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WRITING A GREAT PERSONAL AD

One of the key components of finding great friendships, relationships, romance and more online is down to your personal ad. Good personal ads (ie. the ones that will get the best responses) are the ones which state in no uncertain terms who you are and what you want.

While it can be difficult to sum up who you are, what you do, what you like and what you are looking for in a few words, anyone can write a good personal ad - it’s just a case of knowing what to say.

These pointers will help:

• Honesty..be honest in your ad. Don’t pretend you enjoy the opera if you think it will attract a certain type of person that you are looking for – it won’t
• BEFORE you start writing you advertisement, make two lists. List one will be information that you think people need to know about you before they get in touch. List two should be a list of those qualities you are looking for in a partner.

Some ideas for list one could include:

• Your career
• Your main interests outside work
• Your goals in life
• How you like to spend your free time
• Children (have?want?dislike?)
• Your personality (serious, confident, shy etc)
• How you feel about relationships

Some examples of things to put in list two include:

• Age range you are looking for
• Children (want?have?dislike?)
• Personality traits you are attracted to
• Location (yours and theirs – it could be important)
• Willingness to move
• Physical Characteristics (Be realistic about yourself and what you want!)

While some of these look pretty cheesy, potential partners will want to know these things about you. There are so many choices out there that people will not want to waste time with incompatible matches.

• It’s important that you grab someone’s attention by including something that makes you unique, some personality quirk or life experience. This is the thing that will make YOU stand out from all the others.
• Some dating services will ask you a number of questions, with the answers appearing in your profile. These will be the more specific elements of who you are so the ad can be more of a general impression. Those people who see themselves in your ad will be more likely to reply. This makes being specific more beneficial. While you may be writing to fewer people, those who do respond will be more likely to possess the qualities you are looking for. It will also stop you wasting your time.
• It will be the headline of your ad that will grab the attention, making the difference between someone reading the rest of your ad or moving straight on by.
• The point is to stand out from the crowd and get noticed by those singles out there who will most likely appeal to you and who will find you interesting enough to make contact.
• Make sure you spell check everything - spelling and bad grammar make a bad impression. Don't shoot yourself in the foot before you start!

SEARCHING THE PERSONAL ADS

Every dating site will provide a search function – some simple and basic, some that are more complicated! Generally, you enter criteria that is important to you and the tool will trawl the database and return some or any results.

The thing to remember about these search tools is that they are very dumb and they will only return "exact" matches to what you have input. There is no intuitive search here. They can't think that others may or may not be suitable. The exact match does narrow your search down considerably, but it does not mean that those it has selected are ideal for you.

Some criteria are easy to find a match for, such as age, or hair colour. Others are not so easy for the search tools to choose. Some search tools are quite inflexible when making selections, you may wish to select more that one option but the search will only allow one or the other.

Make your search activities a regular occurrence. Set time aside each week to search the sites and contact all members you think may be a potential match.

KEEPING TRACK

If you have registered with more that one site, you will find there are times where you are having conversations with more that one person from more than one site. This can get quite confusing as well impolite if you get identities of people you have been talking to confused, if nothing else.

Keep notes on all your contacts, create separate folders in your email for each new contact, keeping all incoming and outgoing mail to this contact in the folder.

Maybe cut and paste their profile into a word document so you "know" who you are speaking to and cut and paste in any photos that they may have sent you via email so you get a better feel for who they are.

Prepare stock paragraphs to questions, especially in the early stages of talking, to save yourself the time and effort of re-keying the same information for to 20 different people. Key it once and then cut and paste it.

EMOTICONS

Emoticons are text or graphic images that are displayed in email, chat or other messaging systems to help overcome that fact that many typed messages don't include the same inflections of the spoken word.

Emoticons were originally included as a sequence of characters in a message. The most widely used is the winking face ;-) which is used to denote humour. Here are a few more:

Annoyed >L-(
Astonished 8-O
Blowing a kiss :-{}
Devil ]:->
Happy :^D
Hugs ((()))
Good Grief! |-{
Sad :-(
Sarcasm :-]
Stick out Tongue :-p

In most new chat facilities these emoticons can be inserted as images. Another form used in online messages and chat is abbreviations or acronyms.

Abbreviations

For example the four letters "IMHO" means in "in my humble opinion". Other examples include

Grin <g>
As a matter of fact AAMOF
As far as I'm concerned AFAIC
As soon as possible ASAP
Boy Friend BF
Beats the hell outta me BTHOM
Correct me if I'm wrong CMIIW
Hug H
If you know what I mean IYKWIM
In real life IRL
Kiss K
See you later CUL8R
See ya CYA
See you all later CYAL8R
Significant Other SO
Face to Face F2F
For your information FYI
Get a life GAL
Girl Friend GF
In my humble opinion IMHO
Later L8R
Laughing my ass off LMAO
Laughing my head off LMHO
Laughing out loud LOL
Mind your own business MYOB
None of your business NOYB
On the floor laughing OTFL
Pain in the Ass PITA
Rolling on the floor laughing ROTFL
Smile S
Situation Normal, All F*cked up SNAFU
Sh*t out of luck SOL
That's all for now TAFN
This oughta be good TOBG
Ta-ta for now TTFN
Talk to you later TTYL

OTHER INFORMATION
There are other important steps to take when using a dating service. Most will have their own advice channels and content online, so make sure you read everything you can.

This guide only covers help in attracting the right sort of people online, but this is only the first step. You may want to meet some of these people, or chat outside the confines of the site.

Make sure you read or speak to people who have gone through this process. While no doubt 99.9% of people are honest and open, there will be some that are no what they appear to be. While this is not meant to be a deterrent, be careful.

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Scottish Dating provides an overview of dating sites for Scotland to make your life easier finding the right dating site for dating in Scotland. Why not join some of these sites, specialised for dating in Scotland, all of them are free to join and have lots of singles interested in dating in Scotland. We can cater for Borders, Central, Dumfries & Galloway, Edinburgh, Fife, Glasgow, Grampian, Highlands, Lothian, Orkneys, Shetlands, Strathclyde, Tayside, Western Isles