How to create the best online dating headlines–and one you can use today to immediately improve your profile

The most glaring place people will take advantage of DODs (desperate online daters) is in the headline. In order to make a good one, you have to absolutely forget everything you’ve ever read or heard about the subject. It’s all a crock of bull.

Besides your profile pictures, your online dating headlines are the first thing a girls is going to pay any attention to. It doesn’t have to be very good…it just can’t be BAD. I know, it doesn’t make much sense to put it that way (and it spits in the face of common dating advice) but the fact is that your headline really doesn’t do as much as you’d think it would.

The thing is, your dating headline isn’t going to get women interested in you; it just can’t be SO bad that it keeps them from actually reading your profile. There’s a key element here that works both on and off line—that women don’t always know what they want. But they sure know what they DON’T want.

Women dating online are always looking for any reason NOT to be interested in you. You can’t give them any excuses to zip right past your profile and go on to the next guy. So keep the headline simple.

We did a tremendous amount of testing for the various types of headlines you can use. When we tried catchy, cute, popular, funny or romantic headlines our response rate dropped significantly. And that means all the information we’d ever read on headlines was wrong.

Your pictures are what are going to get women to look into your profile further, and a bad headline can prevent this. Like I’ve been saying…keep your headline simple.

But wait, they say you’re supposed to be different, right?

Yes, you want to separate yourself from the crowd. And yes, it is possible to do that in your headline—but it’s just too risky to do it this early in the process. You WILL show your uniqueness, just not yet. You want to sink your hooks in a bit first.

I want to share a couple of dating headlines that should work according to the “experts”. These are headlines where you tell her to prove her worth. Like, “Yeah, you’re beautiful, but what else do you have going for you?” Or, “What do you have to offer?” The problem is, these are written by wannabe players and totally misapply the fundamental rules of attraction.

You do need to create attraction and make her qualify herself to you, but that comes after she’s interested in you. If you don’t wait until that point, you’re going to come across as rude and arrogant. There isn’t any reason for her to qualify herself at this point, so it’s not effective to make her try. It’s just going to blow up in your face. That’s the problem with most of the advice out there—it misapplies those basic principles.

You have to lay the groundwork first, have a pretty ordinary headline, build attraction in your profile and then get her to qualify herself in her response to you. Now she might do that, or she might not; but either way it’s a win because you’ve shown that you are selective and expect a lot out of the women you date.

There are other ideas, like using quotes in your headlines (from movies, TV shows, famous people), but these have the unintended effect of weeding out people who may otherwise want to get to know you but didn’t get the reference. They end up clicking right past you.

Using a headline to attract someone with similar interests, such as “Triathlete looking for a training partner”, are a little better than the examples above, but they still serve to weed out people who might be interested in YOU, but not necessarily training for triathlons.

The bottom line is that you want to keep your headline simple and ordinary. Want to know the best one we tested??

“Are you there?”

Hmmm…seems too easy, doesn’t it? But that’s the point of the headline. It doesn’t have to be something super witty or uber-intelligent, it just has to NOT keep women from reading further into your profile.

I break down the whole headline debate in much more detail in my book “Magnetic Profiles”, so if you’d like a more in-depth look at it, as well as some great headlines to use, check it out.

For information about the next step in the process, check out this post on profile writing.