10. Bald spot camouflage.
If you’re going bald don’t hide the fact under a cap. It’s not a character flaw and there’s no reason to be embarrassed by it. Besides, bald is the new sexy. So show skin with pride.

9. Saying you’re young at heart.
Generally only people over 40 years old say this and often it’s to compensate for being older. Age is not a defect. Just pick someone you can be comfortable growing old with, no matter what your age difference.

8. The “online but not desperate” defense.
So many profiles justify going online to find love when, in fact, millions of singles choose this as one of the most effective ways to meet people. So don’t justify – have fun with this often rewarding choice for a romantic connection.

7. Life is short and other platitudes.
Countless profiles say “loves to laugh, life is short, love sunsets”. Rather than state the obvious, talk about things that make you unique. If you must say you love to laugh then add what makes you laugh.

6. Listing honesty as a quality.
Being honest is not impressive, it’s basic. This is also true of being compassionate, courteous, and kind. If you’re satisfied with basics, you may not be asking enough of yourself or others. Instead, list your special qualities. Chances are you’ll attract others who aim high.

5. Focusing on flaws.
So many profiles say “not into drama or head games”. Instead of listing flaws you won’t tolerate, politely disengage from people who don’t appeal to you. If you feel someone’s playing you, delete them and move on to more positive experiences.

4. Buddies ‘n beer pics
It’s great that you have friends to fish, drink and take pictures with. However, a buddy picture is not a profile picture – keep the focus solely on you and smile warmly. Besides, do you really want to imply that you and your buddies are all looking for one soul mate?

3. If you don’t like to write, get off the site.
A lot of profiles say, “I don’t like to write about myself so ask what you want to know”. This puts the onus on the other person to do all the work. It can seem a lazy and anti-social. So If you’re not comfortalbe with the process, don’t date online.

2. Disses and misses.
Everyone’s had a bad experience with an ex or an unfortunate meeting with someone online. It’s best to put those disappointments behind you and not reference them on your profile. It can sound self-pitying and unforgiving. Instead, keep positive.

1. The headless woman pic.
On every dating site, there always seems to be at least one picture of a man standing next to a woman whose head has been torn off. Seriously guys. That’s just not going to win hearts.

Kate Houston is President and Founder of trysweettalk.com, one of the only online dating profile writing services to leverage subtle, but highly effective, ad techniques so that dating profiles stand out and compete among the millions out there.

Related posts:

1. Funny Dating Profiles
2. The Affects of Angle
3. How to Make Your Dating Profile Far More Interesting

I would recommend the following if you’re brand-new to online dating or if you are nervous:

• Check out my free online dating guide. I had a lot of trouble with online dating in the beginning in my guide offers advice on just about every area of online dating. I met my wife using Match.com so I promise you that the information in it is relevant!

• If you’re not interested in reading my full guide, at least check out my 30 point online dating checklist. I believe that this can help even someone brand-new to online dating gets started off on the right foot.
• Consider trying OKCupid first. This is a totally free service and in some ways is similar to Match.com. In general, I find that most people have far less success with the free services. However, that is no reason to avoid a trying one. OKCupid happens to be my favorite and I feel that this service offers singles the most opportunity to have the most success (of the free services, anyway). The idea here is to get comfortable with online dating and then try to Match.com free trial.
• You may also want to consider trying Chemistry’s 14 day free trial. This is because chemistry.com helps guide users through the dating process and can be a good place to start for those new to online dating. While chemistry.com offers seven days more free than Match.com does, they also control who you can communicate with. It is still a great service but a free trial with it probably still offers you less opportunity than half the time with Match.com (but that’s just my opinion, you may find you have far more success with it).

Note that you will have to provide credit card information to sign up for the Match seven day free trial. As long as you cancel the subscription during your first seven days, you’ll be charged nothing. This is a hassle although I suspect they do this so you cannot continuously sign up for additional free trial periods. Regardless, this fact is a big reason why I make the suggestions above to ensure that you’re ready to try the Match.com free trial and make the most of it. You really do only get one shot!

Try the Match.com free seven day trial now.

Related posts:

1. Is the Chemistry.com Free Trial Worth It?
2. How to Make the Most of Your Chemistry.com Free Trial
3. DatingDirect Free Trial July 21st 2010

Lavalife will be providing free use of their instant messenger service to all memeber this Wednesday, July 28 2010.

The email alert I received from them suggested that I:

Log in now and start hot-listing your favorites, then come back first thing Wednesday and start communicating with 1000s of local singles on IM for FREE!

