This is a sample guest message. Register a free account today to become a member! Once signed in, you'll be able to participate on this site by adding your own topics and posts, as well as connect with other members through your own private inbox!
Single for several months now, ready to start getting into Tinder, et al so I'll have to review this thread.
Although at the moment I'm doing fine with 2 FWBs - a 37yo and a damn cute 24yo (I'm 43). When those go south, which they will at some point, then it's time to fire up Tinder.
Ha! You see, I told you guys we mid-40's types can score the young ones.
Single for several months now, ready to start getting into Tinder, et al so I'll have to review this thread.
Although at the moment I'm doing fine with 2 FWBs - a 37yo and a damn cute 24yo (I'm 43). When those go south, which they will at some point, then it's time to fire up Tinder.
Have you looked into Grindr? Sweet new dating site
Single for several months now, ready to start getting into Tinder, et al so I'll have to review this thread.
Although at the moment I'm doing fine with 2 FWBs - a 37yo and a damn cute 24yo (I'm 43). When those go south, which they will at some point, then it's time to fire up Tinder.
better for twinks or bears?Have you looked into Grindr? Sweet new dating site
Single for several months now, ready to start getting into Tinder, et al so I'll have to review this thread.
Although at the moment I'm doing fine with 2 FWBs - a 37yo and a damn cute 24yo (I'm 43). When those go south, which they will at some point, then it's time to fire up Tinder.
:slowclap:Hard to overstate how important a good profile is on OKC.
Mine is too long but it's hard to cut it down because it works really well on there.
First thing: pictures. You're going to want some decent ones. Ideally, your main picture should be a knees & up or maybe a bit or closer, with a clear view of your face, looking slightly off-camera as if you're seeing something interesting, with narrow depth-of-field. That means: your face/body in focus, the background a slight bit blurry. Soft/muted colors, not saturated. Ideally, something kind of like this: http://images.thesartorialist.com/thumbnails/2013/10/92813robert4191web.jpg (ignore the fashion, just look at the technical aspects of that photograph). There are a lot of psychological tricks at work when doing this... the narrow focus depth of field creates an illusion of intimacy. Men looking slightly off camera creates curiosity (what's he looking at? A woman? Is she hotter than me? Why isn't he paying attention to me? Seriously, this sounds stupid but it works). When asked to crop to your face for the icon, keep it loose... enough that your face is big enough in the square that it's easily visible on the search results pages, but off center a bit and not too close so it stands out a little.
A psychological trick I use on myself is using a main photo that clearly shows my flaws. I'm very self-conscious about my looks (basically, I'm a slightly taller Costanza). I make sure it's evident in my first shot. No need to waste time on women who will be turned off by my looks by trying to arrange a date with photos that hide it, then surprise them in person when we actually meet. It means I have to send out a lot more messages to get a reply, that's fine, but the replies I get are from women who are clearly OK with my looks and it completely makes it easier for me when the in-person meet actually happens.
Now, add five more photos. The classic action/having fun shots. I know it's cliche, but have one with a hot chick. I have a hot friend I teamed up with to run a scavenger hunt-like thing with, so I have a photo of her holding up my legs like a human wheelbarrow for one of the stunts we had to do. Me doing something stupid and looking goofy & having fun with a hot chick. Winner. Another one I lucked into... I was doing a photography Meetup at a stadium, we took some photos before the event, then I took a quick nap in the stands while waiting for the action to start. Some other photographer took a photo of me sleeping, all alone, nice muted colors, narrow-depth-of-field... score. Sleeping shots work for some reason. Another pair of cliche shots I have are the standard skydiving photo and the running shot from a 5K. Sign up for a 5K and make sure you pass each photographer. There's usually a way (check reddit) to get the photos for free off their websites. Every shot should convey that you have an interesting life.
Then, the profile itself. Be funny. Make some jokes in there. Make yourself seem fun & interesting. Put in some random stuff. Good advice I read somewhere is write something every day for a few weeks in Word or whatever, for 20 minutes or so. Throw most of it away. But just get into that stream-of-consciousness mode when writing, then take one good bit and drop it in your profile somewhere. Just take one of those prompted sections and ignore it... just fill it with whatever you want. I took the "most private thing you're willing to admit" section and just wrote a story in there about something interesting that happened recently. With self-deprecating humor. (One day, I went to take in the garbage cans from the street, and I saw a purse was in one. Some thief must have dumped it. So I turned it in to the police. That's it. Turned it into 4 long paragraphs with 20+ jokes peppered in there, 15 of those at my own expense, and a nice call-back on the closing line. Took me a couple weeks to get into the zone to write it, but it's great. Doesn't answer the question at all but who cares? It's funny, it's interesting, and women have written me first because of it.)
Try to answer as many sections as you can with jokey answers. "I'm really good at:" is answered with "Fixing things. But it turns out I'm even better at breaking them." "Favorite Music: Classic rock. Like fine art, it's better once they're dead." I have an RFK assassination joke in my favorite foods section. Just random stupid stuff. I get a new message every month or so from some woman just saying I have the best profile they've ever read.
Edit often. Cut down as much as possible. Every sentence should be there for a reason and serve some sort of duty: is it funny? is it making you seem interesting? If it's not either of those, delete it or rephrase it.
Messages: I pull a hook move with my messages. Every girl I've ever met online, OKC or otherwise, has said the same thing: "You're the only guy who ever replied who actually read my profile." Secret is, I barely skim. They're all pretty much the same. You can often re-use bits of messages to other girls that have the same interests listed. Just pick two or three things in their profile and tell a quick personal story. Message of 5-8 sentences, tops, to open. "Hey. Saw you're a Doctor Who fan too! Did you check out the special preview at ComiCon? I got hooked on that show on PBS when I was a kid, remember that?" or whatever. My main hook: I like photography. I'm pretty good at it, or at least I like to think so. Had a couple of showings and been published on a lot of random places. I have a nice collection of shots I worked on with a photography meetup group. So I have a flickr account full of photos I've taken all over the city at a ton of different events. I find one thing they're interested in that I've taken a picture of, and send them a link. Women cannot resist this... they see one shot in my portfolio and end up scanning through the whole set. I'm doing this on purpose. I always get a message back "I had to just keep clicking, I love your pictures!" and stuff like that. That's the hook, something that leads elsewhere that adds interest. It's like added content to the original message. Sometimes it's a link to a newspaper article about me or something like that. There was a halloween zombie-walk for charity I went to take pictures of for fun one day. Every girl who mentions zombies or The Walking Dead in her profile, that's my excuse to send a link to my photos. And at least half of women's profiles mention one of those, it seems. You'll start to notice this: the same 3 or 4 things keep showing up on every girl's profile. Find something to say about those things, make a nice catalog of form letters you can send out, slightly changing and personalizing each one, but, basically the same. I have "zombie message" and "football message" and "food trucks message" and "X-Files message" and one of those will work for like 90% of the women on there. Been a while, but I bet a good "I love Crazy Eyes on Orange is the New Black" message will work on 75% of the profiles on OKC.
Another thing to do is spell check. Carefully. Be well-spoken. Be interesting. Work in "you're" and "your" casually but on purpose in the message so they know you're literate. Seriously, this actually is enough to make you stand out.
Anyway, it takes a while because I'm not good looking, but when I'm really working OKC I'll send out 5 messages a day to any one who could be interesting. I'm lucky to get one reply in a week, but it's a quality lead. Usually during my lunch break in my office, just take 20-30 minutes and crank out a few semi-personalized 5-8 line messages. It's all a numbers game.
It's been a while since I've been on OKC, but there's two other things I tried in the past that may have been successful: 1) edit my profile every day. Make a very minor superficial change. Replace an "I've" with "I have" and then back again the next day or something. Change an ellipsis... to an em-dash-- somewhere in a short funny answer section (Like above, where I answered "Fixing things. But it turns out I'm even better at breaking them." the next day it'll read "Fixing things. But, it turns out, I'm even better at breaking them." and then I'll switch it back the next time I'm online). This puts your profile in the "Recent Activity" section of women's login pages in your search area. I don't know how well it works in generating interest, but why not try? 2) OK Cupid has a color-rating system. People who reply often are colored green. People who reply sometimes are yellow, and rarely are red. Every guy on there is colored green, because no guy isn't going to respond to every message he gets. Except me. I'm yellow. It says "replies selectively" under my profile. How did I do this? Well, one by ignoring some messages I get. Two... the devious way, I created some fake women's accounts and emailed myself from them, then deleted the emails when I got them in my main account. Again, I don't know if it works on women or not, but why not try? At least it's one simple way to stand out when women are looking on the site. They see a results page with a hundred guys, all with the green mark, and one guy who's actually picky. How can they not be curious about that?
Best of luck. Just keep cranking the messages out. Eventually you'll see what works and what doesn't.
And don't get discouraged. The standard OKC mailbox can hold 300 messages before they ask you to upgrade to pay. Many women I talk to get 50-100 messages a day. A day. Getting read in the first place is tough. When you have 100 messages waiting, most women just bulk delete. If they're talking to some guy already, bulk delete everything else. If they're having a bad hair day and aren't in the mood? Bulk delete all their messages. Fight with their mom yesterday? Bulk delete. Seriously. Don't take it personally. Don't worry if you've sent out messages to 50 different women with no replies. The odds are stacked against you. 1) You have to catch her on a day when you can get her attention. Not a day where she's cranky from work or had a fight with her roommate or is going out of town for the weekend and bulk-deleting her messages because she's not in the mood. 2) You have to fit whatever random 'type' she is interested in... tall guys, bearded guys, clean-shaven guys, tattoo guys, guys who look like her dad, guys who look like they'd piss off her dad, et cetera. 3) Your profile, as good as it may be, can't hit any of her triggers... Does your funny story involve the time you threw a birthday party for your dog, but she's allergic to dogs? Do you mention your love of 'Sons of Anarchy' but she dated this guy with a motorcycle in college once and now they're a huge turn-off for her? Are you vegan? Are you not vegan? Whatever random reason some woman comes up with, you have to luck into not matching any of her triggers, and then match something that is a turn-on for her. Maybe she only messages guys back who list a foreign film or two on their profiles. Or, no foreign films. Whatever. The point is, the subset of the subset of the subset of women who will reply to a message from you is so small, you can't let it discourage you. Just getting a match at all is tough enough, just understand it and don't let it psych you out.
