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Looking for love? There are many dating and personal introduction services on the net - we've chosen three to highlight here, all very different, all with something special to offer and all with their pitfalls. They are all dating/personal ad services - ie, you place a free ad and wait for replies. You can also browse other people's ads for free, but you usually need to be a member to reply to them.

Personal Ads

If you measure effectiveness in terms of the number of responses - yes, they certainly work, expecially if you're a woman placing an ad. Isobel placed an ad and photo on Thursday 9th July. She received over sixty replies in 3 days, over 200 in total, from men aged 30 to 54 in the US, Canada and Europe. See her ad here.

To get the best out of this kind of service though, you need to be able to reply to others' ads as well as placing your own. That way, you can choose the people who attract you, but who may have excluded you from their search criteria for some reason and who you'd never be able to make contact with otherwise.

Once you're a member, most dating services have some kind of system, usually included in the membership fee, of emailing you details of new ads that fit your criteria, and that certainly cuts out a lot of wasted online time searching for yourself. You can normally join for a month, three months, six months or one year (you'd have to be pretty pessimistic to join for a year, I'd have thought!) and the best and most useful deals are usually three or six months.

Advantages

Placing an ad is free.

Including a photo with your ad is free. It takes a couple of days for the photo to appear, but it's really essential if you want to get many replies.

Browsing ads is free. You can't usually reply to them, but at least you can see if there are enough people in the database who appeal to you before you sign up.

Email notification of new ads. A brilliant service - it's part of most membership deals, but you get new ads just about every day and you only need to go to the site to look at the ones that appeal to you.

Voice files. Again, usually free - except for the call charges, which can be significant if you don't live in the US. Net2Phone may be the answer in that case. With some, you can record 1 minute "tasters" which are stored as wav files and up to 5 minutes of real audio. If it's offered and you don't sound like a squeaky wheel, take advantage of it - it makes your ad stand out and many people are more aural than visual.

Confidentiality. If someone replies to your ad, they do it through the service - your email address isn't given out. It's then up to you if you want to respond to them or not. With some services however, if you respond to someone else's ad, your email address is sent to them with your reply.

Disadvantages

Ads can be out of date. It's not clear what system the various services have for removing old ads and there's often no indication on the ad itself of when it was placed. That's why the email notification is so useful - you only get details of new ads.

No checking is done. Apart from removing any urls or email addresses from ads (so people can't reply without being members) and sometimes checking that the city you say you live in actually exists, absolutely no verification of details is done. Provided they're not considered obscene or inflammatory, ads will be posted exactly as submitted. You have no idea if the photo is of the advertiser or whether they are telling the truth about themselves or not. Apparently, women most often lie about their age and men about their height! We're working on a Safety section for advice on how best to check people out, keep your details confidential and generally be safe until you're sure of who you're corresponding with. If you have any tips you'd like to share, please email them to us.

Unsuitable replies. Especially if you're a woman, you'll get replies from lots of unsuitable people, however carefully you specify the kind of person you're looking for. That's not always a bad thing - I responded to someone whose age range didn't include me, but we clicked almost immediately - but it can be very irritating if you've specifically said you want to meet people over 6 foot tall and you have to wade through loads of replies from guys of 5ft 6" and under. And when I say "loads of replies" - that can mean hundreds of them!

Limited help with ads. Unless you're used to writing copy, creating an ad that gets responses can be very difficult. Your ad is your showcase - if you want replies from the right kind of people, your ad needs to reflect who you are as attractively as possible.

Recommended Reading:

For some guidelines on writing ads, plus a very good read, we can recommend 25 Words or Less : How to Write Like a Pro to Find That Special Someone Through Personal Ads. Although the emphasis is on print rather than online ads, the advice holds good for both kinds. Full details are available on our Book Reviews Page or by clicking on the title above.

The Online Dating Guide is billed as "the internet's first complete guide for online dating and matchmaking". We haven't read it ourselves yet, but it's recommended by many of the top dating and matchmaking sites. It could be a good idea to get your own personal copy before signing up at a dating or matchmaking site. As it's an eBook, you can have your downloaded copy within minutes. Let us know what you think of it or any other resource you come across.