ve found your niche, it’s a great time to start brainstorming a web domain name for your blog. You’ll want to pick a name that’s brandable and available. Use our domain name tool to check if your name is available. If it is, scoop it up before someone else gets to it first.

Brand Your Blog

The strongest and most memorable businesses are built on a solid brand. When developing your brand, think about what your business stands for. Customers and clients are looking for companies that have a compelling brand, as much as they are shopping for high-quality products and services.

Creating a logo for your business is vital for increasing brand awareness. You can design your own unique logo using our Free Logo Generator. Our free tool will help you brand your business with a unique logo to make your business stand out.

Finding Your Audience

Having a good sense of who is going to be reading your blog is one of the best ways to know what type of content to create, how to shape it, and, ultimately, how to grow your following. With a clear understanding of your niche, understanding your audience should come more naturally.

Finding your target audience - the people you want hanging out on your blog - isn’t only statistics and demographics. It requires a deeper understanding of who these people are and what they want. Your target audience is the people you’re writing to when you write your blog.

Are you writing to teens who are just starting dating, or are you writing to adults who have been dating for decades? No matter what the core focus of your blog is, you need to consider the people you want reading the blog to direct the tone and content of your writing.

Create a Persona

One way to understand your audience is to create a persona of your perfect target audience member. This essentially means creating a mock-up of the ideal person you hope to reach with your blog.

Here is an example of a target audience persona:

Having a persona for your perfect audience member helps you to visualize and understand who you are writing for and provides important direction to your content.

Be Your Own Persona

Another popular way to find your perfect target audience is to be your own persona. Many of the best products and services come from scratching your own itch. It’s possible you’ve searched for the perfect dating blog to read, came up short, and decided to create it yourself. This makes you the perfect audience member for your own blog.

This can be a great strategy for creating highly effective content. If you’ve noticed a meaningful omission in blog content, chances are you are not alone. By writing personally satisfying content you are likely to reach an audience in search of the same things.

Where Is Your Audience Hanging Out?

No web content exists in a vacuum. While you should strive to create uniquely entertaining content for your blog, your target audience is almost certainly already out there reading other blogs, engaging on specialized forums, and using social media. Finding the sites where your audience already mingles is a great way to discover what topics they are most interested in, what language they are using, and what valuable content you can add to that mix.

Some examples for your dating blog may include:

• YourTango.com
• Match.com
• nytimes.com/topic/subject/dating-and-courtship
• DatingScout.com

Visiting these sites is also a great way to begin engaging with your audience before your blog has even gone live. Jump into conversations on forums and in comments sections and get to know the people you’ll be writing for. This is a great, organic way to build relationships and direct people to your blog in its early days. Sharing your passion with like-minded people will make them more excited and passionate about supporting you in your blogging endeavor.

How Will You Present Your Work?

Traditionally, when most people think about a blog they picture written content on a page. However, there are several different ways to present your ideas on your blog, depending on your subject matter and target audience. Every blog will thrive with different formats, so it’s important to think carefully about how to best showcase your content before you start.

There are several effective methods of presenting the material on your dating blog. They include:

Evergreen Articles

As the name suggests, evergreen articles are composed of content that lasts. These articles are designed to have a long shelf life and continue drawing readers to your blog over time. They are typically long-form, text-based articles that delve more deeply into a particular topic.

A great option for evergreen content on a dating blog is relationship advice. While the way that people meet each other does change, the basics of healthy relationships tend to stay the same. Writing articles on fundamentals like communication, respect, and consent will help you develop content that people will find useful year after year. The better you are at teaching readers the fundamentals, the more attractive your blog will be to newcomers.

Videos

While the video format is not new, the explosive growth of YouTube and the advent of new and innovative video-based tech like Snapchat and TikTok have shown the true power of video as an online medium. While you may think that creating video is much more difficult and expensive than writing your content, you have access to all the technology you need to make high-quality video content right on your smartphone.

Compelling video how-tos on dating topics are an excellent way to attract readers to your blog. What types of videos you make will depend on your niche, but you can definitely find various topics that video will work well for. If you teach divorced parents how to navigate the dating world, you could create how-to videos for talking to children of various ages about the dating life of parents. Your video how-tos can expand on your existing articles, which means you can get more content out of each topic with a little forethought.