Hang in there and keep trying and keep learning.
I agree. These are all things that I've tried to do in the past, but probably more as a general style rather than working and re-working with a fine-toothed comb. Whenever I get the energy maybe I'll dive back into my profile for a re-write.:slowclap:Hard to overstate how important a good profile is on OKC.
Mine is too long but it's hard to cut it down because it works really well on there.
First thing: pictures. You're going to want some decent ones. Ideally, your main picture should be a knees & up or maybe a bit or closer, with a clear view of your face, looking slightly off-camera as if you're seeing something interesting, with narrow depth-of-field. That means: your face/body in focus, the background a slight bit blurry. Soft/muted colors, not saturated. Ideally, something kind of like this: http://images.thesartorialist.com/thumbnails/2013/10/92813robert4191web.jpg (ignore the fashion, just look at the technical aspects of that photograph). There are a lot of psychological tricks at work when doing this... the narrow focus depth of field creates an illusion of intimacy. Men looking slightly off camera creates curiosity (what's he looking at? A woman? Is she hotter than me? Why isn't he paying attention to me? Seriously, this sounds stupid but it works). When asked to crop to your face for the icon, keep it loose... enough that your face is big enough in the square that it's easily visible on the search results pages, but off center a bit and not too close so it stands out a little.
A psychological trick I use on myself is using a main photo that clearly shows my flaws. I'm very self-conscious about my looks (basically, I'm a slightly taller Costanza). I make sure it's evident in my first shot. No need to waste time on women who will be turned off by my looks by trying to arrange a date with photos that hide it, then surprise them in person when we actually meet. It means I have to send out a lot more messages to get a reply, that's fine, but the replies I get are from women who are clearly OK with my looks and it completely makes it easier for me when the in-person meet actually happens.
Now, add five more photos. The classic action/having fun shots. I know it's cliche, but have one with a hot chick. I have a hot friend I teamed up with to run a scavenger hunt-like thing with, so I have a photo of her holding up my legs like a human wheelbarrow for one of the stunts we had to do. Me doing something stupid and looking goofy & having fun with a hot chick. Winner. Another one I lucked into... I was doing a photography Meetup at a stadium, we took some photos before the event, then I took a quick nap in the stands while waiting for the action to start. Some other photographer took a photo of me sleeping, all alone, nice muted colors, narrow-depth-of-field... score. Sleeping shots work for some reason. Another pair of cliche shots I have are the standard skydiving photo and the running shot from a 5K. Sign up for a 5K and make sure you pass each photographer. There's usually a way (check reddit) to get the photos for free off their websites
Then, the profile itself. Be funny. Make some jokes in there. Make yourself seem fun & interesting. Put in some random stuff. Good advice I read somewhere is write something every day for a few weeks in Word or whatever, for 20 minutes or so. Throw most of it away. But just get into that stream-of-consciousness mode when writing, then take one good bit and drop it in your profile somewhere. Just take one of those prompted sections and ignore it... just fill it with whatever you want. I took the "most private thing you're willing to admit" section and just wrote a story in there about something interesting that happened recently. With self-deprecating humor. (One day, I went to take in the garbage cans from the street, and I saw a purse was in one. Some thief must have dumped it. So I turned it in to the police. That's it. Turned it into 4 long paragraphs with 20+ jokes peppered in there, 15 of those at my own expense, and a nice call-back on the closing line. Took me a couple weeks to get into the zone to write it, but it's great. Doesn't answer the question at all but who cares? It's funny, it's interesting, and women have written me first because of it.)
Try to answer as many sections as you can with jokey answers. "I'm really good at:" is answered with "Fixing things. But it turns out I'm even better at breaking them." "Favorite Music: Classic rock. Like fine art, it's better once they're dead." I have an RFK assassination joke in my favorite foods section. Just random stupid stuff. I get a new message every month or so from some woman just saying I have the best profile they've ever read.
Edit often. Cut down as much as possible. Every sentence should be there for a reason and serve some sort of duty: is it funny? is it making you seem interesting? If it's not either of those, delete it or rephrase it.
Messages: I pull a hook move with my messages. Every girl I've ever met online, OKC or otherwise, has said the same thing: "You're the only guy who ever replied who actually read my profile." Secret is, I barely skim. They're all pretty much the same. You can often re-use bits of messages to other girls that have the same interests listed. Just pick two or three things in their profile and tell a quick personal story. Message of 5-8 sentences, tops, to open. "Hey. Saw you're a Doctor Who fan too! Did you check out the special preview at ComiCon? I got hooked on that show on PBS when I was a kid, remember that?" or whatever. My main hook: I like photography. I'm pretty good at it, or at least I like to think so. Had a couple of showings and been published on a lot of random places. I have a nice collection of shots I worked on with a photography meetup group. So I have a flickr account full of photos I've taken all over the city at a ton of different events. I find one thing they're interested in that I've taken a picture of, and send them a link. Women cannot resist this... they see one shot in my portfolio and end up scanning through the whole set. I'm doing this on purpose. I always get a message back "I had to just keep clicking, I love your pictures!" and stuff like that. That's the hook, something that leads elsewhere that adds interest. It's like added content to the original message. Sometimes it's a link to a newspaper article about me or something like that. There was a halloween zombie-walk for charity I went to take pictures of for fun one day. Every girl who mentions zombies or The Walking Dead in her profile, that's my excuse to send a link to my photos. And at least half of women's profiles mention one of those, it seems. You'll start to notice this: the same 3 or 4 things keep showing up on every girl's profile. Find something to say about those things, make a nice catalog of form letters you can send out, slightly changing and personalizing each one, but, basically the same. I have "zombie message" and "football message" and "food trucks message" and "X-Files message" and one of those will work for like 90% of the women on there. Been a while, but I bet a good "I love Crazy Eyes on Orange is the New Black" message will work on 75% of the profiles on OKC.
Another thing to do is spell check. Carefully. Be well-spoken. Be interesting. Work in "you're" and "your" casually but on purpose in the message so they know you're literate. Seriously, this actually is enough to make you stand out.
Anyway, it takes a while because I'm not good looking, but when I'm really working OKC I'll send out 5 messages a day to any one who could be interesting. I'm lucky to get one reply in a week, but it's a quality lead. Usually during my lunch break in my office, just take 20-30 minutes and crank out a few semi-personalized 5-8 line messages. It's all a numbers game.
It's been a while since I've been on OKC, but there's two other things I tried in the past that may have been successful: 1) edit my profile every day. Make a very minor superficial change. Replace an "I've" with "I have" and then back again the next day or something. Change an ellipsis... to an em-dash-- somewhere in a short funny answer section (Like above, where I answered "Fixing things. But it turns out I'm even better at breaking them." the next day it'll read "Fixing things. But, it turns out, I'm even better at breaking them." and then I'll switch it back the next time I'm online). This puts your profile in the "Recent Activity" section of women's login pages in your search area. I don't know how well it works in generating interest, but why not try? 2) OK Cupid has a color-rating system. People who reply often are colored green. People who reply sometimes are yellow, and rarely are red. Every guy on there is colored green, because no guy isn't going to respond to every message he gets. Except me. I'm yellow. It says "replies selectively" under my profile. How did I do this? Well, one by ignoring some messages I get. Two... the devious way, I created some fake women's accounts and emailed myself from them, then deleted the emails when I got them in my main account. Again, I don't know if it works on women or not, but why not try? At least it's one simple way to stand out when women are looking on the site. They see a results page with a hundred guys, all with the green mark, and one guy who's actually picky. How can they not be curious about that?
Best of luck. Just keep cranking the messages out. Eventually you'll see what works and what doesn't.
And don't get discouraged. The standard OKC mailbox can hold 300 messages before they ask you to upgrade to pay. Many women I talk to get 50-100 messages a day. A day. Getting read in the first place is tough. When you have 100 messages waiting, most women just bulk delete. If they're talking to some guy already, bulk delete everything else. If they're having a bad hair day and aren't in the mood? Bulk delete all their messages. Fight with their mom yesterday? Bulk delete. Seriously. Don't take it personally. Don't worry if you've sent out messages to 50 different women with no replies. The odds are stacked against you. 1) You have to catch her on a day when you can get her attention. Not a day where she's cranky from work or had a fight with her roommate or is going out of town for the weekend and bulk-deleting her messages because she's not in the mood. 2) You have to fit whatever random 'type' she is interested in... tall guys, bearded guys, clean-shaven guys, tattoo guys, guys who look like her dad, guys who look like they'd piss off her dad, et cetera. 3) Your profile, as good as it may be, can't hit any of her triggers... Does your funny story involve the time you threw a birthday party for your dog, but she's allergic to dogs? Do you mention your love of 'Sons of Anarchy' but she dated this guy with a motorcycle in college once and now they're a huge turn-off for her? Are you vegan? Are you not vegan? Whatever random reason some woman comes up with, you have to luck into not matching any of her triggers, and then match something that is a turn-on for her. Maybe she only messages guys back who list a foreign film or two on their profiles. Or, no foreign films. Whatever. The point is, the subset of the subset of the subset of women who will reply to a message from you is so small, you can't let it discourage you. Just getting a match at all is tough enough, just understand it and don't let it psych you out.
Hang in there and keep trying and keep learning.
I'm not in the game but great stuff (some borderline obsessive/creepy...I love it).
That is good stuff. Following this advice should put you in front of enough women.I agree. These are all things that I've tried to do in the past, but probably more as a general style rather than working and re-working with a fine-toothed comb. Whenever I get the energy maybe I'll dive back into my profile for a re-write.:slowclap:I'm not in the game but great stuff (some borderline obsessive/creepy...I love it).Hard to overstate how important a good profile is on OKC.
Mine is too long but it's hard to cut it down because it works really well on there.
