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Writing personal ads should be considered an art in its own right. For decades personal ads have appeared in magazines and newspapers all over the world, and for decades people have struggled to describe themselves in 25 words or less. It is difficult, impossible really, to fully sum up one’s essence in just a few lines, including likes, dislikes, interests and goals. These days the top quality dating sites offer more sophisticated personal ads, which are usually called profiles. Unlike the older personal ads in newspapers, modern profiles are detailed and in-depth and often help the user to build his or her description by taking a test or answering a series of questions. Even though describing yourself to a virtual stranger will always be difficult, making a free profile and getting yourself in the dating scene can be done if you follow our advice.

If you want to get the best of your personal ads membership, try to present the right image and get people to interact with you by chatting daily, make note of these 10 personal ad tips:

1. An obvious one - complete your personal ad profile fully. And accurately! There is nothing worse for a browsing member than spending their quality time opening your profile only to find your profile is full of Ask Me statements. So … Be informative, be complete, be thorough, be interesting.
2. Add a photograph or two or even four! Amazingly, members with photos in their personal ads are likely to get up to 9 times more replies than members without any photo image attached to their profile. Okay, so even if we aren’t all photogenic models, any photo is far better than none at all.
3. Don’t be aggressive or rude in personal ads. It may be your sense of humor to be sarcastic or cutting, but it doesn’t always come across best in anonymous text. Biting humor in the first instance will not usually attract the desired attention, even if it’s meant to be amusing. That comes once you are chatting face to face.
4. You may have had a bad experience with a previous partner, but making a list of specific criteria a future partner must meet usually has the effect of making people look elsewhere. Even if they match! We all seek Mr. and Miss Right, but turning dating into a job interview removes every ounce of romance and passion from the occasion.
5. No matter how you speak in your day-to-day life, don’t use swear or curse words in your profile, personal ad, conversations or emails! They are generally offensive and turn people off. Again, swearing is like sarcasm — people may find your colorful language charming in face-to-face conversations, but without context your cursing may make you seem uneducated or angry.
6. Make your personal ad truthful above all things, but also emphasize your best characteristics. Admitting that you are a loner who has no friends will not win you many admirers, but emphasizing that you are a true individual will. Learning to sell yourself a bit without exaggerating is your best bet.
7. If you really feel passionate about something say so, don’t try and hide the things that are important to you. If you love partying say so, if your religion is important to you, say so. Be yourself, and be upfront with who you are.
8. Do not pretend that you are willing to fly half way round the world to meet someone if you are not. It’s not fair to anyone including you. If you are really only looking for someone in your state or close to home then stick with that and make it clear.
9. Always try and reply to people’s messages and reply in a reasonable amount of time, not weeks later. If you are serious about dating, you are serious about replying to personal messages. Give people the ability to move on to other potential partners if you are not interested. Conversely, don’t email someone weeks later and not expect that they haven’t written you off!
10. Be positive! The more you project a friendly and positive attitude, the more likely people are going to be attracted to you. Smile in your photo and be inviting in your chats and comments. People who seem bitter, negative or conceited push others away — people on dating websites are often sensitive to rejection, so who would want to take a chance getting to know someone who may end up being cruel or mean?

Be patient, it takes time to find someone special using personal ads but it does work. After all, it’s just that one special person that you wish to meet. Sometimes you need to chat to quite a few people first. Know that the missteps and fizzles in chemistry are part of the process. Take your time to complete your personal ads, take your time to chat with many different people, and take your time to get to know someone well. It’s all part of moving toward the day when you find that special someone.

What about adult dating websites and profiles?

If you are a Garrison Keillor fan, you have probably heard about the fictional Lake Wobegon on National Public Radio, where “all the women are strong, all the men are good-looking, and all the children are above average.” In the online dating community, similar rules apply: in one study, only 1 percent of online daters listed their appearance as “less than average.”

Rationale for Falsehoods
Why so much inaccuracy? One theory, formulated in the late 1980s and early 1990s by Sara Kiesler and her colleagues at Carnegie Mellon University, suggests that by its very nature “computer-mediated communication” is disinhibiting, causing people to say just about anything they feel like saying. Because people typically use screen names rather than real ones, their ramblings are anonymous and hence not subject to social norms. There are also no physical cues or consequences–no visible communication gestures, raised eyebrows, grimaces, and so on–to keep people’s behavior in check. As a result, online daters tend to construct what Ellison and her colleagues Jennifer Gibbs of Rutgers University and Rebecca Heino of Georgetown University call an “ideal self” rather than a real one. A study published recently by Ellison and her colleagues even suggests that online daters often regret it when they do tell the truth, feeling that too much honesty, especially about negative attributes, creates a bad impression.

There are also straightforward, practical reasons for lying. One recent study showed that men claiming incomes exceeding $250,000 got 151 percent more replies than men claiming ?incomes less than $50,000, for example. Many women are quite open about listing much younger ages, often stating in the text of their profiles that they have listed a younger age to make sure they turn up in searches. (Because men often use age cutoffs in their searches, women who list ages above that cutoff will never be seen.)

My research assistant Rachel Greenberg and I have examined the age issue by plotting a histogram of the ages of 1,000 men and 1,000 women selected at random from the national database of Match.com, arguably now the largest of the online matchmaking services. We speculated that from age 29 on–the point at which people in our culture tend to become sensitive about growing older–we might see some distinctive patterns in the distribution of ages. For men, a small spike appeared in the ?distribution at 32 and a large one at 36. The number of men calling themselves 36 was dramatically higher than the average frequency of men between the ages of 37 and 41.

For women, we found three clear age spikes at 29, 35 and 44. The difference between the number of women claming to be 29 and the average frequency of women claiming to be between ages 30 and 34 was nearly eight times larger than we would expect by chance. Apparently women at certain ages are reluctant to reveal those ages–and certain numerical ages are especially appealing, presumably because our culture attaches less stigma to those ages.

Tests That Fail
I have been a researcher for about 30 years and a test designer for nearly half those years. When I see extravagant ads for online tests that promise to find people a soul mate, I find myself asking, “How on earth could such a test exist?”

The truth is, it doesn’t.

For a psychometric evaluation to be taken seriously by scientists, the test itself needs to clear two hurdles. It needs to be shown to be reliable–which means, roughly, that you can count on it to produce stable results. And it needs to be shown to be a valid measure of what it is supposed to be measuring. With a test that matches people up, such validity would be established by showing that the resulting romantic pairings are actually successful.