So, now you’ve got that profile online and you’re ready to roll. What? You were expecting to just sit there and wait for the men/ladies to deluge you with email? Sorry… online dating takes a little more work than that. As in offline dating, you’re going to have to get out there and mingle. Don’t worry, though, it’s easy as long as you follow some basic guidelines.

First of all, you’ll have to do some searching. Dating sites have search functions of varying capability, allowing you to whittle down potential matches by weeding out those that don’t fit your qualifications. Some sites only allow you to search by a few factors such as age and country, while other sites such as Yahoo Personals and Perfect Match get ultra-detailed and allow you to look for – as a ridiculously extreme example – women who knit.

Searching takes some time to do properly. You have to include enough factors to find someone close enough to what you want, but if you are too picky you may not get any matches at all. It’s best to focus on the things you find most important. Presumably, location is the most important thing, so finding a dating site that allows you to search by city (and not just country or state) is ideal.

Another option is to rely on the site's two-way matching feature to find you your perfect match. Almost all dating sites have matching capabilities, granted some are better than others, but in general they all work the same.

When creating a personal profile, the user is asked to provide details about themselves, and the person they want to find. The service then uses this information to search the database and find members that have entered similar information in their own profile. Depending on what dating service you use, the better the matching system, the better your results will be. Match.com offers tons of matching features, more than any other dating service online.