First thing: pictures. You're going to want some decent ones. Ideally, your main picture should be a knees & up or maybe a bit or closer, with a clear view of your face, looking slightly off-camera as if you're seeing something interesting, with narrow depth-of-field. That means: your face/body in focus, the background a slight bit blurry. Soft/muted colors, not saturated. Ideally, something kind of like this: http://images.thesartorialist.com/thumbnails/2013/10/92813robert4191web.jpg (ignore the fashion, just look at the technical aspects of that photograph). There are a lot of psychological tricks at work when doing this... the narrow focus depth of field creates an illusion of intimacy. Men looking slightly off camera creates curiosity (what's he looking at? A woman? Is she hotter than me? Why isn't he paying attention to me? Seriously, this sounds stupid but it works). When asked to crop to your face for the icon, keep it loose... enough that your face is big enough in the square that it's easily visible on the search results pages, but off center a bit and not too close so it stands out a little.
A psychological trick I use on myself is using a main photo that clearly shows my flaws. I'm very self-conscious about my looks (basically, I'm a slightly taller Costanza). I make sure it's evident in my first shot. No need to waste time on women who will be turned off by my looks by trying to arrange a date with photos that hide it, then surprise them in person when we actually meet. It means I have to send out a lot more messages to get a reply, that's fine, but the replies I get are from women who are clearly OK with my looks and it completely makes it easier for me when the in-person meet actually happens.
Now, add five more photos. The classic action/having fun shots. I know it's cliche, but have one with a hot chick. I have a hot friend I teamed up with to run a scavenger hunt-like thing with, so I have a photo of her holding up my legs like a human wheelbarrow for one of the stunts we had to do. Me doing something stupid and looking goofy & having fun with a hot chick. Winner. Another one I lucked into... I was doing a photography Meetup at a stadium, we took some photos before the event, then I took a quick nap in the stands while waiting for the action to start. Some other photographer took a photo of me sleeping, all alone, nice muted colors, narrow-depth-of-field... score. Sleeping shots work for some reason. Another pair of cliche shots I have are the standard skydiving photo and the running shot from a 5K. Sign up for a 5K and make sure you pass each photographer. There's usually a way (check reddit) to get the photos for free off their websites
Then, the profile itself. Be funny. Make some jokes in there. Make yourself seem fun & interesting. Put in some random stuff. Good advice I read somewhere is write something every day for a few weeks in Word or whatever, for 20 minutes or so. Throw most of it away. But just get into that stream-of-consciousness mode when writing, then take one good bit and drop it in your profile somewhere. Just take one of those prompted sections and ignore it... just fill it with whatever you want. I took the "most private thing you're willing to admit" section and just wrote a story in there about something interesting that happened recently. With self-deprecating humor. (One day, I went to take in the garbage cans from the street, and I saw a purse was in one. Some thief must have dumped it. So I turned it in to the police. That's it. Turned it into 4 long paragraphs with 20+ jokes peppered in there, 15 of those at my own expense, and a nice call-back on the closing line. Took me a couple weeks to get into the zone to write it, but it's great. Doesn't answer the question at all but who cares? It's funny, it's interesting, and women have written me first because of it.)
Try to answer as many sections as you can with jokey answers. "I'm really good at:" is answered with "Fixing things. But it turns out I'm even better at breaking them." "Favorite Music: Classic rock. Like fine art, it's better once they're dead." I have an RFK assassination joke in my favorite foods section. Just random stupid stuff. I get a new message every month or so from some woman just saying I have the best profile they've ever read.
Edit often. Cut down as much as possible. Every sentence should be there for a reason and serve some sort of duty: is it funny? is it making you seem interesting? If it's not either of those, delete it or rephrase it.
Messages: I pull a hook move with my messages. Every girl I've ever met online, OKC or otherwise, has said the same thing: "You're the only guy who ever replied who actually read my profile." Secret is, I barely skim. They're all pretty much the same. You can often re-use bits of messages to other girls that have the same interests listed. Just pick two or three things in their profile and tell a quick personal story. Message of 5-8 sentences, tops, to open. "Hey. Saw you're a Doctor Who fan too! Did you check out the special preview at ComiCon? I got hooked on that show on PBS when I was a kid, remember that?" or whatever. My main hook: I like photography. I'm pretty good at it, or at least I like to think so. Had a couple of showings and been published on a lot of random places. I have a nice collection of shots I worked on with a photography meetup group. So I have a flickr account full of photos I've taken all over the city at a ton of different events. I find one thing they're interested in that I've taken a picture of, and send them a link. Women cannot resist this... they see one shot in my portfolio and end up scanning through the whole set. I'm doing this on purpose. I always get a message back "I had to just keep clicking, I love your pictures!" and stuff like that. That's the hook, something that leads elsewhere that adds interest. It's like added content to the original message. Sometimes it's a link to a newspaper article about me or something like that. There was a halloween zombie-walk for charity I went to take pictures of for fun one day. Every girl who mentions zombies or The Walking Dead in her profile, that's my excuse to send a link to my photos. And at least half of women's profiles mention one of those, it seems. You'll start to notice this: the same 3 or 4 things keep showing up on every girl's profile. Find something to say about those things, make a nice catalog of form letters you can send out, slightly changing and personalizing each one, but, basically the same. I have "zombie message" and "football message" and "food trucks message" and "X-Files message" and one of those will work for like 90% of the women on there. Been a while, but I bet a good "I love Crazy Eyes on Orange is the New Black" message will work on 75% of the profiles on OKC.
Another thing to do is spell check. Carefully. Be well-spoken. Be interesting. Work in "you're" and "your" casually but on purpose in the message so they know you're literate. Seriously, this actually is enough to make you stand out.
Anyway, it takes a while because I'm not good looking, but when I'm really working OKC I'll send out 5 messages a day to any one who could be interesting. I'm lucky to get one reply in a week, but it's a quality lead. Usually during my lunch break in my office, just take 20-30 minutes and crank out a few semi-personalized 5-8 line messages. It's all a numbers game.
It's been a while since I've been on OKC, but there's two other things I tried in the past that may have been successful: 1) edit my profile every day. Make a very minor superficial change. Replace an "I've" with "I have" and then back again the next day or something. Change an ellipsis... to an em-dash-- somewhere in a short funny answer section (Like above, where I answered "Fixing things. But it turns out I'm even better at breaking them." the next day it'll read "Fixing things. But, it turns out, I'm even better at breaking them." and then I'll switch it back the next time I'm online). This puts your profile in the "Recent Activity" section of women's login pages in your search area. I don't know how well it works in generating interest, but why not try? 2) OK Cupid has a color-rating system. People who reply often are colored green. People who reply sometimes are yellow, and rarely are red. Every guy on there is colored green, because no guy isn't going to respond to every message he gets. Except me. I'm yellow. It says "replies selectively" under my profile. How did I do this? Well, one by ignoring some messages I get. Two... the devious way, I created some fake women's accounts and emailed myself from them, then deleted the emails when I got them in my main account. Again, I don't know if it works on women or not, but why not try? At least it's one simple way to stand out when women are looking on the site. They see a results page with a hundred guys, all with the green mark, and one guy who's actually picky. How can they not be curious about that?
Best of luck. Just keep cranking the messages out. Eventually you'll see what works and what doesn't.
And don't get discouraged. The standard OKC mailbox can hold 300 messages before they ask you to upgrade to pay. Many women I talk to get 50-100 messages a day. A day. Getting read in the first place is tough. When you have 100 messages waiting, most women just bulk delete. If they're talking to some guy already, bulk delete everything else. If they're having a bad hair day and aren't in the mood? Bulk delete all their messages. Fight with their mom yesterday? Bulk delete. Seriously. Don't take it personally. Don't worry if you've sent out messages to 50 different women with no replies. The odds are stacked against you. 1) You have to catch her on a day when you can get her attention. Not a day where she's cranky from work or had a fight with her roommate or is going out of town for the weekend and bulk-deleting her messages because she's not in the mood. 2) You have to fit whatever random 'type' she is interested in... tall guys, bearded guys, clean-shaven guys, tattoo guys, guys who look like her dad, guys who look like they'd piss off her dad, et cetera. 3) Your profile, as good as it may be, can't hit any of her triggers... Does your funny story involve the time you threw a birthday party for your dog, but she's allergic to dogs? Do you mention your love of 'Sons of Anarchy' but she dated this guy with a motorcycle in college once and now they're a huge turn-off for her? Are you vegan? Are you not vegan? Whatever random reason some woman comes up with, you have to luck into not matching any of her triggers, and then match something that is a turn-on for her. Maybe she only messages guys back who list a foreign film or two on their profiles. Or, no foreign films. Whatever. The point is, the subset of the subset of the subset of women who will reply to a message from you is so small, you can't let it discourage you. Just getting a match at all is tough enough, just understand it and don't let it psych you out.
Hang in there and keep trying and keep learning.
This is why I was more than happy to bang 5's and 6's. No way I had the patience for all that.Hard to overstate how important a good profile is on OKC.
Mine is too long but it's hard to cut it down because it works really well on there.
First thing: pictures. You're going to want some decent ones. Ideally, your main picture should be a knees & up or maybe a bit or closer, with a clear view of your face, looking slightly off-camera as if you're seeing something interesting, with narrow depth-of-field. That means: your face/body in focus, the background a slight bit blurry. Soft/muted colors, not saturated. Ideally, something kind of like this: http://images.thesartorialist.com/thumbnails/2013/10/92813robert4191web.jpg (ignore the fashion, just look at the technical aspects of that photograph). There are a lot of psychological tricks at work when doing this... the narrow focus depth of field creates an illusion of intimacy. Men looking slightly off camera creates curiosity (what's he looking at? A woman? Is she hotter than me? Why isn't he paying attention to me? Seriously, this sounds stupid but it works). When asked to crop to your face for the icon, keep it loose... enough that your face is big enough in the square that it's easily visible on the search results pages, but off center a bit and not too close so it stands out a little.
A psychological trick I use on myself is using a main photo that clearly shows my flaws. I'm very self-conscious about my looks (basically, I'm a slightly taller Costanza). I make sure it's evident in my first shot. No need to waste time on women who will be turned off by my looks by trying to arrange a date with photos that hide it, then surprise them in person when we actually meet. It means I have to send out a lot more messages to get a reply, that's fine, but the replies I get are from women who are clearly OK with my looks and it completely makes it easier for me when the in-person meet actually happens.