This seems like pretty good advice to me (and I’m actually surprised to see the service offering such clear instructions on how to best take advantage of the free time!)

This Lavalife free event begins at 12:01am local time Wednesday, July 28, 2010 and ends 11:59 pm local time Wednesday, July 28, 2010.

Related posts:

1. Lavalife Free Email Weekend, December 2009
2. Lavalife 100% Free Email Weekend November 2009
3. DatingDirect Free Trial July 21st 2010

Interview Part 1
Interview Part 2

I wanted to take an opportunity to talk a little bit more about this service. The first thing that I’ll say is that in talking with Chloe, I was given the very strong impression that she really does care about providing a great service to singles.

Second, I also believe that this service has some really great ideas. As someone who frequently pushes for greater acceptance of online dating, I am excited to see a service that encourages social interaction with your friends as you use it. Services like this, in my opinion, are the next step between yesteryear’s rejection of online dating and tomorrow’s online dating becomes the norm.

Members, Members, Members
Still, good ideas will only get you so far. While HelloJackieJoe brings great ideas to the table, such as incentives to get your friends to join and at the same time earning yourself free time on the service, when many people use the site they may not sign up because of the newness of the service or because there are very few members where they live.

To that, I would suggest that if you like what the service has to offer, that you sign up regardless of the number of people in your area. I recommend this because new online dating services frequently find themselves caught in a Catch-22: having low membership discourages many people from joining which keeps the membership low. If you sign up and convince a few of your friends to do the same, the next time someone in your area visits the website they may find themselves compelled to try it where they otherwise would have passed it by. You can still have a primary dating service that you use that has huge membership. At the same time, there is no harm in creating your account here and seeing what happens. If more people took this approach, I believe there are a lot of great, yet small, online dating services that could find their membership rolls growing.

And just to be clear for any cynics out there, this really is my opinion. No money is changing hands here, I really just feel that the service is run by people who care about their customers and who have some genuinely interesting ideas.

Interested? Get 60 Days Free
If the service interests you, check out this promotion which gives readers a Little Red Rails a free 60 days using the service. This promotion won’t last forever so if you’re interested check it out today.

Related posts:

1. Finding Good Deals for Online Dating Services
2. The HelloJackieJoe Interview, Part 1
3. 2010 Dating Service Valentine’s Day Specials

Yahoo! Personals is the first service I ever paid for when I started dating online. I never had success with this service and as I discuss in my online dating guide, I think it may have had to do with the fact that Yahoo! wasn’t a site about dating. People doing other things would find themselves checking out Yahoo! Personals just because they basically already had an account through their Yahoo! account. It is my theory that this activity inflated the membership numbers for Yahoo! although many of these members were never all that active. On the other hand, if you found yourself with a Match.com account, you ended up with it for a very specific reason: you intentionally signed up for an online dating service.

Yahoo! Personals Ending – A Good Thing?
It is my opinion that the closing of Yahoo! Personals is not a bad thing for those of us dating online. This is because two fairly large separate services have now consolidated into one service. This is great news for users of both services and for any other singles who now sign up Match.com. While features of an online dating service are important, having a large pool of singles to choose from is often just as important.

Why Is My Yahoo! Personals Account Gone?
If you have found yourself reading this article because you stopped using your Yahoo personals account and now find it missing, at this point I think your only option is to create a new account at Match.com. On July 21, 2010, Yahoo removed all accounts that had not already switched to Match.com.

Related posts:

1. Match.com and Yahoo! Personals to be One Dating Service
2. The Best and Worst Cities for Dating
3. Do Cheesy Pick-up Lines Really Work?

This post is the second half of a two-part interview I had with Chloe Rothwell, the CEO of the new online dating service called HelloJackieJoe. HelloJackieJoe is unique in that it aims to involve your friends into your online dating experience. The first half of my interview with Chloe is available here in the second half is below:

You had mentioned that HelloJackieJoe integrates with Facebook. If I were using this service, and I wanted to ask 10 of my friends on Facebook what they thought of a girl I’m considering contacting, do they have to be members of the site or can they just see it as a visitor?

We take the dating to them in their Facebook environment. You select your friends from your list and you agree to allow them to pull the data for you. You see the profile, but within Facebook. It’s a very simple mechanic with options like “yes,” “no,” or “maybe”—we’re not asking people to comment on whether someone is attractive or anything like that—it’s very, do you think this person would be a good fit for me? And it’s just a way to have a little bit of fun and an extra way to encourage your friends, to get out there and arrange a few dates. It’s all designed to be very friendly from the point of where not forcing people to join our site if they don’t want to be there, we’re not trying to make you promote us to your friends unnecessarily – it’s very much about trying to come at this from the point of view of the person dating.