News-type Articles

News articles or other “announcement” type content can be a great way to gather new readers. One benefit of news content is the short-term but powerful increase in search volume during an event. While this bump may be temporary, it can be a great tool for grabbing new readers who end up coming back for more.

Writing about current events or new happenings also means there will typically be less competition for readers. Other blogs and media sources are all getting the information as it develops. Since the base of knowledge available is smaller, this gives you a good opportunity to add your own flavor to the article.

The downside to news-type articles is that they tend to lose popularity much more quickly than evergreen content. While the interest for an event may be very large one day, the next day people may already be moving on to the next shiny object.

It may seem challenging at first to think of news-type articles related to your dating niche, but with a little consideration you can come up with new topics regularly. Think about the kind of research you do on your own for your blog and incorporate your findings into news-type articles. If your blog is about dating for teens, you could cover new couples among teen stars. If you are writing about dating for older adults, you could cover new research into relationships among your audience.

Image-heavy Content

While most people expect to be reading when they visit a blog, image-heavy content can be very appealing and break up your text-focused posts to keep people’s attention. Depending on the topic of your post, displaying multiple images per page on a single subject can give your audience a better sense of what you are trying to convey.

While some topics may take to images very easily, like a car blog or a celebrity gossip site, others may require some deeper thinking to make this strategy work.

You have some options for image-heavy content on your dating blog. To determine what kind of images you want to use, start by thinking about your niche. If you write about great dating destinations, you can travel to those destinations and take photographs for your blog and incorporate those pictures in your text. If you write about grooming for dating, you could create image-heavy how-tos on great grooming options for your audience.

Some niches will definitely be more image-heavy than others, but try to keep an open mind about where and when images will work with your unique perspective. Over time, you will develop a system that ensures you capture enough images – taken by you or others -that you can then use in your blog.

Mix and Match

Mixing and matching content types is important for dating blogs because it ensures that you appeal to as many people as possible in your audience niche. Some readers will be more interested in text, while others will be more into video. By incorporating different types of content into your blog, you keep things fresh and interesting – and you challenge yourself to be more creative in your blogging. You may be surprised by the different types of content you become skilled at creating. Just keep trying different things and you will get better at all of them.

How To Make Money From A Dating Blog

One of the main reasons people start blogs is to generate some sort of profit. Whether you’re looking for a few hundred dollars per month or a job-replacing income, blogging is still an excellent way to make those dreams a reality.

There are a few great ways to make money from a dating blog:

Display Ad Networks

Display ads are the simplest way for websites to generate any sort of income. Ad networks, like Google Adsense, are fairly simple to be accepted into, and implementation onto your site is streamlined and clean. If you’re just beginning to see some traffic to your blog and want to turn this into dollars, display ads are where most people start.

There are a few downsides to display ads, however. The first is that some feel they detract from the user experience on your blog. Most people have been to a site where large ads pop up and block the content in the middle of reading. This can be distracting, frustrating, and even drive people away from your blog. While it’s possible to clean up and control the type of ads you use, it can be a constant battle to balance effective ad placement with aesthetics and readability.

The other main downside is that they don’t pay a lot. These networks generally use a pay-per-click (PPC) model which, depending on the niche, can pay anywhere from $0.01 to $1.50 per click, most on the lower end.

While display ads are a great way to make your first dollars, you’ll want to make sure any negatives they bring are worth the profits they provide. Once you develop a solid following, you can consider moving on to more lucrative and effective profit-making options.

Affiliate Marketing

Affiliate marketing programs like Amazon Affiliate have become much more popular over the past few years, as they take the payment model from pay-per-click to cost-per-acquisition (CPA). This means you can refer as many users to an advertiser’s product as you want, but will only get paid when the user makes a purchase.

Both advertisers and publishers benefit from an affiliate marketing setup. The advertiser pays nothing until a sale is made and the publisher enjoys much higher commissions than the pay-per-click model.

The Amazon Affiliate program is an excellent fit for a dating blog. The platform is easy to incorporate into a blog and pays commissions to publishers for sales that they help facilitate on products from Amazon.