Now, add five more photos. The classic action/having fun shots. I know it's cliche, but have one with a hot chick. I have a hot friend I teamed up with to run a scavenger hunt-like thing with, so I have a photo of her holding up my legs like a human wheelbarrow for one of the stunts we had to do. Me doing something stupid and looking goofy & having fun with a hot chick. Winner. Another one I lucked into... I was doing a photography Meetup at a stadium, we took some photos before the event, then I took a quick nap in the stands while waiting for the action to start. Some other photographer took a photo of me sleeping, all alone, nice muted colors, narrow-depth-of-field... score. Sleeping shots work for some reason. Another pair of cliche shots I have are the standard skydiving photo and the running shot from a 5K. Sign up for a 5K and make sure you pass each photographer. There's usually a way (check reddit) to get the photos for free off their websites
Then, the profile itself. Be funny. Make some jokes in there. Make yourself seem fun & interesting. Put in some random stuff. Good advice I read somewhere is write something every day for a few weeks in Word or whatever, for 20 minutes or so. Throw most of it away. But just get into that stream-of-consciousness mode when writing, then take one good bit and drop it in your profile somewhere. Just take one of those prompted sections and ignore it... just fill it with whatever you want. I took the "most private thing you're willing to admit" section and just wrote a story in there about something interesting that happened recently. With self-deprecating humor. (One day, I went to take in the garbage cans from the street, and I saw a purse was in one. Some thief must have dumped it. So I turned it in to the police. That's it. Turned it into 4 long paragraphs with 20+ jokes peppered in there, 15 of those at my own expense, and a nice call-back on the closing line. Took me a couple weeks to get into the zone to write it, but it's great. Doesn't answer the question at all but who cares? It's funny, it's interesting, and women have written me first because of it.)
Try to answer as many sections as you can with jokey answers. "I'm really good at:" is answered with "Fixing things. But it turns out I'm even better at breaking them." "Favorite Music: Classic rock. Like fine art, it's better once they're dead." I have an RFK assassination joke in my favorite foods section. Just random stupid stuff. I get a new message every month or so from some woman just saying I have the best profile they've ever read.
Edit often. Cut down as much as possible. Every sentence should be there for a reason and serve some sort of duty: is it funny? is it making you seem interesting? If it's not either of those, delete it or rephrase it.
Messages: I pull a hook move with my messages. Every girl I've ever met online, OKC or otherwise, has said the same thing: "You're the only guy who ever replied who actually read my profile." Secret is, I barely skim. They're all pretty much the same. You can often re-use bits of messages to other girls that have the same interests listed. Just pick two or three things in their profile and tell a quick personal story. Message of 5-8 sentences, tops, to open. "Hey. Saw you're a Doctor Who fan too! Did you check out the special preview at ComiCon? I got hooked on that show on PBS when I was a kid, remember that?" or whatever. My main hook: I like photography. I'm pretty good at it, or at least I like to think so. Had a couple of showings and been published on a lot of random places. I have a nice collection of shots I worked on with a photography meetup group. So I have a flickr account full of photos I've taken all over the city at a ton of different events. I find one thing they're interested in that I've taken a picture of, and send them a link. Women cannot resist this... they see one shot in my portfolio and end up scanning through the whole set. I'm doing this on purpose. I always get a message back "I had to just keep clicking, I love your pictures!" and stuff like that. That's the hook, something that leads elsewhere that adds interest. It's like added content to the original message. Sometimes it's a link to a newspaper article about me or something like that. There was a halloween zombie-walk for charity I went to take pictures of for fun one day. Every girl who mentions zombies or The Walking Dead in her profile, that's my excuse to send a link to my photos. And at least half of women's profiles mention one of those, it seems. You'll start to notice this: the same 3 or 4 things keep showing up on every girl's profile. Find something to say about those things, make a nice catalog of form letters you can send out, slightly changing and personalizing each one, but, basically the same. I have "zombie message" and "football message" and "food trucks message" and "X-Files message" and one of those will work for like 90% of the women on there. Been a while, but I bet a good "I love Crazy Eyes on Orange is the New Black" message will work on 75% of the profiles on OKC.
Another thing to do is spell check. Carefully. Be well-spoken. Be interesting. Work in "you're" and "your" casually but on purpose in the message so they know you're literate. Seriously, this actually is enough to make you stand out.
Anyway, it takes a while because I'm not good looking, but when I'm really working OKC I'll send out 5 messages a day to any one who could be interesting. I'm lucky to get one reply in a week, but it's a quality lead. Usually during my lunch break in my office, just take 20-30 minutes and crank out a few semi-personalized 5-8 line messages. It's all a numbers game.
It's been a while since I've been on OKC, but there's two other things I tried in the past that may have been successful: 1) edit my profile every day. Make a very minor superficial change. Replace an "I've" with "I have" and then back again the next day or something. Change an ellipsis... to an em-dash-- somewhere in a short funny answer section (Like above, where I answered "Fixing things. But it turns out I'm even better at breaking them." the next day it'll read "Fixing things. But, it turns out, I'm even better at breaking them." and then I'll switch it back the next time I'm online). This puts your profile in the "Recent Activity" section of women's login pages in your search area. I don't know how well it works in generating interest, but why not try? 2) OK Cupid has a color-rating system. People who reply often are colored green. People who reply sometimes are yellow, and rarely are red. Every guy on there is colored green, because no guy isn't going to respond to every message he gets. Except me. I'm yellow. It says "replies selectively" under my profile. How did I do this? Well, one by ignoring some messages I get. Two... the devious way, I created some fake women's accounts and emailed myself from them, then deleted the emails when I got them in my main account. Again, I don't know if it works on women or not, but why not try? At least it's one simple way to stand out when women are looking on the site. They see a results page with a hundred guys, all with the green mark, and one guy who's actually picky. How can they not be curious about that?
Best of luck. Just keep cranking the messages out. Eventually you'll see what works and what doesn't.
And don't get discouraged. The standard OKC mailbox can hold 300 messages before they ask you to upgrade to pay. Many women I talk to get 50-100 messages a day. A day. Getting read in the first place is tough. When you have 100 messages waiting, most women just bulk delete. If they're talking to some guy already, bulk delete everything else. If they're having a bad hair day and aren't in the mood? Bulk delete all their messages. Fight with their mom yesterday? Bulk delete. Seriously. Don't take it personally. Don't worry if you've sent out messages to 50 different women with no replies. The odds are stacked against you. 1) You have to catch her on a day when you can get her attention. Not a day where she's cranky from work or had a fight with her roommate or is going out of town for the weekend and bulk-deleting her messages because she's not in the mood. 2) You have to fit whatever random 'type' she is interested in... tall guys, bearded guys, clean-shaven guys, tattoo guys, guys who look like her dad, guys who look like they'd piss off her dad, et cetera. 3) Your profile, as good as it may be, can't hit any of her triggers... Does your funny story involve the time you threw a birthday party for your dog, but she's allergic to dogs? Do you mention your love of 'Sons of Anarchy' but she dated this guy with a motorcycle in college once and now they're a huge turn-off for her? Are you vegan? Are you not vegan? Whatever random reason some woman comes up with, you have to luck into not matching any of her triggers, and then match something that is a turn-on for her. Maybe she only messages guys back who list a foreign film or two on their profiles. Or, no foreign films. Whatever. The point is, the subset of the subset of the subset of women who will reply to a message from you is so small, you can't let it discourage you. Just getting a match at all is tough enough, just understand it and don't let it psych you out.
Hang in there and keep trying and keep learning.
I wish I could be.This is why I was more than happy to bang 5's and 6's. No way I had the patience for all that.Hard to overstate how important a good profile is on OKC.
Mine is too long but it's hard to cut it down because it works really well on there.
First thing: pictures. You're going to want some decent ones. Ideally, your main picture should be a knees & up or maybe a bit or closer, with a clear view of your face, looking slightly off-camera as if you're seeing something interesting, with narrow depth-of-field. That means: your face/body in focus, the background a slight bit blurry. Soft/muted colors, not saturated. Ideally, something kind of like this: http://images.thesartorialist.com/thumbnails/2013/10/92813robert4191web.jpg (ignore the fashion, just look at the technical aspects of that photograph). There are a lot of psychological tricks at work when doing this... the narrow focus depth of field creates an illusion of intimacy. Men looking slightly off camera creates curiosity (what's he looking at? A woman? Is she hotter than me? Why isn't he paying attention to me? Seriously, this sounds stupid but it works). When asked to crop to your face for the icon, keep it loose... enough that your face is big enough in the square that it's easily visible on the search results pages, but off center a bit and not too close so it stands out a little.
A psychological trick I use on myself is using a main photo that clearly shows my flaws. I'm very self-conscious about my looks (basically, I'm a slightly taller Costanza). I make sure it's evident in my first shot. No need to waste time on women who will be turned off by my looks by trying to arrange a date with photos that hide it, then surprise them in person when we actually meet. It means I have to send out a lot more messages to get a reply, that's fine, but the replies I get are from women who are clearly OK with my looks and it completely makes it easier for me when the in-person meet actually happens.
Now, add five more photos. The classic action/having fun shots. I know it's cliche, but have one with a hot chick. I have a hot friend I teamed up with to run a scavenger hunt-like thing with, so I have a photo of her holding up my legs like a human wheelbarrow for one of the stunts we had to do. Me doing something stupid and looking goofy & having fun with a hot chick. Winner. Another one I lucked into... I was doing a photography Meetup at a stadium, we took some photos before the event, then I took a quick nap in the stands while waiting for the action to start. Some other photographer took a photo of me sleeping, all alone, nice muted colors, narrow-depth-of-field... score. Sleeping shots work for some reason. Another pair of cliche shots I have are the standard skydiving photo and the running shot from a 5K. Sign up for a 5K and make sure you pass each photographer. There's usually a way (check reddit) to get the photos for free off their websites
Then, the profile itself. Be funny. Make some jokes in there. Make yourself seem fun & interesting. Put in some random stuff. Good advice I read somewhere is write something every day for a few weeks in Word or whatever, for 20 minutes or so. Throw most of it away. But just get into that stream-of-consciousness mode when writing, then take one good bit and drop it in your profile somewhere. Just take one of those prompted sections and ignore it... just fill it with whatever you want. I took the "most private thing you're willing to admit" section and just wrote a story in there about something interesting that happened recently. With self-deprecating humor. (One day, I went to take in the garbage cans from the street, and I saw a purse was in one. Some thief must have dumped it. So I turned it in to the police. That's it. Turned it into 4 long paragraphs with 20+ jokes peppered in there, 15 of those at my own expense, and a nice call-back on the closing line. Took me a couple weeks to get into the zone to write it, but it's great. Doesn't answer the question at all but who cares? It's funny, it's interesting, and women have written me first because of it.)
