Advice for Men on Using Personal Ads to Meet Women

Excerpt from the Publication, Effective Personal Ads - How to Write Personal Ads or Respond to Personal Ads

We've all heard horror stories about personal ads. Lonely women who placed personal ads and were ripped off (or worse) by smooth-talking con artists. Perhaps the woman who responded to man's personal ad and developed a Fatal Attraction-type obsession about him. It can and does happen. You might meet one of those types of people through the personal ads...but the odds are at least as good that you'll meet someone like that in a bar, at school or at church.

Some of are old enough to remember when the only personal ad we had ever heard about were in The Berkeley Barb or The Village Voice and were placed for the purpose of meeting people with, well, unusual "hobbies." Personal ads have come a long way. You can still read an ad from a professional man who has tattoos, rides a Harley motorcycle and wants to meet an Asian transsexual who likes classical music, romantic dinners and long sensual walks along the beach. For God's sake, how else are two people like that going to meet except through a personal ad? You can also read an ad from a man with a good education who has a heart of gold but doesn't meet many women because he's a very busy urologist.

Do some people lie about themselves in their ads or when they respond to an ad? Of course they do. The people who write and respond to personal ads are a cross-section of the general population. No better, no worse. My experience, and the experience of many people that I've talked to, is that you meet the good, the bad, the ugly, the honest and the dishonest through the personal ads.

I'm here to give you some ideas about how you can write an ad or pick out ads to respond to and increase your chances of meeting the good and minimize your chances that you'll meet the bad or the ugly. Unfortunately, I can't guarantee that even if you take my advice you'll meet the perfect person for you.

I don't have any gimmicks, magic words or canned phrases for you to use that will make people respond to your ad or like your response to their ad. There are none that I know of - except for those men who advertise that they're filthy rich and generous, especially in their headline, always seem to get a lot of responses from women. Women who say that they're beautiful and sexy always get a lot of responses from men. You didn't need me to help you figure that out. You probably rejected taking one of those approaches because either (a) it isn't true, or (b) if it is true, you don't want to rely on such shallow attributes, or (c) you don't want to attract the types of people that would respond to such shallow attributes.

Of course you can always just keep doing whatever you've been doing to meet people. You women can keep hoping that the next time your friends set you up with a man that they've known for a couple of weeks that he has a job and that his divorce really is final. You men can stand around looking puzzled by the yams and sweet potatoes in the vegetable section at the supermarket and hope that a beautiful woman comes over and offers to explain the difference between them to you. If you're really lucky, she might offer to go over to your place and cook them for you. Right. That will happen when donkeys levitate.

This article is an excerpt from our publication, "Effective Personal Ads - How to Write Personal Ads or Respond to Personal Ads."

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