Veiko Herne – lifetime entrepreneur with adventurous soul

By doing evaluation of social networking software platforms I had an idea to launch and manage such kind of site myself. And as I did not have any money at all, I tried to convince some social networking consultants to purchase social engine license for this purposes. I had previously found social engine most well programmed software platforms.  

But somehow those arrogant British consultants do not want to gain experience before starting their consulting business, calling everyone else losers’ and have their scam business ideas to give lectures without any expertise.

Having not able to raise money for software license and being evaluated most of social networking platforms; I took some dating software platforms to test. Dating sites has been much earliest form of social networking and there where more mature software products available compared to special social networking platforms.

I found the Estonian written A-Dater Pro script written in PHP. This was based on business model to publish your pictures for others to rate which was extremely popular in Estonia since late 90ties. Over one third of the population has their profile in rate.ee site and this site has become most popular local website having more usage than local news sites or search engines.

Free Dating was something to introduce to UK as online services here are charging over £10 per month and I haven’t had any luck using those.

However free sites could have problems with spam and as I wanted to implement SMS messaging, mobile friendly WAP interface, etc I had to figure out some income from it. A-dater was supporting paid VIP memberships so currently I decided to use this feature when somebody want to make contact or upload more pictures.

Even A-Dater was well programmed code I still had some problems with it. I was getting SQL errors, last online and members currently online did not work, etc. until I figured out that table online existed in my database for some other application and didn’t match with A-Dater.

There was some other modifications in the code I implemented like contact rights, commenting rights, etc but mainly I used my time to properly translate the language file and implement SEO friendly URL’s.

The XML sitemap still needs to be implementing together with some additional SEO tricks to get better positions. I found the search term “Free Online Dating Service” having KEI index very low - 0.61.

“Dating meet people online love match” could be much better keyword to use having KEI index 7.7 but the search volume for it is limited only to 20 searches per day. “Free Online Dating Service“is searched over 2000 times per day, so that’s where the traffic is.

I had a problem to get top and latest members to the main page, so I figured out that the SQL query is using AND operator to have matching men and women listed. Changing it to OR worked fine and I removed the poll functionality as it did not fit to the space. Maybe I will put it back to homepage together with communities and events.

Getting the logo and banner space shown properly was again causing me problems and after playing with it some hours I gave up. Sometime in the future when I will have more money, I should work with professional web designer anyway. I put the Google AdSense banner to run there until I will find better advertisers.

I had an idea to add social bookmarking features but soon finding out that del.icio.us, furfl, etc does not support parameters in dynamic URL’s. So I was able to implement only copy paste button code for the personal profile to use in personal blogs and websites.

When trying to get the service to the market, I encountered further problems. I had an idea to market it using Gumtree personal ads sections as Craiglist do not allow links.

However Gumtree did not publish those with the reason that those contain a link to site with commercial nature. How can free site be commercial nature as my objective was not to make money out of it? Finally I was able to publish my ad in other community services section.

Besides Gumtree, I found http://www.postfreeads.net where I was able to publish my ad in proper section. This seems to be part of Australian sites together with http://www.australiaclassifieds.net, http://www.freeukclassifieds.com, etc. However they do not have much traffic there, otherwise those are much more user friendly sites to list any type of local classifieds.

I tried to send out the press release using freepressreleases.co.uk without any luck. This site integrates their RSS feed with Google News but somehow they have implemented censorship? So it could be easier for me to launch my own press releases site than dealing with those who do not respect democratic values anymore.

I still published my press release as article to goarticles.com; however there aren’t many readers there.

In first week I had twelve members signed up but seem that British women are too shy to publish their pictures. So I had to ask Estonians to help me. When I could have few hundred members, it will be feasible for me to continue site development. Events module could be nice to have and WAP interface for mobile devices, SMS notifications, etc.

You can check the site at http://www.toppicturedating.com