Once you have perfected your profile on an online dating site, you should start getting messages or emails from other people. The quality of the people who respond will reflect the quality of your profile. If you are not getting anyone interesting messaging you that means that your profile or your photo is not up to standard yet. You should not have to send the first message to anyone, that is the job of your profile.

As you get messages from people, you obviously should reply. Not replying is rude and inconsiderate. What you would not normally think about when replying to a message is the style of your reply. Messages can have many styles and people prefer different styles. It is your job to select the right style that the recipient will like. Selecting the correct style makes the recipient feel that you have connected with them.

Although the list of message styles is limitless, there are some major features that you really should think about. These are:

• Topic

• Funny or Serious

• Informative

• Length

Topic

The first thing that you need to think about when writing a message is the topic. The topic is not just something that you can talk about. It needs to be able to spawn a great conversation and show them that you both have something in common. A message about something that they are not interested in will just get ignored.

Finding ideas for topics is easy. There are 4 places that come to mind:

1. Things they mention on their profile

2. About them

3. About you

4. Current events

Out of these 4, I would recommend that you start by talking about something on their profile first.

Funny or Serious

The next thing that you need to decide is how funny or serious your message will be. You may think that everyone would love a funny message but this is not the case. Take a career driven woman for example. You will find that some career-focused women may like your funny messages but stop responding after a while. If you try to be too funny, she will assume that you can not be serious at all. That is not a good thing.

Informative

Informative messages are similar to the lay-off between funny and serious. On one hand you want to appear knowledgeable and intelligent, but on the other hand you do not want to sound like you are a geek that has trouble with social interaction.

Length

Some people can not read long messages as they have trouble concentrating or do not have the time. Others really like to get into reading a message and like them to last as long as possible. You need to decide what the other person would like. Once you have received an email from them, try to respond with a message that has roughly the same number of paragraphs.