Preparing for Online Dating in the New Year

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As I discussed in my previous article, January will be the busiest time of the year for online dating. There are a lot of opportunities with the new year and online dating. I wanted to compile some articles from my site to help you prepare if you decide to take the plunge into online dating, or give it another try, in the new year.

Comprehensive Advice

First, if you’re looking for a comprehensive guide check out my free online dating guide. This is a PDF file you can download and it has all the details on everything below, plus a lot more. I talk about how I struggled with online dating and what I did to turn things around. I add to it each year based on situations I hear from readers and now it’s grown to over 100 pages.

But maybe reading a document like this isn’t your thing? What follows is what I feel are some of the most important parts of the guide to help you along.

Admit That Online Dating Can Be Difficult

People sometimes assume that online dating will be easy. This is normally people who’ve never tried online dating…because once you try it, you quickly realize things aren’t as easy as they seem!

Along those lines, I’d recommend checking out my article on having the right mindset going into online dating. A lot of people take an approach that increases the chance that they won’t find success. In this article, I recommend a different way to look at things and to prepare yourself to have perseverance throughout your dating life.

Creating Your Profile

I can’t emphasize it enough: a bad profile can be one of the most damaging things to the online dater. Many times, profiles aren’t bad…just a bit boring. But occasionally they are bad. The problem for most of us, including me, is that you can’t tell that you’re creating a bad profile when you read your own.

In an effort to help people create more helpful online dating profiles, I created my step-by-step profile creation guide. In this, I walk you through a process that I believe is very likely to help you create a solid dating profile. Perhaps most important, I try to help you see ways to give people a feel for who you really are. Most profiles go with the “list” approach where they include things like: I like to do X and to go to Y and I also enjoy doing Z. These profiles aren’t horrible but they do tend to be a bit boring. My hope is that the profile creation guide can help you create something more interesting than a list of things you like.

Sending Emails

Once you have your profile ready, you’ll want to start communicating with other singles. In my article on writing a first email in online dating, I walk you through the steps to create what I consider to be a good email.

Good news on this one too: it’s actually very simple and following a few suggestions can not only get you more responses, I think it can also help you write your emails faster. Also, I’d recommended reading through the comments on this article because, over the years, there have been lots of back and forth on different situations that you might find helpful.

Too Much? Not Enough?

If all that is still more than you want to read, I’d recommend my online dating checklist. I can’t get it much more condensed than this!

If, on the other hand, you want more to consider, I’d recommend reading my 10 day online dating challenge. This is primarily intended for someone who has never tried online dating and is meant to help you skip some of the mistakes that many of us make when it comes to online dating. It’s called a challenge because you’ll find that as time goes by you’ll not want to do everything I’m recommending…but I do believe the fact that it’s challenging is a good thing, not a bad thing.

 

Best of luck if you decide to give online dating a try!

 

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About the Author:

Brad initially struggled with online dating but over time became quite successful using it. He met his wife using online dating and has been giving advice and helping people improve their results since 2007. He has written a Free Online Dating Guide to help others find success with online dating. You can learn more about his personal experience using online dating and running this website here.