Try to answer as many sections as you can with jokey answers. "I'm really good at:" is answered with "Fixing things. But it turns out I'm even better at breaking them." "Favorite Music: Classic rock. Like fine art, it's better once they're dead." I have an RFK assassination joke in my favorite foods section. Just random stupid stuff. I get a new message every month or so from some woman just saying I have the best profile they've ever read.
Edit often. Cut down as much as possible. Every sentence should be there for a reason and serve some sort of duty: is it funny? is it making you seem interesting? If it's not either of those, delete it or rephrase it.
Messages: I pull a hook move with my messages. Every girl I've ever met online, OKC or otherwise, has said the same thing: "You're the only guy who ever replied who actually read my profile." Secret is, I barely skim. They're all pretty much the same. You can often re-use bits of messages to other girls that have the same interests listed. Just pick two or three things in their profile and tell a quick personal story. Message of 5-8 sentences, tops, to open. "Hey. Saw you're a Doctor Who fan too! Did you check out the special preview at ComiCon? I got hooked on that show on PBS when I was a kid, remember that?" or whatever. My main hook: I like photography. I'm pretty good at it, or at least I like to think so. Had a couple of showings and been published on a lot of random places. I have a nice collection of shots I worked on with a photography meetup group. So I have a flickr account full of photos I've taken all over the city at a ton of different events. I find one thing they're interested in that I've taken a picture of, and send them a link. Women cannot resist this... they see one shot in my portfolio and end up scanning through the whole set. I'm doing this on purpose. I always get a message back "I had to just keep clicking, I love your pictures!" and stuff like that. That's the hook, something that leads elsewhere that adds interest. It's like added content to the original message. Sometimes it's a link to a newspaper article about me or something like that. There was a halloween zombie-walk for charity I went to take pictures of for fun one day. Every girl who mentions zombies or The Walking Dead in her profile, that's my excuse to send a link to my photos. And at least half of women's profiles mention one of those, it seems. You'll start to notice this: the same 3 or 4 things keep showing up on every girl's profile. Find something to say about those things, make a nice catalog of form letters you can send out, slightly changing and personalizing each one, but, basically the same. I have "zombie message" and "football message" and "food trucks message" and "X-Files message" and one of those will work for like 90% of the women on there. Been a while, but I bet a good "I love Crazy Eyes on Orange is the New Black" message will work on 75% of the profiles on OKC.
Another thing to do is spell check. Carefully. Be well-spoken. Be interesting. Work in "you're" and "your" casually but on purpose in the message so they know you're literate. Seriously, this actually is enough to make you stand out.
Anyway, it takes a while because I'm not good looking, but when I'm really working OKC I'll send out 5 messages a day to any one who could be interesting. I'm lucky to get one reply in a week, but it's a quality lead. Usually during my lunch break in my office, just take 20-30 minutes and crank out a few semi-personalized 5-8 line messages. It's all a numbers game.
It's been a while since I've been on OKC, but there's two other things I tried in the past that may have been successful: 1) edit my profile every day. Make a very minor superficial change. Replace an "I've" with "I have" and then back again the next day or something. Change an ellipsis... to an em-dash-- somewhere in a short funny answer section (Like above, where I answered "Fixing things. But it turns out I'm even better at breaking them." the next day it'll read "Fixing things. But, it turns out, I'm even better at breaking them." and then I'll switch it back the next time I'm online). This puts your profile in the "Recent Activity" section of women's login pages in your search area. I don't know how well it works in generating interest, but why not try? 2) OK Cupid has a color-rating system. People who reply often are colored green. People who reply sometimes are yellow, and rarely are red. Every guy on there is colored green, because no guy isn't going to respond to every message he gets. Except me. I'm yellow. It says "replies selectively" under my profile. How did I do this? Well, one by ignoring some messages I get. Two... the devious way, I created some fake women's accounts and emailed myself from them, then deleted the emails when I got them in my main account. Again, I don't know if it works on women or not, but why not try? At least it's one simple way to stand out when women are looking on the site. They see a results page with a hundred guys, all with the green mark, and one guy who's actually picky. How can they not be curious about that?
Best of luck. Just keep cranking the messages out. Eventually you'll see what works and what doesn't.
And don't get discouraged. The standard OKC mailbox can hold 300 messages before they ask you to upgrade to pay. Many women I talk to get 50-100 messages a day. A day. Getting read in the first place is tough. When you have 100 messages waiting, most women just bulk delete. If they're talking to some guy already, bulk delete everything else. If they're having a bad hair day and aren't in the mood? Bulk delete all their messages. Fight with their mom yesterday? Bulk delete. Seriously. Don't take it personally. Don't worry if you've sent out messages to 50 different women with no replies. The odds are stacked against you. 1) You have to catch her on a day when you can get her attention. Not a day where she's cranky from work or had a fight with her roommate or is going out of town for the weekend and bulk-deleting her messages because she's not in the mood. 2) You have to fit whatever random 'type' she is interested in... tall guys, bearded guys, clean-shaven guys, tattoo guys, guys who look like her dad, guys who look like they'd piss off her dad, et cetera. 3) Your profile, as good as it may be, can't hit any of her triggers... Does your funny story involve the time you threw a birthday party for your dog, but she's allergic to dogs? Do you mention your love of 'Sons of Anarchy' but she dated this guy with a motorcycle in college once and now they're a huge turn-off for her? Are you vegan? Are you not vegan? Whatever random reason some woman comes up with, you have to luck into not matching any of her triggers, and then match something that is a turn-on for her. Maybe she only messages guys back who list a foreign film or two on their profiles. Or, no foreign films. Whatever. The point is, the subset of the subset of the subset of women who will reply to a message from you is so small, you can't let it discourage you. Just getting a match at all is tough enough, just understand it and don't let it psych you out.
Hang in there and keep trying and keep learning.
HFS. Great post.... really great post. Very useful information for the single noob to online dating. But golly, it's so much easier just to go to China.Hard to overstate how important a good profile is on OKC.
Mine is too long but it's hard to cut it down because it works really well on there.
First thing: pictures. You're going to want some decent ones. Ideally, your main picture should be a knees & up or maybe a bit or closer, with a clear view of your face, looking slightly off-camera as if you're seeing something interesting, with narrow depth-of-field. That means: your face/body in focus, the background a slight bit blurry. Soft/muted colors, not saturated. Ideally, something kind of like this: http://images.thesartorialist.com/thumbnails/2013/10/92813robert4191web.jpg (ignore the fashion, just look at the technical aspects of that photograph). There are a lot of psychological tricks at work when doing this... the narrow focus depth of field creates an illusion of intimacy. Men looking slightly off camera creates curiosity (what's he looking at? A woman? Is she hotter than me? Why isn't he paying attention to me? Seriously, this sounds stupid but it works). When asked to crop to your face for the icon, keep it loose... enough that your face is big enough in the square that it's easily visible on the search results pages, but off center a bit and not too close so it stands out a little.
A psychological trick I use on myself is using a main photo that clearly shows my flaws. I'm very self-conscious about my looks (basically, I'm a slightly taller Costanza). I make sure it's evident in my first shot. No need to waste time on women who will be turned off by my looks by trying to arrange a date with photos that hide it, then surprise them in person when we actually meet. It means I have to send out a lot more messages to get a reply, that's fine, but the replies I get are from women who are clearly OK with my looks and it completely makes it easier for me when the in-person meet actually happens.
Now, add five more photos. The classic action/having fun shots. I know it's cliche, but have one with a hot chick. I have a hot friend I teamed up with to run a scavenger hunt-like thing with, so I have a photo of her holding up my legs like a human wheelbarrow for one of the stunts we had to do. Me doing something stupid and looking goofy & having fun with a hot chick. Winner. Another one I lucked into... I was doing a photography Meetup at a stadium, we took some photos before the event, then I took a quick nap in the stands while waiting for the action to start. Some other photographer took a photo of me sleeping, all alone, nice muted colors, narrow-depth-of-field... score. Sleeping shots work for some reason. Another pair of cliche shots I have are the standard skydiving photo and the running shot from a 5K. Sign up for a 5K and make sure you pass each photographer. There's usually a way (check reddit) to get the photos for free off their websites
Then, the profile itself. Be funny. Make some jokes in there. Make yourself seem fun & interesting. Put in some random stuff. Good advice I read somewhere is write something every day for a few weeks in Word or whatever, for 20 minutes or so. Throw most of it away. But just get into that stream-of-consciousness mode when writing, then take one good bit and drop it in your profile somewhere. Just take one of those prompted sections and ignore it... just fill it with whatever you want. I took the "most private thing you're willing to admit" section and just wrote a story in there about something interesting that happened recently. With self-deprecating humor. (One day, I went to take in the garbage cans from the street, and I saw a purse was in one. Some thief must have dumped it. So I turned it in to the police. That's it. Turned it into 4 long paragraphs with 20+ jokes peppered in there, 15 of those at my own expense, and a nice call-back on the closing line. Took me a couple weeks to get into the zone to write it, but it's great. Doesn't answer the question at all but who cares? It's funny, it's interesting, and women have written me first because of it.)
Try to answer as many sections as you can with jokey answers. "I'm really good at:" is answered with "Fixing things. But it turns out I'm even better at breaking them." "Favorite Music: Classic rock. Like fine art, it's better once they're dead." I have an RFK assassination joke in my favorite foods section. Just random stupid stuff. I get a new message every month or so from some woman just saying I have the best profile they've ever read.
Edit often. Cut down as much as possible. Every sentence should be there for a reason and serve some sort of duty: is it funny? is it making you seem interesting? If it's not either of those, delete it or rephrase it.