That’s great. A second ago you mentioned recurring billing and I was just reading more about that recently. Do you not use recurring billing?

No. What we’ve basically chosen to do is a site where you pay to communicate with people. You can post the profile for free and you can leave it up there for as long as you want and you only pay when you want to respond to somebody or when you want to initiate contact with somebody new. And at that point you can choose between paying for just one month or paying for two months or three months. And you obviously get a discount for paying for three months up front. Pay as you date is what we’re trying to create. If you don’t know what to commit for, you can just pay as you go, you can take a break and come back. It may be a little more inconvenient for people who have to re-enter their credit card details or reactivate their Paypal account, but we find, for the main part, that people would rather have that than an unexpected expense pop up because they forgot to cancel it.

What’s your target audience for HelloJackieJoe.com?

We’re based in the U.S. We’re actually based in Los Angeles, so what we’re trying to do is to focus on two markets right now. We’ve chosen Los Angeles because we’re here and we’ve also chosen Seattle because we have some familiarity with that market and we think it’s a really good singles market. There seems to be a lot of single people who are looking to be a part of some cool dating sites up there. If we find a good audience, then we’ll keep rolling out to other markets. There’s no reason you can’t join in you’re in another part of the country. It’s about making sure that we’re getting as many people nearby you to actually date. That’s a big challenge so we’re just trying to focus on different markets at different times.

It seems like your service is very socially oriented. Do you offer any of your users incentives to get their friends to participate or that sort of thing?

Yeah we do. We recently introduced a site credit system whereby if you encourage somebody else to join either by them adding themselves as a single person or by them being the friend adding somebody, you get a $10 credit on the site and that credit never expires and you can use it whenever you want in any payment that happens on the site. Eventually, if you added a couple of friends, you could date for free for a while. That’s the idea behind it. We’re trying to make it so that the other people who go to the trouble of bringing other people to the site are rewarded for that. And that was a feature that was created based on feedback from people who were using the site. People seemed to be liking it as a recognition for the effort they go to, as a reward system. We are finding so far that is a good system and we’re open to hearing from anyone else what we can do to help encourage them because I think it’s important to recognize the users who go out of their way to bring their friends to the site.

Yeah I think it’s a great idea. I’m not a business owner but I can imagine how hard it would be to break into a market that’s very controlled and with something like that you may be able to do it virally. I think it’s great for the users but I think it could be great for the service as well.

I’m glad you think that. We’re trying very hard to get people to share and do the referring so they get the credit.

Photo by Bill Ward’s Brickpile

Oh wow that’s a big question. I agree with you 100% that it has become a lot more socially accepted to say that you’re using a service. Appropriately, single people are getting a lot more choices for what services are out there that they can utilize.

I think the trend to more mobile services which has feature to help you keep up with what’s happening on the fly more, specifically with the GPS tracking and all that stuff, I think that will continue. Obviously, the integration with the social media and social networking sites will continue to find new ways to have the integration. I think all of that is very positive.

I think that there is still a very big desire there for people to have privacy over this topic. In that way, we decided not to make it solely integrated into social networking sites and not being solely about everyone on your social groups knowing what you’re doing. Different services will continue to evolve and appear that cater to more niche needs and desires and I think there’s a place for multiple options here.

In our survey results, we definitely find people use more than one service at a time. In that way, we think what we’re offering at HelloJackieJoe.com is a great complement to other services you might be trying out be they paid or free or very religious specific or any other kind of niche market. In that way I think we’ll definitely see more options coming to cater to people’s different needs and I think we’ll see it evolve to become a lot more social. There’s not a huge amount that has otherwise changed in terms of people posting a profile and I think some of those things are very classic and I think they do work. I don’t think you need to change everything up. More ways to communicate and more ways to communicate quickly will definitely continue to be there. We’ve tried to address how we think people want to communicate with having that safety and anonymity that you can have by the distance that online provides, so we’ve tried to make it that people can, you know, leave each other a voicemail and people can video chat and all these kinds of options, they give you more choices and I think that will continue.

That was actually my last question that I had to ask. Is anything you would like to talk about or anything you think my readers would be interested for you to talk about?

