Online dating doesn’t have to be as scary as it seems. Keep these things in mind before you send a message to a woman you’re interested in if you want success!

Your message box is where you’ll be spending most of your time in a dating site because once your profile is set up, all you’re going to be doing is searching for women, e-mailing them and replying to women’s emails.

A lot of guys can’t bridge the gap between talking and writing letters. They try to do things like they do in real life, but unfortunately that doesn’t translate well to the Internet. As a result, they don’t get replies from women and they quit.

Here’s how I was when I started:

I would read these women’s profiles and I thought that every e-mail I would send out was really unique and funny and interesting and everything that I thought she was looking for based on reading her profile. I would spend 15 to 20 minutes on each e-mail and I would send out dozens of these and dozens more.

I would spend hours and hours sending out e-mails thinking I’m going to get a ton of response. Unfortunately, no e-mails came. If you’ve ever been on a dating site and sent off e-mails, this has probably happened to you. It doesn’t take a genius to realize that when you don’t get a response to your e-mail it’s a long way from getting a date and further away than that from having sex with a woman.

Don’t quit. I didn’t, and the patience paid off.

1. Copy The Best

I didn’t know what kind of e-mails I should write that women would respond to. What happened was I would write these long e-mails that would take 15 minutes to write. It would contain all these great things about her online dating profile that I really liked, and what things we have in common. The problem was I would never hear back from these women.

Let’s say you have an account in one of the sites and you got several e-mails coming in from guys who were interested in this woman. You can shut the profile off after a day or two and read through everything that the account received.

Here’s what I do. I would look at the e-mails, take the best ones, tweak them for myself and then send them out. I call this system “Copy the Best,” for obvious reasons. One thing that’s great about this technique is you know what your competition is doing, how they land dates, and how they write good emails.

Of course, it wouldn’t do to just copy. Inject your personality in these emails. It’s the same as writing your own, but now you have some good “email templates” you can use.

2. Watch Your Subject Line

Your subject line is important, obviously, because if you don’t want your mail buried in those 30 to 100 e-mails she has received that day. If you’ve spent a lot of time creating your email, you don’t want it deleted or thrown in an archive unopened. Your subject line plays a crucial role when sending a message to a girl who doesn’t know you yet.

Here are some suggestions on how to write a subject line that gets her curious enough to open your mail:

• No generic greetings. Whatever you do, never put a generic greeting like “hello” or “hi” on the subject line. What I’ve discovered is that 80% to 90% of the time men send out emails that have “Hi!” or “Hello” as subject lines. To a woman, one message that has this as a subject is like all the rest of the emails she received the past week.
• Use a cliffhanger. You could say something like, “Hey, I read your profile but….” which will instantly get her thinking “but what?” The element of doubt at the end of the subject line will get her clicking to find out what you mean with “but.”
• Use subjects that the dating site sends you. You’re going to notice that every dating site that you sign up to will have their own e-mails they send you. You know what these are – “you have mail,” or “your newest match.” One of my favorite subject lines is, “This member might be interested in you…” That subject line right there is one of the best ever, especially if you get a woman who checks you out or winks at you.
• Include her name. Look at her profile and figure out if she’s using her first name or an alias. If she uses her name in the profile, you can definitely use that in the subject line.
• Use “Re:” What this does is creates curiosity like they might have already e-mailed or spoken to you. Remember, because they’re getting e-mailed so many times per day, they might not even remember if they did or didn’t.
• If she sent you a wink and you want to e-mail her back, you can use a subject line that says “this member is also interested in you.” Or, you can say “thanks for the wink. I’m looking forward to your e-mail.”

3. Take Note of Patterns

What you do next is set up different two different e-mails, maybe you have one of your own, maybe you have an idea for something you think is going to work. So take two of them and start sending out mail to the different women.

Divide it up. If you send out 20 emails, send 10 from one address and 10 from the other.

What you’ll discover is one of these is going to get more responses than the other. Once you have the “winner” (basically the email address that gets more replies), start carpet bombing the whole site because then you have an e-mail that produces great results.

There’s another thing that happens when you use only one email. You’re going to burn through your list of “possible dates” (meaning, these girls live nearby and there’s a big chance that you can meet ASAP) if you send mail from only one address. This means if the girl did not reply, or she deleted your first mail, you’re not going to get a chance to e-mail again.

So, use separate emails and test them out.

4. The Best Day To Send Emails

If there’s a “good time to call,” there’s also a “good time to send emails.” I kept track of the emails that got the best responses, and guess what? There are three days in a week that worked better for sending out e-mails. Those three days are Friday, Saturday and Sunday.

Why Friday, Saturday and Sunday?

Friday in the late afternoon, anywhere from 2:00 to 5:00 pm is an ideal window for you to send out your e-mails. This day, for a lot of people, is just a slack. Maybe some industries aren’t that busy and maybe some people just slack off in the later part of the day. On this day, a lot of women will be on the Internet checking their emails, just basically waiting until they get out of there so they can go home.

Send out your mail on a Saturday morning from about 10:00 am to 1:00 pm.

These girls go out on Friday night and they’re looking to meet somebody but most of the time, they don’t. The guys they want to meet don’t go up and approach them. If they do, it’s using some corny pick-up line that just doesn’t work. The frustrated women wake up on a Saturday and check their e-mails like normal people do on a Saturday morning and poof! There’s your e-mail.

For the same reason, Sunday morning to mid-afternoon from 10:00 am to 2:00 pm is ideal for sending out emails. Let’s suppose these ladies went out on Saturday night and didn’t meet anyone. That’s two days in a row and you can bet they’re feeling a bit more frustrated. Finding your email at that point would be most welcome!