The internet has afforded us many luxuries-we can manage our finances, we can find entertainment, we can order food, and we can keep in touch with long distance friends and family. Most people enjoy using the internet for these things, and rightly so! It makes our lives incredibly simpler and more streamlined. So it should be of no surprise that people many are on at least one online dating service in the effort to find love. But, is it worth it?

Costly Memberships

You've seen the ads on television, on the radio, or even on giant billboards as you're driving down the highway. They tout to having been able to match thousands of happy couples-many of which have gone on to live happily ever after; you know the story. What these billboards don't advertise is their membership fees.

These fees can be pretty costly, especially if you're not meeting the kind of people that you want to actually date. Sure, sometimes these sites will have promotional periods where you can join for free, but then after a month or the holiday season is over, you'll have to pay to continue to use their service. Or what's worse, there are some services that will let you join for free, but you'll have to pay a fee to use some of the features such as webcam chat, chatroom access, and instant messaging. It's pretty pointless to join the service if you can't talk to the people!

Then let's not forget if you do buy into the hype and pay for a membership, there's no guarantee that you're going to meet some! So you could be on these sites, shoveling money out to them, and for what? To go on disappointing dates? Why would you waste your money on that?

You shouldn't. Of all the things in this life, dating and meeting people is something that you shouldn't have to pay for. Which is why there are more and more free dating websites available. You might be wondering how these free services are able to operate. They can do this because they have ads on their site. So while you may not have an ad-free experience, you're getting all the benefits of a paid membership.

Creating Your Own Online Dating Service

With so many online dating services available today, you would think that there isn't any room for more. Ah, but there is. Too often one of the reasons why people aren't able to find love is because they are on the wrong site. They join a site with the hopes of meeting a particular type of person, but if you're joining one of those large, everyone-is-welcome type of sites... Your chances of finding that someone is going to a lot less than if you were to join a site designed for that particular niche-like survivalists looking for love.

It is possible for you to create your own dating website that is designed for that, because if you are looking to fall in love with a survivalist, surely there are going to be other people who will want to do the same. By creating a site to fill that need, not only are you helping others, but you're also helping yourself! Not only could you find love on your own site, but depending on how you'd like to run it (paid memberships or free memberships with ads), you could also make a bit of money on the side as well.

Now, don't get us wrong. Not everyone is going to have the money to start a site (which could cost anywhere from $5,000 and up, depending on the skill level of the web developer that you hire) or have the patience to do it.

If you are interested in creating your own service, it will take a lot of planning and evaluating. Check out the competition, see what features they have and how they run things. Once you have an idea of how you want your site to operate, then you will want to choose what niche you want to focus on. If you're doing it from a business stand point, you may want to be one of those sites that caters to everyone. However if you're doing it to help people find love, you'll want to have a specific target audience in mind.

Once you've done all that planning and you've got your web developer working on the site, you're going to want to market the heck out of it! Take out ads on social media, use Google to advertise, and even ask blogs that are within you niche to do guest posts.

With proper planning and marketing, your site could be the next big thing.