I set them up and spent a few hours doing some initial link exchanges and then promptly moved on to other things and forgot about them.

I still get a check every month and I’ve just discovered I’ve been leaving money on the table, which I’ll come back to in a moment.

Setting up your own dating site is a big job, as a brand new site with no existing members, is pretty un-appealing to visitors, after all, who wants to join a dating site that doesn’t have enough members to find someone locally…

I came across a company called DIY Dating who you can sign up with to get a “white label” site. It’s basically like an advanced affiliate program, you choose the front end look for the site on your own domain name, they provide their complete members database and they deal with all the billing etc for you, so you’re up and running straight away.

Back when I set up with them in 2003 I wasn’t too concerned about whether I was being paid commission on upgrades though, so never got around to checking.

Last week I was approached by another company who offer a similar set up, but a much better payout scheme, including recurring commissions on members who renew, and they claim a higher sign up and retention rate…

yup, it got my attention, so I’ve signed up with them and set up a couple of sites as a test. Both are “dating” based domain names with some natural type in traffic that I just had parked previously, so they’re already getting traffic and I’ll post results as and when I have enough data for it to be useful.

In the meantime I went back to DIY Dating to check on the renewals commissions situation on the basis that I could move the domains over to their competitor if I felt like it, it’s always good to have a choice…

It turns out DIYD will pay commissions on renewals once your site has brought in over 1000 members, which one of my sites had done quite some time ago, as it now has over 4400 members.

They have now updated that site for me so I’ll now get recurring commissions on renewals, but it seems a little off that you actually have to ask, seems to me it should be an automatic update at least…

anyway, here’s a couple of example sites for DIY Dating:

http://www.dating-personals.co.uk
http://www.dating-site.com

and here’s a couple with the new service: -

http://www.datingtips.co.uk
http://www.freedatingservice.co.uk

Look for an update on my results with them in a few weeks.