How to Write a Profile | Write Profile | Writing a Profile Guide: P2 of 3

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How to Write a Profile - Writing a Profile Guide

Continued....

Telling people about who your looking for
Not only do you need to tell the world about yourself, but also you need to give interested readers clues as to whether you might find them attractive. By telling people a few of your core values as well as some of the more practical stuff, you will have already begun to filter out those people who believe that they don't fit. You also need an idea of what kind of person you'd like to meet. I'm not just talking about physical attributes, but the character of the person, the core values again.

I've already mentioned a few worthy attributes such as honesty, integrity etc. What others are important to you? My dear old mum used to say, you shouldn’t talk about religion or politics at the dinner table, but if these are important to you, say so.

Positives and Negatives
You need to understand how you react to other people both in a positive and a negative way. Now, when you start to think about this, it's usually easier to think about what you don't want. For example, one of my pet hates is people who are always moaning about something. Life is never quite fair to them, it's always someone else's fault, and they like to let everybody else know it.

Having established the negative characteristics, reverse them and rephrase them as positives. If the negative is true in terms of dislikes, is the positive case always true in terms of likes? Not always, but quite often it is. In my example above the reverse positive case is someone who has a positive outlook and accepts responsibility for their own lives, and these are attributes I would definitely look for.

So, think about the characteristics in other people that really turn you off, as well as those, which turn you on. Invert all the negative characteristics and list them as positive characteristics. Sort them into order of importance. Put a few of the important ones in your description of the person your looking for. The rest? Well, use them as conversation points once you get a few contacts to e-mail or phone. This will help further in the weeding out process.

Getting people to respond for further information
After reading your description of yourself, and your description of who you're looking for, if any brave souls are left, you want to encourage them to contact you for an exchange of further information. Give them a reason to do so. Give them a final hint of what it might be like to get in touch, or what they might be missing by not getting in touch (but no smut, please :)

Writing My Online Dating Profile
By paying attention to the previous thought process you are setting yourself up for success. You now have to put your conclusions into words. When writing a Profile, there are a number of principles you can adopt from the world of marketing.

The first is a principle of advertising called the two-stage advert where a company will place a small advert in a publication, which is only designed to get people to respond for further information. When a person responds they get the full sales pitch, brochures etc. Given that most online dating agencies only give you a limited space for writing your profile, it seems to me this would be a good approach.

The second principle of marketing is the sales letter format. If you ever get junk mail (who doesn't?) and bothered to read it you might have noticed that they all follow the same basic format (or at least the successful ones do). The format is:- Heading, important benefits paragraph, features/benefits paragraph(s), and a call to action.

The heading is the most important part of the sales letter. Seventy to eighty percent of the readers interest is generated by the heading. The next most important part is the call to action, which is the bit which says 'to get <the benefit> buy / contact / e-mail now'. The bit in the middle although important has less influence on whether a person responds than the heading and call to action. We’ll use the sales letter format, but keep the components reasonable short so they fit into the profile space. This will then be your first stage ‘advert’ to draw people in.

The Headline is your First (and only) chance to Impress
The first thing someone will notice is your profile headline. If it doesn’t immediately strike a cord in the reader, they will probably not read the rest of your profile.

If you've already tried writing a headline, you might have found that it's not always easy to write a meaningful, eye catching headline. However, what if you take your top personal quality and combine it in a short sentence with the top quality you're looking for? For example if my top quality is my sensitivity and I'm looking for someone who is confident, my headline could read 'Sensitive Man looking to meet Confident Woman'. Well, it's not very witty or imaginative, but it does state very clearly, two of the most important characteristics offered or looked for, so that's good. It also shows that I'm a ‘no bullshit’, straight talking person, which I am. It's certainly better than 'Fluffy Bunnikins would love to meet Mr Tiggly Wiggly' which doesn't tell you much, other than the person is probably a tad immature (my apologies to any one out there named Bunnikins :). If a confident woman who's looking for a no bullshit, sensitive sort of guy saw that headline do you think she'd stop and read it? Of course.

Do you have to be witty or humorous in a headline? Well, if that's your nature, you will write something humorous anyway. If it's not your nature then you're better off not fighting evolution, and sticking to your true character and eccentricities rather than trying to convey a false image of yourself. Try writing a few versions of headlines out and see which one you think conveys your personality best. Use different core values that you exhibit, and seek, to see which ones play off each other best. You can't practise writing the headline enough, because it’s so important. Finally sort them into the order which conveys your character and what you seek, most clearly. The top one in the list is the one to use first (remember, when your profile is online it can always be changed if you want)......

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