Messages: I pull a hook move with my messages. Every girl I've ever met online, OKC or otherwise, has said the same thing: "You're the only guy who ever replied who actually read my profile." Secret is, I barely skim. They're all pretty much the same. You can often re-use bits of messages to other girls that have the same interests listed. Just pick two or three things in their profile and tell a quick personal story. Message of 5-8 sentences, tops, to open. "Hey. Saw you're a Doctor Who fan too! Did you check out the special preview at ComiCon? I got hooked on that show on PBS when I was a kid, remember that?" or whatever. My main hook: I like photography. I'm pretty good at it, or at least I like to think so. Had a couple of showings and been published on a lot of random places. I have a nice collection of shots I worked on with a photography meetup group. So I have a flickr account full of photos I've taken all over the city at a ton of different events. I find one thing they're interested in that I've taken a picture of, and send them a link. Women cannot resist this... they see one shot in my portfolio and end up scanning through the whole set. I'm doing this on purpose. I always get a message back "I had to just keep clicking, I love your pictures!" and stuff like that. That's the hook, something that leads elsewhere that adds interest. It's like added content to the original message. Sometimes it's a link to a newspaper article about me or something like that. There was a halloween zombie-walk for charity I went to take pictures of for fun one day. Every girl who mentions zombies or The Walking Dead in her profile, that's my excuse to send a link to my photos. And at least half of women's profiles mention one of those, it seems. You'll start to notice this: the same 3 or 4 things keep showing up on every girl's profile. Find something to say about those things, make a nice catalog of form letters you can send out, slightly changing and personalizing each one, but, basically the same. I have "zombie message" and "football message" and "food trucks message" and "X-Files message" and one of those will work for like 90% of the women on there. Been a while, but I bet a good "I love Crazy Eyes on Orange is the New Black" message will work on 75% of the profiles on OKC.
Another thing to do is spell check. Carefully. Be well-spoken. Be interesting. Work in "you're" and "your" casually but on purpose in the message so they know you're literate. Seriously, this actually is enough to make you stand out.
Anyway, it takes a while because I'm not good looking, but when I'm really working OKC I'll send out 5 messages a day to any one who could be interesting. I'm lucky to get one reply in a week, but it's a quality lead. Usually during my lunch break in my office, just take 20-30 minutes and crank out a few semi-personalized 5-8 line messages. It's all a numbers game.
It's been a while since I've been on OKC, but there's two other things I tried in the past that may have been successful: 1) edit my profile every day. Make a very minor superficial change. Replace an "I've" with "I have" and then back again the next day or something. Change an ellipsis... to an em-dash-- somewhere in a short funny answer section (Like above, where I answered "Fixing things. But it turns out I'm even better at breaking them." the next day it'll read "Fixing things. But, it turns out, I'm even better at breaking them." and then I'll switch it back the next time I'm online). This puts your profile in the "Recent Activity" section of women's login pages in your search area. I don't know how well it works in generating interest, but why not try? 2) OK Cupid has a color-rating system. People who reply often are colored green. People who reply sometimes are yellow, and rarely are red. Every guy on there is colored green, because no guy isn't going to respond to every message he gets. Except me. I'm yellow. It says "replies selectively" under my profile. How did I do this? Well, one by ignoring some messages I get. Two... the devious way, I created some fake women's accounts and emailed myself from them, then deleted the emails when I got them in my main account. Again, I don't know if it works on women or not, but why not try? At least it's one simple way to stand out when women are looking on the site. They see a results page with a hundred guys, all with the green mark, and one guy who's actually picky. How can they not be curious about that?
Best of luck. Just keep cranking the messages out. Eventually you'll see what works and what doesn't.
And don't get discouraged. The standard OKC mailbox can hold 300 messages before they ask you to upgrade to pay. Many women I talk to get 50-100 messages a day. A day. Getting read in the first place is tough. When you have 100 messages waiting, most women just bulk delete. If they're talking to some guy already, bulk delete everything else. If they're having a bad hair day and aren't in the mood? Bulk delete all their messages. Fight with their mom yesterday? Bulk delete. Seriously. Don't take it personally. Don't worry if you've sent out messages to 50 different women with no replies. The odds are stacked against you. 1) You have to catch her on a day when you can get her attention. Not a day where she's cranky from work or had a fight with her roommate or is going out of town for the weekend and bulk-deleting her messages because she's not in the mood. 2) You have to fit whatever random 'type' she is interested in... tall guys, bearded guys, clean-shaven guys, tattoo guys, guys who look like her dad, guys who look like they'd piss off her dad, et cetera. 3) Your profile, as good as it may be, can't hit any of her triggers... Does your funny story involve the time you threw a birthday party for your dog, but she's allergic to dogs? Do you mention your love of 'Sons of Anarchy' but she dated this guy with a motorcycle in college once and now they're a huge turn-off for her? Are you vegan? Are you not vegan? Whatever random reason some woman comes up with, you have to luck into not matching any of her triggers, and then match something that is a turn-on for her. Maybe she only messages guys back who list a foreign film or two on their profiles. Or, no foreign films. Whatever. The point is, the subset of the subset of the subset of women who will reply to a message from you is so small, you can't let it discourage you. Just getting a match at all is tough enough, just understand it and don't let it psych you out.
Hang in there and keep trying and keep learning.
Paging Jessup, Nathan R. Jessup to the courtesy phone (computer).
Also adding to notebook to check on Jessep's well being on Oct 5.
I am alive and still have a complete set of organs
needless to say, things went well 
sounds like this guy has to put in the same amount of work for 5-6 so why not hold out for 8-9This is why I was more than happy to bang 5's and 6's. No way I had the patience for all that.Hard to overstate how important a good profile is on OKC.
Mine is too long but it's hard to cut it down because it works really well on there.
First thing: pictures. You're going to want some decent ones. Ideally, your main picture should be a knees & up or maybe a bit or closer, with a clear view of your face, looking slightly off-camera as if you're seeing something interesting, with narrow depth-of-field. That means: your face/body in focus, the background a slight bit blurry. Soft/muted colors, not saturated. Ideally, something kind of like this: http://images.thesartorialist.com/thumbnails/2013/10/92813robert4191web.jpg (ignore the fashion, just look at the technical aspects of that photograph). There are a lot of psychological tricks at work when doing this... the narrow focus depth of field creates an illusion of intimacy. Men looking slightly off camera creates curiosity (what's he looking at? A woman? Is she hotter than me? Why isn't he paying attention to me? Seriously, this sounds stupid but it works). When asked to crop to your face for the icon, keep it loose... enough that your face is big enough in the square that it's easily visible on the search results pages, but off center a bit and not too close so it stands out a little.
A psychological trick I use on myself is using a main photo that clearly shows my flaws. I'm very self-conscious about my looks (basically, I'm a slightly taller Costanza). I make sure it's evident in my first shot. No need to waste time on women who will be turned off by my looks by trying to arrange a date with photos that hide it, then surprise them in person when we actually meet. It means I have to send out a lot more messages to get a reply, that's fine, but the replies I get are from women who are clearly OK with my looks and it completely makes it easier for me when the in-person meet actually happens.
Now, add five more photos. The classic action/having fun shots. I know it's cliche, but have one with a hot chick. I have a hot friend I teamed up with to run a scavenger hunt-like thing with, so I have a photo of her holding up my legs like a human wheelbarrow for one of the stunts we had to do. Me doing something stupid and looking goofy & having fun with a hot chick. Winner. Another one I lucked into... I was doing a photography Meetup at a stadium, we took some photos before the event, then I took a quick nap in the stands while waiting for the action to start. Some other photographer took a photo of me sleeping, all alone, nice muted colors, narrow-depth-of-field... score. Sleeping shots work for some reason. Another pair of cliche shots I have are the standard skydiving photo and the running shot from a 5K. Sign up for a 5K and make sure you pass each photographer. There's usually a way (check reddit) to get the photos for free off their websites
Then, the profile itself. Be funny. Make some jokes in there. Make yourself seem fun & interesting. Put in some random stuff. Good advice I read somewhere is write something every day for a few weeks in Word or whatever, for 20 minutes or so. Throw most of it away. But just get into that stream-of-consciousness mode when writing, then take one good bit and drop it in your profile somewhere. Just take one of those prompted sections and ignore it... just fill it with whatever you want. I took the "most private thing you're willing to admit" section and just wrote a story in there about something interesting that happened recently. With self-deprecating humor. (One day, I went to take in the garbage cans from the street, and I saw a purse was in one. Some thief must have dumped it. So I turned it in to the police. That's it. Turned it into 4 long paragraphs with 20+ jokes peppered in there, 15 of those at my own expense, and a nice call-back on the closing line. Took me a couple weeks to get into the zone to write it, but it's great. Doesn't answer the question at all but who cares? It's funny, it's interesting, and women have written me first because of it.)
Try to answer as many sections as you can with jokey answers. "I'm really good at:" is answered with "Fixing things. But it turns out I'm even better at breaking them." "Favorite Music: Classic rock. Like fine art, it's better once they're dead." I have an RFK assassination joke in my favorite foods section. Just random stupid stuff. I get a new message every month or so from some woman just saying I have the best profile they've ever read.
Edit often. Cut down as much as possible. Every sentence should be there for a reason and serve some sort of duty: is it funny? is it making you seem interesting? If it's not either of those, delete it or rephrase it.
Messages: I pull a hook move with my messages. Every girl I've ever met online, OKC or otherwise, has said the same thing: "You're the only guy who ever replied who actually read my profile." Secret is, I barely skim. They're all pretty much the same. You can often re-use bits of messages to other girls that have the same interests listed. Just pick two or three things in their profile and tell a quick personal story. Message of 5-8 sentences, tops, to open. "Hey. Saw you're a Doctor Who fan too! Did you check out the special preview at ComiCon? I got hooked on that show on PBS when I was a kid, remember that?" or whatever. My main hook: I like photography. I'm pretty good at it, or at least I like to think so. Had a couple of showings and been published on a lot of random places. I have a nice collection of shots I worked on with a photography meetup group. So I have a flickr account full of photos I've taken all over the city at a ton of different events. I find one thing they're interested in that I've taken a picture of, and send them a link. Women cannot resist this... they see one shot in my portfolio and end up scanning through the whole set. I'm doing this on purpose. I always get a message back "I had to just keep clicking, I love your pictures!" and stuff like that. That's the hook, something that leads elsewhere that adds interest. It's like added content to the original message. Sometimes it's a link to a newspaper article about me or something like that. There was a halloween zombie-walk for charity I went to take pictures of for fun one day. Every girl who mentions zombies or The Walking Dead in her profile, that's my excuse to send a link to my photos. And at least half of women's profiles mention one of those, it seems. You'll start to notice this: the same 3 or 4 things keep showing up on every girl's profile. Find something to say about those things, make a nice catalog of form letters you can send out, slightly changing and personalizing each one, but, basically the same. I have "zombie message" and "football message" and "food trucks message" and "X-Files message" and one of those will work for like 90% of the women on there. Been a while, but I bet a good "I love Crazy Eyes on Orange is the New Black" message will work on 75% of the profiles on OKC.
