I was hoping someone here might have some advice on splitting up a website.
The back story is that I have a website that has outgrown its original focus. The site started out as a niche dating site and community. It worked at the time because in the early days many of the women were concerned about being on a dating website. Sure, they wanted to meet guys but they were concerned about online dating. So the founder of the site decided to add blogging and forums and turned it into a niche community with a lot of dating functionality (i.e. sending kisses, etc).
The monetization strategy was to put restrictions on the dating features unless they had a paid membership.
Fast forward nearly a decade and now the site is struggling a bit. It's having difficulty attracting and keeping members (men and women) who joined mostly for the community because they don't want to "Like" or share content from a site that has online dating overtones. And the dating features haven't kept pace with other dating sites so many of the women are hopping over to dedicated dating websites (I guess they got over their shyness, LOL).
So, it seems like the solution here would be to split the site into a dating site and a community site. I'm thinking we remove all of the dating type features from the forum software and offer 100% full access free membership in the community and purchase a dating site script and port all of the users over to the dating site so it'll have about 100,000 members on launch.
Now, the question is, what is the domain strategy for this? I'm thinking that these are the viable options.
Make the dating site a sub-domain of the community site. For instance:
Community Domain = NICHEBUDDIES.COM
Dating Domain = DATING.NICHEBUDDIES.COM
We're entertaining this idea because we get a lot of the brand equity and some of the domain authority from the original domain. The downside is that it still leaves the two sites connected which somewhat dilutes what we're trying to accomplish.
Another way to go would be to find a new domain that references the community site domain.
NICHEBUDDIESDATING.COM
This also allows us to keep the brand equity but clearly separates the dating from the community. But it is a new domain which means none of the community site's domain authority would be carried over.
The third option would be to use a totally new dating-friendly domain.
NICHEDATING.COM
This one we're considering because now we can get a keyword focused domain which would help SEO rankings a bit. One of the cons of this approach is that many people won't know who the new domain is so if they start getting emails or find their info on the new domain it could cause some freaking out.
Anyway, thoughts? Advice? Anybody done anything like this before?
The back story is that I have a website that has outgrown its original focus. The site started out as a niche dating site and community. It worked at the time because in the early days many of the women were concerned about being on a dating website. Sure, they wanted to meet guys but they were concerned about online dating. So the founder of the site decided to add blogging and forums and turned it into a niche community with a lot of dating functionality (i.e. sending kisses, etc).
The monetization strategy was to put restrictions on the dating features unless they had a paid membership.
Fast forward nearly a decade and now the site is struggling a bit. It's having difficulty attracting and keeping members (men and women) who joined mostly for the community because they don't want to "Like" or share content from a site that has online dating overtones. And the dating features haven't kept pace with other dating sites so many of the women are hopping over to dedicated dating websites (I guess they got over their shyness, LOL).
So, it seems like the solution here would be to split the site into a dating site and a community site. I'm thinking we remove all of the dating type features from the forum software and offer 100% full access free membership in the community and purchase a dating site script and port all of the users over to the dating site so it'll have about 100,000 members on launch.
Now, the question is, what is the domain strategy for this? I'm thinking that these are the viable options.
Make the dating site a sub-domain of the community site. For instance:
Community Domain = NICHEBUDDIES.COM
Dating Domain = DATING.NICHEBUDDIES.COM
We're entertaining this idea because we get a lot of the brand equity and some of the domain authority from the original domain. The downside is that it still leaves the two sites connected which somewhat dilutes what we're trying to accomplish.
Another way to go would be to find a new domain that references the community site domain.
NICHEBUDDIESDATING.COM
This also allows us to keep the brand equity but clearly separates the dating from the community. But it is a new domain which means none of the community site's domain authority would be carried over.
The third option would be to use a totally new dating-friendly domain.
NICHEDATING.COM
This one we're considering because now we can get a keyword focused domain which would help SEO rankings a bit. One of the cons of this approach is that many people won't know who the new domain is so if they start getting emails or find their info on the new domain it could cause some freaking out.
Anyway, thoughts? Advice? Anybody done anything like this before?