You know, my main point is that we’re trying to offer something different and we’re trying to continue to build it in a direction that really serves the people who are out there dating. We’re looking to hear from people who use our site and continue to improve it in the direction that works for them. And in that way we might be quite idealistic, we’re trying to do something that’s committed to making it bigger than the site itself. And of the money that people spend on the site, we do give 20% away to charity which is a big part: that people want to feel good about the services that they’re using today. We’re trying to be very authentic in everything that we’re doing on HelloJackieJoe and I think that’s the main message.

Related posts:

1. The HelloJackieJoe Interview, Part 1
2. Online Dating with Your Friends
3. How to Fix the Free Dating Service Model

Describe HelloJackieJoe and how it’s different from other sites that are out there today.

Really what we’re trying to do is create a site where unlike other options where you’re the person who is trying to date and you have to do everything on your own, the premise of this site is your friend gets involved and helps write your profile and look at what profiles are out there and try to help match you with other people on the site.

So, it’s taking that experience where a friend might introduce you in real life and trying to take that online and at the same time, taking some of that awkwardness that people experience with having to promote themselves and having cliché profiles and helping people who are also a little scared to try online dating and need just a little bit of encouragement.

I was in a situation where I had a number of friends, who for whatever reason, felt like online dating wasn’t for them—they tried a couple of sites and had bad experiences. And it just felt to me like there was nothing out there where, as a friend, you could get involved and help your single friend find a date without completely taking over and trying to write a profile for them or something. And so, this is really where the idea came about. You know, in this day in age, a lot of people either don’t feel online dating is for them or they’re too busy or they’re too scared. It’s just trying to coax people into putting themselves out there without it being quite so scary and quite so solitary.

So you were actually motivated to create your site based on the experience with your friends?

Yeah, totally. You know, really the simple idea of being frustrated. There wasn’t really an option that helped meet their needs without them feeling quite overwhelmed by all of the different sites out there. I had a couple of friend who tried a couple of free sites in particular and found that experience lacking, and so it just felt like there wasn’t a way for you as a friend to get more involved without completely taking over and that’s not really in a support role and that defeats the purpose of them being in control. It really was created out of a need to act amongst my own friends, a need to be resonating with other people.

Now, if I had a friend who I felt would benefit from this service, how much control do they have if I decide to go and create them a profile? Do they need to sign off on this sort of thing?

Yes. The idea is that it’s not supposed to be a bad experience. It’s supposed to be a very positive experience, so the person who is dating has complete control over what anybody else sees about them. So, although you help create their profile, they approve it. So if they read something that they’re not too happy about, they can ask you for a little re-write or pick a different friend to help describe them. So the idea is not to make people, in any way, feel like they don’t have any control over what’s happening or who they’re being presented to, and in what light—they really retain that control but they have the opportunity to have somebody else talk up how great they are and how cool they are without being awkward. It’s also kind of fun to read how other people’s friends describe them—maybe what they wouldn’t reveal about themselves. It’s really going to be a very positive, fun, and collaborative experience as opposed to anything like an ambush site or a situation whereby that person might feel uncomfortable or awkward about being presented in a way that they wouldn’t normally describe themselves.

I have friends who will come to me for advice because they know I run this website. Some of them still seem to treat online dating like their dirty little secret and I’m curious, are you concerned that some people may be too shy to ask their friends for help? Or what encouragement would you offer if you felt they were to shy to ask?

What we’ve found is that most people still don’t want to publicize to everyone on their friends list that they’re dating and that’s why when we’ve done things like integration into Facebook: we’ve done it in such a way that still allows the person whose going out to date the control as to whether or not they’re sharing that information with their friends. For instance, we have an application on the site whereby you can ask other friend’s opinions about people you might be considering going on a date with. And you hand select those people from your friends list and when they reply to you nothing appears in your news feed or on your wall on Facebook—not everybody else your friends with on Facebook would know you’re trying to date.

Photo by jessica.garro

You can read the second half of my HelloJackieJoe interview here. Also, HelloJackieJoe is offering 60-days free to LittleRedRails’ readers. This offer won’t last forever so if you’re interested you should check it out today.

Related posts:

1. The HelloJackieJoe Interview, Part 2
2. On the Fence about Online Dating
3. The Affects of Angle

I had a client whose original profile asserted, I love to cook. As a professional dating profile writer, I can tell you that about 80% of the profiles I read say the very same thing.

Eventually I learned this client not only loved to cook, she loved it so much she collected antique cookbooks. I also learned she was a truly unconventional woman in many respects. So, rather than keep, I love to cook, I began her profile with I have a recipe that says, “catch and pluck 10 chickens”. But, don’t worry, I don’t usually do what I’m told.”

