Advice on Advertising

Don't pay for display ads in newspapers. Press release it up. Use prweb and businesswire if you want to give your press release a kick. You have to pay for these.

However, there are a number of free press release submission sites that you can use. One being irishpressreleases.ie

Just start with online advertising Pay Per Click and monitor how this is performing. Improve the conversion rate of your site.

Do A/B testing on your landing page. Use Google Website optimizer for this.

Also, work on your sales pitch online. Build a sales funnel and test all sections of it.

A very important thing to do is building a mailing list. This is essential if you are planning on marketing online.

I would stay away from interruption based advertising like flyers and newspaper ads. They don't work as well as online advertising. You can't make the adjustments to them over time to make them work. They are an "all in" move.

Also, you don't get real time feedback. It's way too much of a gamble.

Look at it like an investment. If Investment A gave you a 200% return and Investment B gave you a 5% return what would you put all your money into?

The great thing about online is that it's as private as it is public.

Things like facebook are great for connecting with friends and keeping up-to-date with everything your close group of friends are into.

While google search is great for discovering and researching topics/ interests that you're curious about but might not necessarily want all your friends to know about.

So by the sounds of things, your male market who you are trying to target (as they have been the least responsive so far), might not feel comfortable joining your facebook page for all their friends to see that they're attending a singles' event. Some people wouldn't care, but some would.

Therefore, I'd suggest twitter if you're going down the social networking route. People can sign-up to follow your tweets without all their friends getting a live update. This means that your male TM can see where the next event is in their area that might be of interest to them.

Also, an app/ widget with all the areas that single events are taking place might be nice too - and you could allow people to rate each event and comment about the experience and if they met anyone. An option to upload some photos is always nice too.

You can create your own widget here quite easily:
http://developer.wolframalpha.com/widgets/tour.html

Or My Maps is a nice way to customise your own google maps' map to show all your singles' locations:
http://maps.google.com/help/maps/mymaps/create.html

Hope this helps and good luck.