Just about everyone has tried one form or another of trying to meet online, yet most people achieve no results or mediocre results. This is in large part because they don’t take the time to look at the big picture and ask themselves why. The truth is that like in any business, attracting people with dating profile faces competition from thousands of other profiles, and in order to beat that competition, your “product” – profile must stand out the right way and be different from, and better than, most others. Most people don’t put much effort into their dating profile. And, like in anything else in life mediocre effort leads to mediocre results. If your profile is average or cliché / generic, you can’t and you shouldn’t be expecting quality responses from quality people.
If you haven’t yet written a profile, I suggest that you read this article with practical, effective tips on writing a compelling dating profile. If you already have a profile set up and you don’t feel like rebuilding it from scratch, here a short, simple checklist of tips, following which will make your dating profile much more interesting and attractive to the reader:
1. Eliminate a weak beginning/introduction in your dating profile.
You might think that it’s only polite to great the reader before you tell them all about yourself, but “Hey, how are you. Thanks for stopping by” immediately makes your profile sound week, uninteresting and unstimulating. There is also no need to start your profile with “It’s hard to talk about myself and describe who I am.” This is completely redundant to mention in your posting, as we all experience this and we all know how hard it is to talk about ourselves. Many readers don’t have the time and patience for “fluff,” especially when it comes to dating profiles, and will not get past those few lines of “courtesy” and will move on to read the next profile. So, skip the introduction entirely and get to the essence of what you wanted to say.
2. Make sure your dating profile doesn’t sound like a resume of a pompous businessman.
It is not uncommon to see the following kind of text in a dating profile: “I just graduated from MBA program and working part time as a business analyst, concurrently pursuing a teaching credential” might make a great impression on a potential employer if included in the cover letter, but hardly anything can make a dating profile more boring and less romantic than this kind of “business” flavor to it. So make sure that your profile doesn’t sound like a CNN nightly business review. You will have plenty of opportunities to tell your potential dates about your educational and professional aspirations once you meet them. At this point, when you are trying to attract people, your goal is to sound unique and interesting as a person. This can be done effectively by sharing a few of your interesting opinions on random issues and showing wit, sense of humor and sarcastic streak to you.
3. Avoid making cliche statements about yourself and about your life like most others do.
Years go, when it all started, it must have been a good idea to include in the personal profile things like “I like to work hard and play even harder,” “I live life to the fullest,” “I am as comfortable in jeans as I am in a suit/dress,” and “My friends say that I am fun.” However, as a reader goes through profiles that mention the same things over and over in exactly the same wording, it doesn’t take long to be annoyed with those idioms and start judging the writer for lack of originality. So, keep those and other commonly overused statements out of your dating profile.
4. Instantly improve your dating profile by cleaning up your spelling and grammatical errors.
I am far from being a spelling nazi when it comes to dating profiles, and I don’t suggest that you should be. However, it’s hard not to dismiss a profile that says “I am an intelligent women,” or “I am professional, independant woman.” So, if you claim to be intelligent, smart, well-educated and independent, make sure that at the very least your writing abilities support that.
5. End on an a high note – make sure you have a strong ending to your dating profile.
There is only one purpose to your dating profile – to have the reader captivated or at least intrigued and be extremely eager to write to you and want to get to know you better. So, “Thanks for reading,” or “Have a great day and good luck” will hardly achieve that purpose. You are much better off finishing your profile with posing a thought-provoking proposition or a question, inviting the reader to think about it and challenge your line of thinking. “Although I truly enjoy get-a-ways, day hikes, and biking, to me one of the most exciting things is being with a person whose mere character and personality make it an adventure to be in his/her company. How about you?”
These are the five simple, practical steps you can apply to any dating profile to make it more interesting and more compelling to the reader.
Also, make sure that you don’t make these mistakes when writing your dating profile.
If not for your writing this topic could be very convoleutd and oblique.