Free Dating
Finding a web site that offers free dating services is as simple as logging onto the Internet and typing it into Google or Yahoo. But like most things, most good services are not really free. Here is some advice about finding and using a free dating site that will meet all of your needs.
Most online dating web sites have a free offer to get you to sign up and try their service. These usually are for a limited time and start charging you a monthly fee unless you cancel before your free trial is up. The other trick that some sites uses is to let you sign up for free but only give you limited access unless you join as a paying member. For example, you may be able to look at and / or search all of the profiles, but you can’t get any of the contact information for other people until you start your paid subscription.
Some sites offer free membership for women while making the men pay and others let the women in free for an extended period of time before charging them as compared to the men. While I don’t know the specific numbers of men seeking relationships online compared to women, it seems to me like there are many more males than females. This makes me wonder why more sites don’t offer free service for women and just charge the men.
As I mentioned in the opening paragraph, to start your search for free dating sites, search in the main search engines. Make sure to investigate quite a few different web sites in order to find the one that will give you the best chance to find people who you might like to get to know better. Another thing you can do is start asking your friends if they have any sites that they use and like. One other thing you can do is search popular forums for recommendations for online dating sites, but be careful when you do this. Many forum posts are no more than lightly disguised advertisements. Before you believe everything you read when you find something in a forum, make sure the poster is telling you the truth instead of just shilling for a company.
Most of the free dating sites that are available are big general sites that accept anyone and everyone. They need to sign up as many people as possible so they can sell enough advertising to make money. While this is good in that you will have lots of possibilities to find a potential date, it does have a downside. You will have to sift through a lot of profiles to find potential matches. Many sites do have ways to organize and sort different profiles, but it can still be a bit difficult to find a few people that look like they would be good matches. For example, if your search returns just 10 people who are very closely aligned with what you like it will be much easier than is your search returns 200 possible matches.
The best way to get around this sadly does not usually go with a free site. It is much easier to find people interested in exactly what you are by joining one of the smaller sites that are targeted to a specific industry or interest group. For example, if you enjoy camping and the outdoors, you should search for a dating site that is targeted to camping and / or outdoors type activities. Most of these types of sites are not free though, so you will have to decide if the time it takes to sort through all the extra people is worth it or if you would be better off paying whatever the fee is.
Some of the things to look for when you do find a web site that offers free dating services are how easy it is to use the site, how well they protect your private information, how many members they have and how much advertising you have to put up with in order to use their service. Remember that all of the sites in this market are trying to make money and if they aren’t charging you for their service they are trying to monetize their site in some other way. This may be through selling advertising space but it may also be by selling email addresses and personal information to anyone who will pay for it. Many people set up a separate email account through one of the free email services like Yahoo, hotmail or gmail and only use it at dating sites. This is probably a good idea and something you should consider.
Finally you should be careful about how much personal information you share on a free dating site (or any dating site for that matter). Remember that there are people who use these types of web sites to find victims. Don’t give out your street address or where you work and don’t update your schedule too often. It is always better to be safe than sorry. And think of it this way; if you were a predator would you use a free site or a paid one? That is not to say there aren’t bad people on the pay sites, but most of them are cheap in addition to being slime balls.
This entry was posted on Thursday, November 18th, 2010 at 3:58 pm and is filed under Dating. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.