Another thing to do is spell check. Carefully. Be well-spoken. Be interesting. Work in "you're" and "your" casually but on purpose in the message so they know you're literate. Seriously, this actually is enough to make you stand out.
Anyway, it takes a while because I'm not good looking, but when I'm really working OKC I'll send out 5 messages a day to any one who could be interesting. I'm lucky to get one reply in a week, but it's a quality lead. Usually during my lunch break in my office, just take 20-30 minutes and crank out a few semi-personalized 5-8 line messages. It's all a numbers game.
It's been a while since I've been on OKC, but there's two other things I tried in the past that may have been successful: 1) edit my profile every day. Make a very minor superficial change. Replace an "I've" with "I have" and then back again the next day or something. Change an ellipsis... to an em-dash-- somewhere in a short funny answer section (Like above, where I answered "Fixing things. But it turns out I'm even better at breaking them." the next day it'll read "Fixing things. But, it turns out, I'm even better at breaking them." and then I'll switch it back the next time I'm online). This puts your profile in the "Recent Activity" section of women's login pages in your search area. I don't know how well it works in generating interest, but why not try? 2) OK Cupid has a color-rating system. People who reply often are colored green. People who reply sometimes are yellow, and rarely are red. Every guy on there is colored green, because no guy isn't going to respond to every message he gets. Except me. I'm yellow. It says "replies selectively" under my profile. How did I do this? Well, one by ignoring some messages I get. Two... the devious way, I created some fake women's accounts and emailed myself from them, then deleted the emails when I got them in my main account. Again, I don't know if it works on women or not, but why not try? At least it's one simple way to stand out when women are looking on the site. They see a results page with a hundred guys, all with the green mark, and one guy who's actually picky. How can they not be curious about that?
Best of luck. Just keep cranking the messages out. Eventually you'll see what works and what doesn't.
And don't get discouraged. The standard OKC mailbox can hold 300 messages before they ask you to upgrade to pay. Many women I talk to get 50-100 messages a day. A day. Getting read in the first place is tough. When you have 100 messages waiting, most women just bulk delete. If they're talking to some guy already, bulk delete everything else. If they're having a bad hair day and aren't in the mood? Bulk delete all their messages. Fight with their mom yesterday? Bulk delete. Seriously. Don't take it personally. Don't worry if you've sent out messages to 50 different women with no replies. The odds are stacked against you. 1) You have to catch her on a day when you can get her attention. Not a day where she's cranky from work or had a fight with her roommate or is going out of town for the weekend and bulk-deleting her messages because she's not in the mood. 2) You have to fit whatever random 'type' she is interested in... tall guys, bearded guys, clean-shaven guys, tattoo guys, guys who look like her dad, guys who look like they'd piss off her dad, et cetera. 3) Your profile, as good as it may be, can't hit any of her triggers... Does your funny story involve the time you threw a birthday party for your dog, but she's allergic to dogs? Do you mention your love of 'Sons of Anarchy' but she dated this guy with a motorcycle in college once and now they're a huge turn-off for her? Are you vegan? Are you not vegan? Whatever random reason some woman comes up with, you have to luck into not matching any of her triggers, and then match something that is a turn-on for her. Maybe she only messages guys back who list a foreign film or two on their profiles. Or, no foreign films. Whatever. The point is, the subset of the subset of the subset of women who will reply to a message from you is so small, you can't let it discourage you. Just getting a match at all is tough enough, just understand it and don't let it psych you out.
Hang in there and keep trying and keep learning.
will update when I get a chance... swamped at work after missing a week, plus had two root canals this morning
the tldr; for you impatient bastages is that I had more sex in the past 10 days (and at least once 10 out of 10 days) than I've had in the past 2 years
will update when I get a chance... swamped at work after missing a week, plus had two root canals this morning
the tldr; for you impatient bastages is that I had more sex in the past 10 days (and at least once 10 out of 10 days) than I've had in the past 2 years
) so she missed her connecting flight and they had her put up in a hotel till the next flight out, which was 4AM the following morning. I was too far to turn around, and it was already past the refund time for cancelling the hotel room, so I drove on, got some food and went on to the hotel solo. 
and and in various arrangements and locations. We had to be somewhat stealthy at times, as I did have my kids for the week (I wasn't supposed to, but my ex is a worthless P.O.S. worthy of a whole other thread). As far as the kids knew, our guest was staying in my room, and I was on the couch. Pulled that ruse off perfectly. , and had lots of smiles and laughs. I kind of hated to see her go, but back to reality for now.
I don't think we are going to find records of either flight in the tower logs. You covered up everything.finally able to breathe at work... here's a little update
:tldr: warning
I was supposed to pick her up Thursday night at the airport (about 4 hours away) and already had a hotel booked for us near the airport, since it was a late night arrival. Left work for the day and was about halfway to the airport and she called and said her flight into the states took off on time but was an hour late landing (WTF? wrong turn by pilot? Bermuda triangle? thanks, Obama!
Got up early the next morning and headed to the airport, feeling giddy as a 13 year old boy with a Playboy mag. Admittedly, I was a little nervous as I waited for her at the baggage claim. I spotted her coming down the escalator and then she finally saw me and smiled really big and ran over to me. We hugged then I looked her in the eyes and we kissed on the lips. Now, I'm not the smartest man in the world, but I took this kiss on the lips to mean things would be going very well during our little excursion. I would not be disappointed.
We got her bags and headed back to the hotel. Still had about 4 hours before checkout time, so I asked if she wanted to get food, coffee, shower, etc. She opted to lay on the bed for a bit as she had essentially been up for most of the last 24 hours, and laying on the bed was obviously fine with me. We were both a little tired from the previous night's travels and still a little starry eyed from the initial meeting. We laid there and just chit chatted a bit. She maneuvers to get under the covers and after a little more chat, she says "I'm sorry but I've got to take my pants off, I just can't get comfortable". Um, no arguments here. Despite the urge to just whip it out right then and go to town, I kept my composure and just laid there talking to her a little longer. She finally invites me under the covers and I say "I should probably remove my pants as well. You know, it's only fair since yours are gone." She agreed. By this time, I'm sporting more wood than a lumberjack competition, and am not really even trying to hide it. We spoon a bit, I move in for a real kiss. We kiss for a little while then hands start wandering and finally all clothes come off and
We got dressed, checked out, got food and hit the road back to my house.
Off an on for the next 9 days, we
All in all, one of the best weeks of my life. Took her to see the local attractions, we ate good fattening food all week, burned off most of the calories
We've already talked of future visits. Stay tuned!
take caution in your tone! I'm usually a nice guy, but this ####### heat is making me absolutely crazy.
If your wife is truly a POS make sure you don't have the stipulation that limits overnight guests of the opposite sex while you have the children. I have seen a case where a guy got his visitation severely limited doing the same thing you did.
you for a week straight? Are the men in her country horrible, is she fascinated by Americans, are you packing something unheard of down there? What would possess her to do such a thing?
Valid concern and believe me I thought about it ahead of time. We do, but she has pretty much already blown the agreement out of the water. To the point that I think I would have a slam dunk court case against her if she so chose. At worst, she would only have the "well he did it too" argument against me for this, but not worried about that. I have the kids more often than I don't in this "50/50" agreement. This was supposed to be a week I didn't have the kids, but due to the ex being a complete trainwreck in life, I ended up having them anyway. It almost canceled the entire trip, but after talking it out with the chick, she decided to go ahead and come. Pun completely intended.
There's still time. Would a little Jessep make her a citizen?For those of use with no shot at ever doing anything like this, do you know or were you able to ascertain exactly why this comely lass would fly across the ocean to basically
Or is it simply, you two hit it off and she wanted a little adventure? Not going to lie, I was hoping there would at least be some kind of shenanigans on her part.
Regardless, well done!
I told her up front if she was looking for a green card via marriage, she was barking up the wrong tree
For those of use with no shot at ever doing anything like this, do you know or were you able to ascertain exactly why this comely lass would fly across the ocean to basically
Or is it simply, you two hit it off and she wanted a little adventure? Not going to lie, I was hoping there would at least be some kind of shenanigans on her part.
Regardless, well done!
believe me, I asked myself the same question leading up to last weekAh, so this is the reason then.For those of use with no shot at ever doing anything like this, do you know or were you able to ascertain exactly why this comely lass would fly across the ocean to basically
Or is it simply, you two hit it off and she wanted a little adventure? Not going to lie, I was hoping there would at least be some kind of shenanigans on her part.
Regardless, well done!
We started off casually chit-chatting, and really just hit it off. Talked about more serious matters over time, and just bonded more and more. She used to live in the states years ago and liked it here. Moreso than her current location. I think she did want the adventure and to see some other US friends while over here, and we did have a couple of road trips planned initially, but that fell through due to me having the kids for the week. I was sure to let her know that up front and I figured that would be a dealbreaker, but nope, she wanted to still come even if it was just to hang out with me. I was kinda impressed, not gonna lie.
What country is she from?For those of use with no shot at ever doing anything like this, do you know or were you able to ascertain exactly why this comely lass would fly across the ocean to basically
Or is it simply, you two hit it off and she wanted a little adventure? Not going to lie, I was hoping there would at least be some kind of shenanigans on her part.
Regardless, well done!
We started off casually chit-chatting, and really just hit it off. Talked about more serious matters over time, and just bonded more and more. She used to live in the states years ago and liked it here. Moreso than her current location. I think she did want the adventure and to see some other US friends while over here, and we did have a couple of road trips planned initially, but that fell through due to me having the kids for the week. I was sure to let her know that up front and I figured that would be a dealbreaker, but nope, she wanted to still come even if it was just to hang out with me. I was kinda impressed, not gonna lie.
