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Your Best Face Forward

I'm certainly guilty of it and you may be too. Most of us usually set our searches to only include profiles with photos. Lets face it; nothing draws more attention to a profile than an amazing photo. It may sound a little vain, but it is also just the nature of things. A great photo says a lot about a person on so many different levels. On the surface, it shows off your sexiness, your individuality and your sense of style. On a deeper level, it shows that you have confidence in the way you look and sensibility in the way you are attracting more attention to your profile. As you can imagine though, for each individual that views it, what your photos says can be decidedly different. That too, is the nature of things. The best that we can do is to put our best face forward and see who comes calling. For more details on how to put your best face forward, please read this article by Date.com's relationship expert, Brenda Ross.

Your Best Face Forward

By Brenda Ross @Date.com

Your online essay is one of the most important things you will do on Date.com. The goal is to stand out, to show who you are and what makes you unique to the best of your ability, while also appearing approachable. There are five simple but very important rules you need to keep in mind when creating your Date.com profile. These quick tips will help to show you off to your best potential.

How to add the best possible photo to your online personal ad

I read this amazing statistic* that states that 24.3% of singles have used or are currently using online dating services or personals to meet someone. Whoa. Right now there are 15 major subscription-based online matchmaking sites, as well as thousands of smaller, more specialized ones. Like myself, many of my friends have or are giving it a shot, and the last two weddings that I've attended were for couples who met on online dating services.

So now that we've established that it's becoming quite the viable way to meet someone, and you've realized that, to your horror, last Saturday night you caught yourself mouthing the words to an old episode of Friends that you'd already seen six times while all your friends were out with their new significant others, let's say that you've decided to give online dating a try. Okay?, good.

You probably know the basics of how it works. You join up, and you create a bio, which consists of telling a little something about yourself, and/or answering a series of questions, which could be anything from your eye color to your philosophy on Eastern religious practices. But what you might not know is that adding your photo to your ad can mean the difference between getting a big fat bunch of responses or hardly any at all. You literally have 12 times more of a chance of getting a response with a photo then without, and I do believe this to be true, because when I went crusing through the ads, I didn't even bother to look at any without photos. I wouldn't want my blind dates to be *that* blind, you know?

Getting Your Picture Taken

Okay, so you've decided to add a photo. Now you have a few options to consider. Do you go get a glamour shot from the mall? Kinda cheezy. Do you have a friend who's talented behind the camera? A better idea. A friend with a digital camera is even more preferable because then you have less steps from camera to computer. If you already have a great photo of yourself, then you can always get it scanned at a local copier place for less than ten dollars. They give you an image on a floppy, and you upload it onto your computer. The dating sites will alter and resize your image for you if you can't do it yourself.

If you do decide to get your pictures taken from scratch, then remember a few important details. Never have your picture taken if you aren't in a really great mood, because it always shows. And have as many taken as many as possible, so you have more to choose from - rest assured, even supermodel shoots work this way.

Picking the Best Photo

At this point, you should have a few photos to choose from. Let's take a look at the samples I have here and analyze them, shall we? These images are of a good friend of mine who decided to try online dating last year. We had these photos, I took the four in color, and the b/w was a headshot that she'd had done professionally.

A lot of these services let you choose up to three images, so we were both leaning towards the more glamorous shots (A & B), until we decided to ask a couple of guy friends which ones they prefered. The weird thing is that they both (adamently) leaned towards the more casual shots (C & D), and really didn't like the ones we liked at all! They said that those shots were 'trying too hard' and that the more casual ones were better because they seemed more friendly and not so high maintenence.

E was my favorite shot because it shows my friend in all of her evil splendor, yet the guys thought that this one was too wacky, and that it's always better to be safe than sorry. Okay, okay. I guess I can understand that. She could always let other parts of her personality show through the written part of her profile.

So what images did she ultimately choose? A, B and D.

What Not to Do!

Now, of course, there are some instances where if you aren't using the best photo possible, it could wind up being detrimental to the success of your ad. Let's look at the examples below.

Prison photos are never as flattering as those a professional service could offer.	A good haircut (and lighting) can do wonders
Never underestimate the powers of twenty-first century dentistry.	A good photographer (or scarf) can downplay a feature that otherwise might make you feel self conscious.

So now that you have a better idea what you can do to rev up your social life, get out there and give it a try. You never know what might happen. My friend (from the previous page) is very happily dating her new boyfriend. Hey, it could happen to you. Have fun!

Article contents copyright Date.com. Used with permission.

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