Help wanted for a great women's website

Hello all,
Just a few months ago I launched a new women's friendship site. The site is exclusivley for women and focuses on creating new friendships among women who share similar personalities, lifestyles, or interests. I have seen so many women effected by the loss a friendship due to relocations, life changes, etc. and I don't like women having to subject themselves to dating sites, or co-ed chat rooms filled with cybersex, etc - when they are simply seeking to meet new "girlfriends."

I am looking for some feeback on the site, suggestions and comments. Since the launch we have registered over 450 members for the free trial, but the conversion rates after the trial haven't been nearly as high as I would like - even though we've added costly new features like live webchat and even have a gift w/purchase at a retail value higher than the cost of membership. We realized we needed to create a solid data base. My question is - what can I do to convert more members, how can I improve traffic (we already rank in the top 3 pages on Google and Yahoo.) My other dilemma is that the online visits are brief; there is rarely ever more than a few online at the same time which boggles my mind when I see other dating sites, etc. with a whos online box filled with people.

I'm all ears - and open to constructive criticism. I believe 100% in my site and what it offers, but I obviously have room for improvement.

http://www.letsbefriends.net

The look of the site is nice and I do not think your looking for suggestions on how to improve the site visibility.

One random comment before I begin…

I don’t know if it matters but when you see your site quickly and see that its all about women making friends and then you look at your domain name, at first glance it looks like www.lesbianfriends.net instead of www.letsbefriends.net


Okay now to the serious stuff…

You have a database of over 450 members. Who are these members? Do you have any idea of their age group, location, reason for joining, etc… Use these statistics to build your marketing campaign and maybe the look of your site and functionality.

It takes a long time to build an online community it is not going to happen over night. Do not compare your statistics to some of those hugely popular online dating Web sites (yet).

To speed things up, maybe you need a new formula. It seems right now it is something like this…

You offer a free trial period, when the trial expires the member can either sign up for a paid membership or leave your Web site forever.

How about change it to something like…

You offer a free membership forever to all members. Your income will either come from advertising or you can offer paid membership only features.

You said “there is rarely ever more than a few (members) online at the same time,” so I think you realize you do not have anything to offer paid members without having lots of paid members.

Good advice. You need a stable of users before you can get people to pay to join. Follow the advice in the post above mine. It's sound.