In the picture above, which girl would convert the most traffic into profiles on your Private Label dating site? The girl on the left is a model and the girl on the right is an actual member taken from one of our Private Label dating sites.

The Answer is: the girl on the right.

Through extensive research, testing, and data provided by other studies we have found that real member photos always do better than models. The more realistic the photo is the more likely someone will see it and think, “I could meet her tonight.” A model usually will invoke a “wow she is hot” reaction, but doesn’t result in the motivation to complete a form. This rule of thumb also goes for promoting to women with pictures of men as well.

At Datingbackend, one feature that we offer that most of our competitors don’t is the ability to grab photos of members, with their approval, to use for promoting your site. This will help you further down the line for creating and optimizing landing pages. This unfortunately won’t help you when you first start as you won’t have any members to work with. There are two things you can do:

Talk to your partner manager and they can help you find some photos of members who have given approval for you to use on your site from the same niche database.

Edit a model photo to make it look more like a real member. Recently there was an article by POF.com that give some tips to make your photos look more like real members (it actually inspired this post.) With some minor photoshop tools you can downgrade the quality of a photo and improve its effectiveness.

What other methods have you used to improve conversions with photos?