Do this if you have no steady ###. Steady ### > than no steady ###. And the potential for strange, steady ###, well that's something else entirely.Is this thread officially dead?
I was thinking about dipping my toe back into the game.
What are you looking for? If it's just to get laid, find an escort - it's cheaper and safer.Is this thread officially dead?
I was thinking about dipping my toe back into the game.
Outstanding post! This should be pinned or linked in your sig or something.Hard to overstate how important a good profile is on OKC.
Mine is too long but it's hard to cut it down because it works really well on there.
First thing: pictures. You're going to want some decent ones. Ideally, your main picture should be a knees & up or maybe a bit or closer, with a clear view of your face, looking slightly off-camera as if you're seeing something interesting, with narrow depth-of-field. That means: your face/body in focus, the background a slight bit blurry. Soft/muted colors, not saturated. Ideally, something kind of like this: http://images.thesartorialist.com/thumbnails/2013/10/92813robert4191web.jpg (ignore the fashion, just look at the technical aspects of that photograph). There are a lot of psychological tricks at work when doing this... the narrow focus depth of field creates an illusion of intimacy. Men looking slightly off camera creates curiosity (what's he looking at? A woman? Is she hotter than me? Why isn't he paying attention to me? Seriously, this sounds stupid but it works). When asked to crop to your face for the icon, keep it loose... enough that your face is big enough in the square that it's easily visible on the search results pages, but off center a bit and not too close so it stands out a little.
A psychological trick I use on myself is using a main photo that clearly shows my flaws. I'm very self-conscious about my looks (basically, I'm a slightly taller Costanza). I make sure it's evident in my first shot. No need to waste time on women who will be turned off by my looks by trying to arrange a date with photos that hide it, then surprise them in person when we actually meet. It means I have to send out a lot more messages to get a reply, that's fine, but the replies I get are from women who are clearly OK with my looks and it completely makes it easier for me when the in-person meet actually happens.
Now, add five more photos. The classic action/having fun shots. I know it's cliche, but have one with a hot chick. I have a hot friend I teamed up with to run a scavenger hunt-like thing with, so I have a photo of her holding up my legs like a human wheelbarrow for one of the stunts we had to do. Me doing something stupid and looking goofy & having fun with a hot chick. Winner. Another one I lucked into... I was doing a photography Meetup at a stadium, we took some photos before the event, then I took a quick nap in the stands while waiting for the action to start. Some other photographer took a photo of me sleeping, all alone, nice muted colors, narrow-depth-of-field... score. Sleeping shots work for some reason. Another pair of cliche shots I have are the standard skydiving photo and the running shot from a 5K. Sign up for a 5K and make sure you pass each photographer. There's usually a way (check reddit) to get the photos for free off their websites
Then, the profile itself. Be funny. Make some jokes in there. Make yourself seem fun & interesting. Put in some random stuff. Good advice I read somewhere is write something every day for a few weeks in Word or whatever, for 20 minutes or so. Throw most of it away. But just get into that stream-of-consciousness mode when writing, then take one good bit and drop it in your profile somewhere. Just take one of those prompted sections and ignore it... just fill it with whatever you want. I took the "most private thing you're willing to admit" section and just wrote a story in there about something interesting that happened recently. With self-deprecating humor. (One day, I went to take in the garbage cans from the street, and I saw a purse was in one. Some thief must have dumped it. So I turned it in to the police. That's it. Turned it into 4 long paragraphs with 20+ jokes peppered in there, 15 of those at my own expense, and a nice call-back on the closing line. Took me a couple weeks to get into the zone to write it, but it's great. Doesn't answer the question at all but who cares? It's funny, it's interesting, and women have written me first because of it.)
Try to answer as many sections as you can with jokey answers. "I'm really good at:" is answered with "Fixing things. But it turns out I'm even better at breaking them." "Favorite Music: Classic rock. Like fine art, it's better once they're dead." I have an RFK assassination joke in my favorite foods section. Just random stupid stuff. I get a new message every month or so from some woman just saying I have the best profile they've ever read.
Edit often. Cut down as much as possible. Every sentence should be there for a reason and serve some sort of duty: is it funny? is it making you seem interesting? If it's not either of those, delete it or rephrase it.
Messages: I pull a hook move with my messages. Every girl I've ever met online, OKC or otherwise, has said the same thing: "You're the only guy who ever replied who actually read my profile." Secret is, I barely skim. They're all pretty much the same. You can often re-use bits of messages to other girls that have the same interests listed. Just pick two or three things in their profile and tell a quick personal story. Message of 5-8 sentences, tops, to open. "Hey. Saw you're a Doctor Who fan too! Did you check out the special preview at ComiCon? I got hooked on that show on PBS when I was a kid, remember that?" or whatever. My main hook: I like photography. I'm pretty good at it, or at least I like to think so. Had a couple of showings and been published on a lot of random places. I have a nice collection of shots I worked on with a photography meetup group. So I have a flickr account full of photos I've taken all over the city at a ton of different events. I find one thing they're interested in that I've taken a picture of, and send them a link. Women cannot resist this... they see one shot in my portfolio and end up scanning through the whole set. I'm doing this on purpose. I always get a message back "I had to just keep clicking, I love your pictures!" and stuff like that. That's the hook, something that leads elsewhere that adds interest. It's like added content to the original message. Sometimes it's a link to a newspaper article about me or something like that. There was a halloween zombie-walk for charity I went to take pictures of for fun one day. Every girl who mentions zombies or The Walking Dead in her profile, that's my excuse to send a link to my photos. And at least half of women's profiles mention one of those, it seems. You'll start to notice this: the same 3 or 4 things keep showing up on every girl's profile. Find something to say about those things, make a nice catalog of form letters you can send out, slightly changing and personalizing each one, but, basically the same. I have "zombie message" and "football message" and "food trucks message" and "X-Files message" and one of those will work for like 90% of the women on there. Been a while, but I bet a good "I love Crazy Eyes on Orange is the New Black" message will work on 75% of the profiles on OKC.
Another thing to do is spell check. Carefully. Be well-spoken. Be interesting. Work in "you're" and "your" casually but on purpose in the message so they know you're literate. Seriously, this actually is enough to make you stand out.
Anyway, it takes a while because I'm not good looking, but when I'm really working OKC I'll send out 5 messages a day to any one who could be interesting. I'm lucky to get one reply in a week, but it's a quality lead. Usually during my lunch break in my office, just take 20-30 minutes and crank out a few semi-personalized 5-8 line messages. It's all a numbers game.
It's been a while since I've been on OKC, but there's two other things I tried in the past that may have been successful: 1) edit my profile every day. Make a very minor superficial change. Replace an "I've" with "I have" and then back again the next day or something. Change an ellipsis... to an em-dash-- somewhere in a short funny answer section (Like above, where I answered "Fixing things. But it turns out I'm even better at breaking them." the next day it'll read "Fixing things. But, it turns out, I'm even better at breaking them." and then I'll switch it back the next time I'm online). This puts your profile in the "Recent Activity" section of women's login pages in your search area. I don't know how well it works in generating interest, but why not try? 2) OK Cupid has a color-rating system. People who reply often are colored green. People who reply sometimes are yellow, and rarely are red. Every guy on there is colored green, because no guy isn't going to respond to every message he gets. Except me. I'm yellow. It says "replies selectively" under my profile. How did I do this? Well, one by ignoring some messages I get. Two... the devious way, I created some fake women's accounts and emailed myself from them, then deleted the emails when I got them in my main account. Again, I don't know if it works on women or not, but why not try? At least it's one simple way to stand out when women are looking on the site. They see a results page with a hundred guys, all with the green mark, and one guy who's actually picky. How can they not be curious about that?
Best of luck. Just keep cranking the messages out. Eventually you'll see what works and what doesn't.
And don't get discouraged. The standard OKC mailbox can hold 300 messages before they ask you to upgrade to pay. Many women I talk to get 50-100 messages a day. A day. Getting read in the first place is tough. When you have 100 messages waiting, most women just bulk delete. If they're talking to some guy already, bulk delete everything else. If they're having a bad hair day and aren't in the mood? Bulk delete all their messages. Fight with their mom yesterday? Bulk delete. Seriously. Don't take it personally. Don't worry if you've sent out messages to 50 different women with no replies. The odds are stacked against you. 1) You have to catch her on a day when you can get her attention. Not a day where she's cranky from work or had a fight with her roommate or is going out of town for the weekend and bulk-deleting her messages because she's not in the mood. 2) You have to fit whatever random 'type' she is interested in... tall guys, bearded guys, clean-shaven guys, tattoo guys, guys who look like her dad, guys who look like they'd piss off her dad, et cetera. 3) Your profile, as good as it may be, can't hit any of her triggers... Does your funny story involve the time you threw a birthday party for your dog, but she's allergic to dogs? Do you mention your love of 'Sons of Anarchy' but she dated this guy with a motorcycle in college once and now they're a huge turn-off for her? Are you vegan? Are you not vegan? Whatever random reason some woman comes up with, you have to luck into not matching any of her triggers, and then match something that is a turn-on for her. Maybe she only messages guys back who list a foreign film or two on their profiles. Or, no foreign films. Whatever. The point is, the subset of the subset of the subset of women who will reply to a message from you is so small, you can't let it discourage you. Just getting a match at all is tough enough, just understand it and don't let it psych you out.
Hang in there and keep trying and keep learning.
chauncey said:
This is why you back into your parking spot on a first date. And visualize how many steps to get out of the restaurant and into your vehicle. Seconds count.
As I was catching up on the AZRon thread that I avoided for 3 years over several screen names, I thought about posting more in here. I had a small group of regular tinder girls going for awhile that I shut down for the holidays. I'm going to re-download after the first of the year.Is this thread officially dead?
I was thinking about dipping my toe back into the game.
Maintaining a diverse and steady group of ##### is probably the easy mode of online dating. Trying to find a wife or trying to line up one nighters is much more difficult.Do this if you have no steady ###. Steady ### > than no steady ###. And the potential for strange, steady ###, well that's something else entirely.Is this thread officially dead?
I was thinking about dipping my toe back into the game.
Pro tip: odds are good in real life she looks like her worst picture.
