Posted on October 31st, 2009 by Brad
A quick note on these ideas: as I cover in my dating guide, the first date should be used to get to know each other better so there should be as little distraction as possible. Many of the suggested dates below would not make a good first date in most situations.
Find a Great Restaurant
First suggestion isn’t an earth-shaker: have a great dinner at a new restaurant. No need to take a risk picking that new restaurant either! A friend of [...]
Filed under: dating advice
Posted on October 26th, 2009 by Brad
While researching other dating sites, I stumbled upon PoorMatch.com. At first glance I thought I must be reading something wrong…but then I realized it was a big online dating parody. A really, really funny parody at that (we’re talking The Onion kind of funny). If you’re frustrated due to online dating, check out Poor Match for a few laughs to lighten the mood. Every page has great jokes, some that are harder to spot than others.
A few of my favorites [...]
Filed under: rambling
Posted on October 25th, 2009 by Brad
Apparently Chemistry.com has been running promotions to increase the number of women using their site. I would assume this is because the ratio of women to men using the dating service needed improved. Well, it looks as if they were a little too successful. Now they have a much higher female to male ratio and they’re in a position where they need to try to correct this.
Here’s the current message they’re sending out to guys:
Online dating sites very rarely [...]
Filed under: online dating services
Posted on October 24th, 2009 by Brad
I’ve been thinking about doing some online dating profile heading testing (that’s a mouthful!). I’m hoping to share the results here as I currently have a theory that weird or hard to understand headings may work as well as any other. At any rate, while thinking of a good profile heading to test out I came up with first in the list below. I thought it wasn’t too shabby and thought I could come up with nine more for a [...]
Filed under: dating advice, dating profiles, technology
Posted on October 22nd, 2009 by Brad
Today in the world of online dating…
As If You Needed Another Reason To Want A Great Dating Profile
OKCupid is current running a contest called Who Has the Best Online Dating Profile? Both members and non-members can vote on the profiles they think are best (it’s split into several categories). The winner will end up with $250 which is not too shabby considering you’d want a great profile regardless! If you want to enter your OKCupid profile inot the contest or [...]
Filed under: dating advice, dating links, online dating news
Posted on October 22nd, 2009 by Brad
If you’re new to online dating or just wondering if the service you’re using is worth it, here are some signs that it’s time to retire your current dating site and find another.
1. There are advertisements for other dating services
If you walked into a car dealership looking to buy a car, wouldn’t it be strange if the salesman tried to convince you to buy a car from his competition? If Coca-Cola sold their bottles with advertisements for Pepsi on them, [...]
Filed under: dating advice, online dating services
Posted on October 21st, 2009 by Brad
I was excited to learn this week that HBO will begin filming its adaptation of George R.R. Martin’s Game of Thrones. This is the first in the series A Song of Ice and Fire which is probably my favorite series of books around. However, all my excitement regarding the filming has led me back to a familiar feeling of frustration that I haven’t felt since the second half of Robert Jordan’s The Wheel of Time series.
My problems with Mr. Jordan [...]
Filed under: rambling
Posted on October 20th, 2009 by Brad
Wow….lots of free this and free that this month with the dating services! First there was the first ever Lavalife free email weekend, then another free weekend at Chemistry.com (the second free weekend in less than a month) and now eHarmony is having its first “Free Communication Event”. eHarmony is know for its free weekends and this approach make sense. This is because many of the benefits the dating site provides can never be seen unless you’re actually a [...]
Filed under: online dating news, promotions
Posted on October 16th, 2009 by Brad
I’ve been putting together a series of articles to help you protect yourself while dating online. This series is broken into three parts:
1. Online Dating Scams: The Romance Scam – The first part of the series discusses the main scam occurring with online dating.
2. Online Dating Scams: Additional Scams – Several other online dating scams are discussed here.
3. Tools For Identifying Online Dating Scam and Liars – Discusses free online tools that can be used to help you protect yourself.
Online [...]
Filed under: dating advice
Posted on October 16th, 2009 by Brad
This article is one in a series that discusses protecting yourself from scams when dating online.
