Anyone have experience with setting up a dating website? I have a target niche in mind that I've determined to have a high demand. How do you overcome the user base problem, as in no one will register to a site with no users? I was thinking of doing a pre-launch with email sign ups, so that at launch we can have a balanced user base.
I would suggest Letting your Friends know, and Twitter Marketing. I have built a small dating site I did not grow it because I did not have a truly specific niche market. I just advertised it on different sites, put a link in the footer of my accounts on forums. The Biggest Issue I have seen is that there usually tends to be more men than women who join the sites so it makes it difficult to get a balanced amount of users. You could also add a bunch of fake profiles, and that will seem like you have users. And some membership software have plugins for this to make it seem like there are users online when there aren't.
I knew a guy running a pretty successful dating site and the majority of the "initial" users were fake created via Buddy Press. But it got the momentum going with some marketing.
