All of us here at Datepad.com strive in having the best support for our users, and as such we like to offer incredibly cool contests like this month’s $5,000 Dream Date “Spring Fling 08″ contest, and by removing the need to use your credit card to join an online dating service.

To continue this trend, we are offering the blogging community a FREE 16GB iPod touch. We had originally planned on giving away an 8GB (which would still be an incredibly awesome free gift), but we thought our dedicated supporters deserved a free upgrade to the 16GB model, so that’s what we did!

For those of you who are living under a rock, you can see all of the amazing iPod Touch features over at the Apple page.

How do I win a free iPod Touch?
This is going to be a blog contest that is 100% free to join for anyone who owns a blog. All you have to do is write about this blog contest, and include a short snippet about what Datepad does and you will be entered into a raffle for a chance to win a free $400.00 16GB iPod Touch.

Here are the simple rules

1. You must mention Datepad.com and what we offer.
2. Your post must be at least 150 words in length.
3. You must mention this contest and link to this post.

The deadline for submitting your blog entry is Sunday, April 20th. The winner will be selected using random.org’s random integer generator using each entry as a numbered list.

The contest is open to everyone, and there is a maximum of two entries per person.

Late last night our popular article on the 10 things the US could have purchased with the Iraq war fund was promoted to the wildly popular social news website Digg.com. The article was an instant success, and before I had gone to bed the article was ranking as the #1 most popular upcoming story. This means that our article had the most potential out of any Digg submission to reaching the front page and receiving thousands of visitors. When I had awoken the next morning, the article had grown even more and was still the #1 most popular upcoming story.

A few hours later that day, instead of seeing our article on the homepage and having our server flooded with visitors, our article had disappeared from the upcoming sections. There was no explanation, notice, or comment stating why our article had seized to exist. The most popular story that would have been incredibly popular for Digg readers had gone from #1 to #100000000000000000. The only conclusion that we can come to is that it was attacked by what is known as the “Bury Brigade,” a group of Digg users who randomly bury stories in the masses resulting in popular stories never hitting the light of day.

While the Digg article did send us our #2 record traffic day, it was upsetting knowing that an excellent article of ours was removed because of a bunch of immature Digg.com trolls…

The first few months for any startup, especially in the dating niche, is to find ways to build enough traffic to satisfy the first members to the site.  I believe we are greatly accomplishing that, as we have just had our 10,000th visit to the site.  This is the first step into adding another zero or two onto that number as our site grows and becomes the king of the free online dating services.

I am a big fan of statistics. I like to know everything about everyone that visits my websites so that I can learn how to better satisfy their experience. While for the launch I have been targetting the United States and Canada for my marketing campaigns, it has been interesting to find out that we are receiving a lot of traffic from unexpected areas due to the power of the internet. See for yourself:

United States- 64.4%

Canada - 7.8%
United Kingdom - 6.7%
India - 4.4%
Australia - 3.3%

This truly shows you the effect viral marketing has on the internet. If you are not utilizing it, you are missing out on a lot of potential clients.

The first 7 days for any startup company are always very hectic. We have been constantly adding new features and upgrading our site as we go, which is a neverending process for new web2.0 companies like ourselves. I am proud to say the first week has been a phenominal success.

We have already had over 3,000 visits, and over 13,000 pageviews.

When the Datepad.com idea was originally conceived, we knew that while there were other free dating sites on the market we knew we could do better. With an incredibly clean and fresh feel to our site that makes navigation a breeze to our regularly updated article section that offers dating tips, health suggestions, our fun top 10 lists and of course sex!

After completing hours of testing and a nation wide focus group one of the areas we knew we had to focus on was member pictures! Because of this we have developed what we believe is the best picture uploading/viewing system on the net. We not only optimize your picture when you upload it but in order to make that perfect thumbnail we have added a cropping feature.

It looks like that creative thinking has truly been worth it, as our article about how to be a great first date has received over 1600 views! Talk about a killer launch party!

After months of preparing, today is the big day.   Datepad.com has officially opened the site to the public, and you can now enjoy everything our site has to offer!

If you have not already, I recommend that you sign up to be entered into our free $5000 DreamDate “Spring Fling 08″ contest going on this month!  What better way to have a good time with our free online dating service than by getting to relax at your favorite location in an all expenses paid DreamDate?