As online dating grows more popular so do dating scams associated with them. There are many good resources online describing dating scams but not very many give concrete ways to defend or combat them. Because of this, I want to offer some actual methods to detect if you’re dealing with a dishonest person. I’ll try to cover the tools in detail so you can perform [...]
Filed under: dating advice, online dating services
Posted on October 16th, 2009 by Brad
This article is one in a series that discusses protecting yourself from scams when dating online.
Online Dating Scams: The 419 Scam
The Romance Scam is often mentioned in relation to the 419 scam (also referred to as the Nigerian scam). The standard 419 scam involves the scammer offering you a large sum of money if you help them move that money out of the country they are currently in. For example, they may want to send you a check for $50,000 [...]
Filed under: dating advice
Posted on October 16th, 2009 by Brad
This article is one in a series that discusses protecting yourself from scams when dating online.
There are many online dating scams out there but I would consider this the “main” scam. This scam involves the scammer posing as a potential love interest with the goal of making money off of their target. It’s amazing how many people are fooled by this one but the bad guys are good at what they do and can be very convincing.
The Romance Scam [...]
Filed under: dating advice
Posted on October 16th, 2009 by Brad
Just a quick line to let you know that Chemistry is having another free weekend this coming weekend. This is the second time in a month Chemistry is having a free weekend (see my comments on regarding that one at Chemistry.com Free Weekend, September 2009).
While I can’t promise this frequency of free weekends will continue, at this rate it would be well worth having an account even if you only plan to use the service every fourth weekend!
Remember: Chemistry.com [...]
Filed under: promotions
Posted on October 11th, 2009 by Brad
Is it better to ignore unwanted contact or come right out and tell someone that you’re not interested? I’ve had this question asked a few times…always by women but I assume some men find themselves asking this question as well. On one hand, simply ignoring people is generally considered rude but on the other explicitly rejecting someone isn’t something most people like to do. For many of us, especially early on in our online dating, this creates something of a [...]
Filed under: dating advice, internet dating
Posted on October 10th, 2009 by Brad
This weekend, for the first time ever, Lavalife is having a free email weekend. Normally the service is free to sign up for and browse other users, just like almost every other dating site of this type. However, this weekend everyone will also be able to email other members for free.
This practice is common for both eHarmony and Chemistry.com and in some ways it makes more sense from a business point of view for these services to offer free weekends. [...]
Filed under: promotions
Posted on October 9th, 2009 by Brad
According to this Yahoo! article, some pick-up lines do work. Of course, the article is from Yahoo! India so maybe something is lost across cultures because I would have never thought this was the case. The only time I’ve seen this approach taken was by men who didn’t seem serious about having success with the woman they were approaching. When I’ve seen it used it’s hardly been a step above the stereotypical cat-calling from construction works. From what I’ve seen [...]
Filed under: online dating news
Posted on October 8th, 2009 by Brad
Recently I decided I wanted to try and improve my traffic here and I ended up buying a book named Building Findable Websites by Aarron Walter. I really liked the book and would recommend it if you’re looking for a good introduction to SEO.
In the book, Aarron discusses the All in One SEO plug-in for Wordpress so I went ahead and installed it for my website here. When I was setting this plug-in up, I decided to turn on canonical [...]
Filed under: technology
Posted on October 7th, 2009 by Brad
Just a quick update: this weekend will be a free communication weekend for eHarmony Canada. I talked about my thoughts on the free weekends here but I’ll say again here there’s several good reasons for trying it out. If you’ve never tried eHarmony and live in Canada, now would be a great time to see what it’s all aboot. Keep in mind that you can sign up before the weekend begin (and you may want to because the personality test [...]
Filed under: promotions
Posted on October 3rd, 2009 by Brad
Note: In discussing this topic I’ll be using a Christian dating service as an example but I hope it becomes clear that this advice can be applied to many different types of niche sites. I use this example as I have some personal experience in the area. I also have a friend who has had success using a Christian service after having no luck with one of the “big” sites and I draw many of my thoughts from conversations with [...]
Filed under: dating advice, online dating services