My point is that your interests are not necessarily what make you interesting, it’s how those interests are manifested that make you interesting. For instance, I had a client who loved to travel – a fairly common interest. However, after probing further, I learned that she used to put on her mother’s high heels as a child then go in her parents’ vehicle and pretend she was driving. On her profile I wrote, When I was little, I’d put on heels, climb into our car and pretend I was driving. I don’t know why I wore heels but I do know that I still love to travel.

If you’re writing your dating profile yourself then be sure to do more than just list common interests. Instead, pick your main interests and bring them to life with an anecdote.

More Dating Profile Examples
Here are some other examples from dating profiles I’ve written that demonstrate how an interest can go from being commonplace to unique:

I love animals became I rescued a cat who was missing a tail. I adopted a terrier that was missing a leg. Though I’m not missing anything myself, I do have extra time for the right woman.

I like sci-fi because No one imitates Yoda the way I do.

Personally, I don’t think anyone can write their own profile as well as I can (insert shameless self-promotion!), but I do think that you can make your interests far more interesting by avoiding adjectives and lists in favor of anecdotes.

If you like, there’s a free personality quiz on my site that will help you uncover some of your more interesting traits. From there, you can weave these into your profile so that it becomes more engaging. Though I’m the first to admit that online dating success begins with your looks (shallow as that may be), what will clinch the deal is your profile. It’s the first impression people get of your personality so you need to make it count.

Kate Houston is President and Founder of trysweettalk.com, one of the only online dating profile writing services to leverage subtle, but highly effective, ad techniques so that dating profiles stand out and compete among the millions out there.

Related posts:

1. How Do I Write an Email to a Woman with Nothing Interesting in Her Profile?
2. Improve Profile Views with your Heading
3. Internet Dating: Profile Views vs. Actual Interest

While free events are always a good thing, this weekend offers some particular value because of both of these free weekends. A common question is, ”What is the difference between chemistry and eHarmony?” or, “Which of the two services is better?”

Decide For Yourself…
This weekend you have an opportunity to decide for yourself! You will be able to compare the two services side by side and decide for yourself: which service is easier to use, which one provides better matches, and so on. Regardless of which service you prefer, the great thing about all this is you get to answer those questions for free.

With that being said, a warning: both of these services have a extensive sign up process and if you plan on signing up for both of them on the same evening I would set aside an hour (and perhaps a touch longer). As I always recommend on these free events, better to sign up earlier rather than later. Allow yourself some time taking the latest matches and review them so when it comes time to use the free service, you’ll know who you want to contact right away.

Best of luck to all of the singles this weekend!

Try Chemistry – Free Communication Weekend! July 23 – 25 2010

Related posts:

1. eHarmony Free Communication Weekend, July 2nd – 5th 2010
2. Chemistry.com Free Communication Weekend – June 11th to 13th 2010
3. eHarmony Free Communication Weekend, July 23rd – Aug 1st 2010

This eHarmony free communication weekend is far more than a weekend – it’s a full 10-days of free communication. The Free Communication Weekend begins at 12:01AM on Friday, July 23nd and ends at 11:59PM on Sunday, August 1st. Please note that this free event is only available to the United States (sorry Canada, but you did have your own free 10-day communication “weekend” in the past).

Even though you will have 10 days to use eHarmony for free, I still recommend signing up in advance if you can. Having your profile and matches already available and ready to go when Friday arrives gives you a nice head start. If you are reading this and the event has already started, I still think you should sign up (obviously). But for those who know in advance, I say give yourself every opportunity for success that you can.

If you already have an account with eHarmony, remember to turn on the setting to provide new matches if you have it turned off! This should be done as early as you can.

The normal eHarmony free communication weekends are great but I do feel that having a large amount of success in 3 days is a tall order. Will you find dates on a 3 day free weekend? Sure, but with 10 days you can have time to build more of the conversations which will lead to more first dates. This really is a great opportunity to get a real feel for the service.

Just a note to anyone who has not read my online dating guide: some singles think they should only talk to one person at a time with online dating. I believe this is a mistake (you can read why here) but it is even a bigger mistake when you only have a 10 day window. It may seem like a long time but it will fly by before you realize it.

Note: Chemistry.com is also having a free weekend this coming Friday through Sunday. If you ever wanted to compare the two services, now is a perfect time.

eHarmony.com – Try for Free July 23 – August 1.

Related posts:

1. eHarmony Free Communication Weekend, July 2nd – 5th 2010
2. Chemistry.com Free Communication Weekend: July 23 – 25 2010
3. eHarmony Free Communication Events for May 2010