Blogging about dating will give you plenty of opportunities to link to products on Amazon if you keep your eyes open for opportunities. Blog readers expect – and want – links to products that you talk about so that they can get them for themselves. If you write about books on relationship advice, you can link to them. If you write about grooming products, you can link to them. Anytime you write about something that can be found on Amazon, you have an opportunity to earn a commission. Each time a reader clicks on your link and makes a purchase, you get a small cut from that purchase.

Many dating blogs start with Amazon Affiliates as their first source of income because it has such a low barrier to entry. While your blog is small, you may make a few dollars a month from the program. But if your blog becomes big, you could make thousands of dollars a month.

Sell Digital Products

Digital products are an online entrepreneur's dream. You create the item once, then sell it as many times as you can, with little to no cost of reproduction. This means that you can scale your business to infinity.

Examples of digital products are:

• Ebooks - A piece of writing, generally in PDF format. These can contain literally anything that your audience would want. They can either be true book-length all the way down to a few pages of content. Depending on your niche, audience, and subject, these can run from $1 to $100 per sale fairly easily.
  
  
• Gated Content - This is content that is served on your website just like any other article, except that is behind a “paywall”. If you are creating content that you don’t want to be released to anyone but your true followers, you have them sign up for an account on your site and charge them a subscription fee for access. Generally, authors charge anywhere from $5 to $200 per month for access to gated content.
  
  
• Online Courses - If you can teach a skill that your audience wants to learn, you can create an online course to sell to them. These courses can be formatted in whatever way makes the most sense to you, but most nowadays are video courses. Online courses can sell from $10 to well over $10,000 per course, obviously depending on the subject matter and audience.

A good example of a digital product that a dating blogger could sell is an online course on dating for your niche audience. If you are writing for single women in their 30s who want to find a partner, you could offer an online course that guides them from being single to finding a happy and rewarding relationship. Ask for feedback from your audience to find out what problems they need solved and use your course to solve those problems. A well-produced course in this niche could sell for hundreds of dollars or more.

Sell Physical Products

Selling physical products is the original money-making strategy. You gather an audience that is hungry for something, you sell it to them, and everyone wins. You don’t have to be an inventor, designer, or manufacturer to sell products. Sites like Alibaba and AliExpress import already-made items into the United States and sell them for a markup.

The two main methods for the distribution of these items are: dropshipping and self-fulfilled.

Dropshipping is a method where you advertise a product on your site that you do not own. Once you make the sale, you inform the manufacturer, who will handle the shipping and handling to the end-user. While this is simple because you don’t have to worry about storing or shipping any items yourself, you’ll find that the margins can be quite slim.

Self-fulfilled sales are much more of a hands-on approach to sales. You buy the item from the manufacturer, store it, then ship it to the end-user once you have made the sale. While there is much more work involved, you’ll find that the margins per sale are much higher.

Product sales through a dating blog may seem difficult at first, but there are a few options available that could work for you. Journals and other easy-to-print products are a great fit. You could develop writing prompts for those seeking relationships to help them achieve their goals. It may only cost a few dollars to print the journals for you, and then you can mark them up significantly to sell to your audience.

While it can be very profitable when done well, selling products is not generally recommended for the beginner blogger. It’s best to secure an audience that you know will be receptive to the product before making a large investment in product development or acquisition.

Create A Service

Providing a service is another very basic money-making plan. If you can provide a service that you know your audience needs, you have a viable business on your hands.

Whether this service is delivered through one-on-one interaction with the user, through a piece of software that you develop, or by directly completing a task for the user, this is a great way to monetize your skillset and your blog.

If your blog focuses on finding a relationship partner, you could offer individual coaching services for your readers to help them achieve their dating goals. Depending on your focus, you could offer a targeted coaching program designed specifically for your unique audience – like dating coaching for men, women, teens, etc.

You have positioned yourself as an expert through your blog, which means you can charge a premium for your services. Just be careful to avoid taking on too much work through your services, because if your blog is popular you will likely be heavily sought after. With enough demand, you could earn a full-time income through your services. However, it is always important to keep your blog going since it is what drives customers to your service.

Next Steps To Get Your Dating Blog Started

Now that you have the strategies in place to build and grow your own blog, check out our free course: How To Start A Blog.

This course includes all the essentials on how to get your blog out of your head and onto its own website. Starting a blog is simple and inexpensive, so there’s no reason that you shouldn’t start today!

Free Course: How To Start A Blog

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