First of all, if you want optimal results with your online dating profile, you have to have a picture. Every bit of research shows that a profile with a picture will get at least three times as many responses as one without.
Second, your pictures are there primarily to pique her interest so she either reads your profile or decides then and there to send you some kind of communication.
Third, put up current pictures. It's not going to do you any good to show up on a date 30 pounds fatter than you are in your pictures. All you're going to do is turn her off, show that you're deceitful, and find out that she might not be attracted to you. It's not like you can blame her.
Likewise, if you have something major going on like you only have one arm, you're crippled, or as in my case, your ear is mutilated, you need to address that somehow. Either in your pictures or in your profile.
The fact is that if you're comfortable with whatever is "wrong" with you, everyone else will be too. People don't know how to react to certain things, and they'll take their cue from you. If you create the reality that you're comfortable with yourself, everyone else will accept you. You create the reality that you want. After I've gotten to know them, some women have told me that on first meeting me they thought my ear was disgusting and a turn off. Regardless of what they think, I make it a point to bring my ear up early in the first conversation. There is no sense trying to ignore the elephant in the room.
Here's a paraphrase of what I say:
How do you like my ear? Pretty cool, huh? My best friend did this to me, some friend, huh? He had a great left hook and I was never good enough to slip it. He hit me so much that it ended up looking like this. I love it. People in the know' know that I must be pretty tough. Or maybe they figure I must not be all that good if I get hit so much. Either way, they know I've been through some shit. It's not like you get an ear like this from playing checkers.
Then I go into a story about how people ask me if I fight in the UFC or if I've ever played rugby. Or I tell the story about the commentators talking about my ear when I fought live on ESPN. All of that is purposely designed to be funny, show social acceptance, and illustrate that I'm proud of my deformity. I say that I love my ear. It's a badge of honor. That people "in the know" respect me for it. That other people are comfortable bringing it up. I end the anecdote with a story with something that makes me unique, either being on TV or having strangers come up to me and ask about it. I create the reality for the woman.
You can do the same thing with stuff about yourself that's a bit strange. You can turn anything around with the right story, make any seemingly negative thing into a positive, and make something that was unattractive into something that is. It's all about your attitude and the stories you tell.
Picture basics:
You need a variety of different shots on your profile. On most sites you can post at least 12 pictures. Using what I'm going to show you here, you'll need at least six.
These are the minimum I suggest:
A basic head shot
You in another country or traveling to somewhere notable in the US.
You in any kind of leadership position
A full body shot
In a social setting having fun with friends
You doing something unique
I've heard some people say that you shouldn't put up a real picture, but instead an illustration or some artistic rendition of yourself made with Photoshop filters. In the experiments I did, this cut my responses to almost one third compared to when I used a real picture. It wasn't as bad as using no picture at all, but still not the best bet.
Another thing that actually works in terms of generating initial responses is to have a picture where you can't necessarily see your face, but that shows you doing something interesting. And, believe it or not, a picture that doesn't show your face at all will get just as many responses as one that does, as long as the picture is unusual, intriguing or mysterious. The problem with this is that most sites (but not all) require your main picture to be a face shot.
The advantage to putting up one of these "fake" pictures is that it will give anyone responding to you an immediate talking point. Every single one of the emails we got either asked us for a real picture or commented on the illustration. I'm not sure if that's all that significant though, because when we put up real pictures, almost everyone asked us about one or more of those too.
I'll go over the six points one-by-one in future articles, until thenstart snapping pics and let's get on the road to success!
JT
For more tips, check out my site at www.online-dating-mastery.com
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