The goal of an online dating site profile is to entice other singles to click onto your profile, read through it, and make the effort to contact you to find out more about you.

You should not rush through this step. For a few fortunate people, writing is a very natural thing. They can sit down and look at a blank sheet of paper and within 15-20 minutes they are able to write a concise and well-written profile. These people are the exception.

Most of us fall into the second category of people who struggle with writing in general, let alone writing personal information about ourselves. This will be the most time consuming process of setting up your dating profile. It can take people many hours, if not days, to develop a profile that they’re comfortable in posting.

By nature, most people are not good at selling. Sales is a difficult process, and it takes a certain personality to succeed in sales. Yet every dating site you visit tells you that you need to develop a personal profile that “sells” yourself to other singles. This is a tough dilemma for many to deal with.

Generally speaking, most people are modest about selling themselves. From an early age, our parents go to great lengths to tell us what an admirable personality trait humility is, and we are encouraged to praise and extol the virtues of others while at the same time downplaying our own actions. We are not comfortable with “bragging” to others about what our strengths are.

Let’s take a look at this social trend we are taught, and let’s use it to our benefit to develop our online persona. This will require you to step outside your normal comfort zone, but the benefits you receive from it will be quite substantial in the long run.

• Ask your closest personal confidents if they could take a few minutes of their own time to write down what it is that they like most about you.

Explain to them why you’re asking them to do this, and you’ll find that they’ll be more than happy to help you out. Once you ask a few close friends, siblings, or even your parents to do this, you will find reoccurring themes that will continue to present themselves.

This will be embarrassing process for a many because it requires you to put yourself out there a little bit. You’ll be letting others know that you’re planning to use an online dating site. This might stop a few people from following my advice, because the anonymity of using an online dating service is a big selling point of the process.

Single people don’t like to have discussions on why they’re still single (again back to the issue of drawing attention to ourselves). If this describes you remember that you have little to lose. You’ve chosen a person who’s gotten to know you really well and they like what you have to offer.

Remember, you are joining an online dating service because you want a change in your life. Your current model for meeting singles isn’t working as you would like. You are tired of being alone and you are looking for someone to share your day-to-day activities with. A few minutes of what you perceive to be “embarrassment” with a friend who values you for who you are is really a small inconvenience.

The benefit of asking two or three people to do this for you is that the majority of your dating profile will be written for you. It will portray who you are and how people perceive you. It will be an honest representation of who you are, and research shows that honest online dating profiles tend to be the most successful.

Once you’ve figured that out, use the parts of those profiles as a template to work off of but insert your personal info. The most important part of this plan is that you need to make sure to write the things and beliefs that make you unique and will set you apart.

An example of this would be that you’ve seen a profile that drew you in because it quoted the lyrics of a song that you really enjoy.

The use of the song lyric is what drew you in, so incorporate a similar strategy when piecing together your profile. I’m not suggesting that you use that exact lyric, but rather come up with another favorite lyric or line of poetry to help convey your message.

You don’t need to reinvent the wheel, but these profiles were interesting to you and most likely will be interesting to people with tastes similar to yours. It only works if you personalize it to represent you. If not, the people that you’re trying to meet will recognize this as soon as they get to know you and in many cases dismiss you as a fraud.

In the online community, many people aren’t even bothering to put any thought or originality into their own online persona. There’s a fantastic article written by Jennifer Saranow of the Wall Street Journal titled “The Cut-and-Paste Personality” which goes into great detail.

The gist of the article is that there is rampant plagiarism running through not only online dating site profiles but also many of the social networking sites such as MySpace. For a lot of people, it’s much easier for them to copy a dating profile than to sit down and put the effort into creating their own original profile.

Ms. Saranow points out that people aren’t just taking lines or small quotes from other profiles, but that they are actually copying profiles in their entirety. She uses the example of a writer named Hugh Gallagher, who has had parts of one of his college essays from over 20 years ago copied in over 50 different profiles on Match.com alone.

That’s just one dating site. Imagine with all of the dating sites out there how many other times his work has been plagiarized?

The anonymity of the internet makes a lot of this quite possible. It’s quite easy to google any subject imaginable and it will return hundreds or even thousands of pages that reference what you’re looking for. The amount of written material to borrow from is immense, and it grows on a daily basis. I speak from experience as I’ve visited numerous other dating sites and I’ve found many of the articles I’ve written posted on their sites without any credit being referenced back to me.

The bottom line is that when you are creating your online dating profile; make it as unique as possible. Make sure it represents who you are. You may be able to fool someone into clicking onto your profile, but relationships built on false pretenses rarely succeed.

When you post a profile on an online dating site, there are three parts that viewers will see: your picture, your headline, and your profile. Each one serves a distinct purpose, but in my opinion, the picture and the headline are the most important.

Research shows that you only have 5 seconds to grab someone’s attention.

People are superficial and we are drawn to things that catch our attention. I have previously written about the importance of your written profile and how you should focus on it when starting out. I firmly stand by that, but if you can’t get someone to click onto it to read it, it won’t matter what you write.

Think about articles you read in a paper or magazine. What is it that usually draws you in? It’s the headline and the picture. Many a great article has been written and never read because the headline doesn’t draw people in.

I want to focus on creating a great headline for your online dating profile. Here are a few tips that you should focus on.

1. Keep it between 3-7 words. Anything longer than that tends to lose the reader.

2. Avoid Clichés. The goal is to come up with something unique and original. You want to differentiate yourself from all the others. Take a stroll around your dating site and take a tally of how many times you see the following:

3. Avoid negativity. Portray a positive image in your headline. Although you may be LonleyLady or LookingForLove, you don’t need to announce it. It implies you’re a weak person, and many will avoid people they see as weak.

4. Incorporate your hobbies or interests. This headline is supposed to tell others something about you. What better way to do that than to come up with a quick snippet of what you like to do. Feel free to use your college, favorite sports team, restaurant, or local hang out in the title.

• Meet me at Starbucks?
• Join me for a Walk on the Beach…
• Small Talk & a bottle of Merlot.  Interested?
• Steeler Fan Looking for a Tailgating buddy
• Let’s Go Ride our Harley’s

5. Incoroporate a song lyric or line from a poem.

• “Some people call me the Space Cowboy…

6. Unless you are joining an “adult” site, avoid all sexual innuendo. If it’s sex you’re selling, those are the only responses you’ll get back.

7. Feel free to switch it up. Come up with a couple different headlines and change them every few weeks. Keep track of which ones work best and get rid of the ones that don’t.

8. As with everything in your profile, make sure that you spell everything correctly. If you’re not sure how to spell a word, then just don’t use it. Otherwise, make sure to look it up in an online dictionary.

9. Avoid Capitals. In the online world, using all capitals is considered “yelling” and is considered to be rude behavior.

10. Use (…) to end your headline. I’ve done a lot of research on headlines and my success rate is twice as high when I end a phrase with (…). That’s three dots. It gives the reader the impression that there is more to the story, but they need to click to find out more. What have you got to lose…

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