Free Online Dating Site

Being a single and a software engineer its very obvious for me to look out on web and search for pretty girls looking for fun time ;)

I was thinking it should be pretty cool on internet, but to my frustration ended up paying money to lot of sites without any good result.

I started with Yahoo! created my profile and took their one week free subscription thought will try and unsubscribe it if I am not satisfied, I didn't bother to know the procedure to unsubscribe, On Friday night when my reminder rang to unsubscribe I came to know that you need to post some signed letter and call them, well ended up paying them for a month. Felt as if they snatched my money by their trap of one week free gimmick.

Anyway, after that I tried many other sites, but restrained paying anyone. On any site paid or free - the problem is you are not sure if the profile is of real person or just a fake. Then I tried e-harmony, saw their ad and wanted to give a try, felt good initially thought I will get someone with whom my personality will match.

But they would not even reveal the photo of anyone without me paying, ok few of the matches' description looked good so I ended up paying $60 for a month, thats really huge! and to my surprise there were very few profiles with pictures and those with pictures I didn't really like them. Well felt cheated again, I was wondering why the heck are they charging money left and right when the internet is supposed to be free for at least such purposes.

Then I looked into other free dating sites. Ultimately met few girls but was not much impressed.

So I did some research, after giving it a careful thought, looking into keywords searched on Google and Yahoo, I think these are the few important factors that any dating site should keep in mind.

1) There seems to be plenty of pain in market on dating - there are lot of people searching for terms "dating", "online dating", "free online dating" etc on search engines everyday, in spite of so many popular dating sites and social networking sites.

2) What most of the people are looking for is free online dating (this seems from the keywords they search for) But I would believe that they would not mind paying if they really get the right person through your website. People are aware that nothing comes for free. But many are also frustrated by marketing gimmicks of selling hope for their hard earned money. Thats why they prefer to put free keyword before typing dating on search engine.

3) Targeting the right crowd - I see most of the sites target the extrovert and party animal type crowd who would like to go pubs or night clubs every night. But I am never convinced with this type of targeting.

I speculate its the shy, little introvert, brought up in a little conservative environment type and busy (either in job or small businesses etc) people who would like to search for dates online. Dating is different than social networking.
Also age wise I think it should be around 32 to 55 yrs age range that should be targeted actively as these people when single have more physical and emotional need and lesser means to find a date, as most of the friends are married or committed and also this range has more responsibility of work which gives them less time to actively find a right date.

4) Method of targeting - Again with the change in targeting segment, method of targeting should change, i.e. instead of emphasizing on active search and numbers, emphasize more on passive search i.e your site should search the right date for a person based on criteria and personality type on behalf of user.

Secondly emphasize more on quality of profile, try to get more information about users' preferences, likes, dislikes and personality. I would be more happy if you save my time and find me a right person, I wouldn't mind paying. One site which claims to does this is e-harmony and is successful in making lot of people to pay them. Well I so far doesn't have very great experience with them and haven't really found their matching criteria that good.

5) Mode of communication - This is an important area to consider. Why do you want your users to communicate over such a slow and unreliable method emails? I agree to start a conversation this should be fine but utilize VoIP to allow them talk over phone and still maintain the anonymity.

(Well I myself with few of my friends have started one such site http://www.lets101.com - it is a comparatively new site, but I am trying to incorporate all the points I have written here to solve the pain of the singles.)

6) Teaching members about effective dating and long lasting relationship and its importance - I think this is one of the segment many of sites just miss out.

When you sell a product, you also give manual or advices and tips to your customers about how to better use your product.

Same goes for dating - Tell your members about how they should use your site for their advantage. Give them advices and tips on how to make the environment more pleasant with their partner.

7) Customer communication and Useful News letters - I am emphasizing on word "useful" its very important to think from user's point of view and then send them periodic emails which can be of use to them, don't spam them. Emails may consist of new high matching profiles found for user as per user criteria, I think this can be the most useful information that user would certainly like. Don't send spamming emails which true.com keeps on sending and really irritates the user.

Well keeping above points we designed and launched our site Lets101, and getting a very good response from our users, lot of people are joining us everyday! And we are improving our site really fast with new ideas to ease free dating.

Our focus is to make sure each member gets a date and that date is a right match.

And I certainly think this should be the focus of any dating site, instead of just milking money.

The important features on Lets101 that most of other site lack are these:

1) It is a completely free dating site

2) Lets101 asks you to create profile, upload pictures and set your preferences and give weight to various attributes of personality and background of a desired match, such as looks, height, age, ethnicity, religion etc.

3) It has powerful personality test to know the subconscious and conscious type of a person's personality based on Jung-Myers-Briggs psychological model.

4) It then applies powerful matching algorithm to match people's chemistry based on their preferences and their subconscious and conscious personality type. The result of this algorithm are really effective - You find a right chemistry match on Lets101.

5) We are developing a matching email-er system that would run and match you all the times with new members who join and notify you of any high match.

6) Lets101 then allows users to communicate directly over the phone without revealing phone numbers. This is really a cool way to take communication to next level. We also have email messaging and Lets101 initiated introduction system.

7) Before you start communicating you are recommended to get prepared with a very practical dating tips and advice sections for a successful and pleasant dating experience and long lasting relationships.

8) We are currently active for US but planning to open it to UK, Canada and other Countries.

9) We are coming up with an innovative personal activity section, that you can use to put in your day-today's activity and your unique differentiators, to impress your potential dates in a more effective way.

Lets101 does not have millions of users at the moment because it's just few months old but it does has thousands of users.

Good thing about lets101 is - you do not need to visit and search yourself again and again. Instead it will automatically notify you whenever any new match joins and which has a very high matching score with you and qualifies your preferences.

Its worth spending some 5 to 10 minutes to set your preferences and take personality test and open possibilities of meeting very like minded, subconsciously attractive and pleasant personality dates for lifetime! and all this is FREE!