I just loooove giving advice. Somebody oughtta hire me to write an advice column. No, really. No, REALLY.

Anyhow, this is actually a bit I just wrote to post on the Panty Hog forum; and I liked it so much I wanted to spread it around. Although posted here I suppose it’s more in the nature of a rant.

This is advice to a guy who is having poor results in meeting women on an online dating service. Now my advice is geared more toward the “adult” sites such as Adult Friend Finder or alt.com than say, eHarmony or match.com. Being married already I don’t have much call to advertise in places where people are (essentially) looking for someone to marry; wheras I have advertised for, well, other things on the “adult” sites. But the principles are probably applicable to those places as well.

The first thing to remember is that on those sites, guys outnumber girls by ten or twenty to one. So you really have to stand out from the crowd to get noticed.

Number one tip: DO NOT SIT AROUND WAITING FOR THE LADIES TO CONTACT YOU because it isn’t going to happen. These women are flooded with messages, they don’t have time to go searching through the listings. You need to do the searching, and send a message to the girls that interest you.

Tip number two, please, please READ her profile before you message a girl. Eg., if she’s into nothing but black guys and you’re whiter than rice, she’s going to shoot you down for sure. That’s why they have profiles, and all too many guys just look at a girl’s pic and don’t even bother to read the profile. With the volume of messages a girl gets, ones from guys who are obviously looking for something completely different will be ignored at best and flamed at worst. It’s hard not to get annoyed when the tenth guy that day offers you something you explicitly said you don’t want!

Tip number three: Don’t forget to write your own profile!!! It’s there so others can get to know you, and you can bet that if your initial message catches her eye she’ll be looking at your profile before she answers. Don’t miss the opportunity to impress her; put some effort into it! Check your spelling and grammar, write in complete, understandable sentences. Don’t rattle off the tired line about “I just want to please you” either; women (rightly) don’t buy it and it just looks desperate. Say something about yourself, what you do for a living, what your hobbies are, whatever’s really important to you. Besides hooking up :-p

Tip number four: You should definitely post pictures with your profile, and they should NOT be pictures of your dick! Even a size queen will want to look at your face before she sees your penis. Remember too that most of the women won’t have paid for a membership, so they won’t be able to see your full-sized pic unless you send it with your message - so do send one (or more) and please, please, let it not be a pic of your woodie! Just imagine if you were anywhere else, and you walked up to a girl and whipped it out as you were saying hello.

(I sincerely hope that the regular dating sites like screen for those! )

Tip number six: When you write that first message to a woman you’re interested in, once again put some effort into it! For heaven’s sake say something more than “I’d like to meet with you, here’s my phone number” Whyever should she respond to that? Remember, she’s getting a LOT of messages, most of which run along the lines of “you’re so hot, here’s my email/phone number/instant message handle/home address, when can we get together?” These messages are boring (cause you get so many of them), rude (assumes you’ll want to/have time to meet any old body), and unwise (nobody with any sense is going to meet with a stranger right away). Tell her what you find attractive about her, from her picture(s) AND her profile. Tell her what you would like to do with her (keep the naughtiness level appropriate to the forum - girls on alt.com are going to be more open to outright lewdness than those on a regular dating site). And finally, tell her something more about yourself.

(Extra bonus tip - keep these items in that order - everybody likes to hear good things about themselves, and it’ll get you off on the right foot with her. )

Tip number seven: Keep your own wits about you. A good percentage of the “women” who place ads at places like Adult Friend Finder and alt.com are actually people (male and female) trolling for customers. Some of them have worse things planned. And it wouldn’t be any more wise for you to go giving out your home address & phone number or agreeing to meet a stranger in a motel room than it would be for HER. Your using good sense will protect your from being scammed, and it will impress her with your wisdom, coolness, and lack of desperation if she’s for real.