Personal Ad Posting Tips

In this second personal-ad advice piece are some practical tips that may save you some time and trouble when posting on-line personals.

Before you start posting ads on various websites, set up a separate disposable email address on an anonymous free service, such as Yahoo's, that you wouldn't mind losing at some future date. Use that email address in your ads and with the sites that require you to register before posting an ad. Then, if you decide you don't want to respond to ads anymore, you can simply delete this single email address. In addition, the address will inevitably get clogged with spam, not just from the websites you register with and the companies they sell your email address too, but also from independent "harvester" programs which collect any email addresses posted in html on public or even semi-private web pages.

Many pay sites allow you to post and to browse ads for free, but they charge for responding to an ad. When publishing an ad on these sites, take care to write as interesting an ad as you can to encourage others to pay the price of responding to it. Although women are in such demand on those sites, that even the most carefully written ad won't stop every inappropriate and incompatible guy in the place from trying to meet you anyway.

If you decide to post to a lot of Web sites, save time and repetition by preparing the text of your ad off line in an ASCII word processor, such as Windows Notepad. Most personals sites provide an on-line form or an email window into which you can paste your ad text. You will need a short version of your ad: at most a couple of sentences, and a longer versions. Sites vary in the amount of ad-space they give you. Some submissive women we know have long personal ads on free websites they build. The much shorter ad they post on the personals site points the reader to their webpage which has more details about them. Making such websites is pretty easy today: the site-building software does all the coding and hard stuff.

When on a personal ads Web page on which there are a large number of unsorted ads on one page, you can, with some browsers, use a Find command to search for certain keywords on the page. For instance, in Netscape, choose the Find command off the Edit menu, and enter a word like "dom," "dominant," or "BDSM" to search for any occurrences of that term in the ads. Searching in this way may turn up some relevant ads quickly, but remember that everyone uses different words to describe their kinky interests, and thus, your keyword searches may miss some interesting ads.

Many Web personals sites require you to supply extensive personal information about yourself to their database before you can submit an ad. This process is called REGISTERING. Unless you plan to lie blatantly on these registration forms (which might not be a bad idea), ask yourself the following question: "Do I want the owners of this Web site to know exactly who I am and perhaps my phone number and where I live, as well as the contents of my kinky ad?" Think about it carefully: this information about you may be in their possession for years after you post your ad, and it could be sold or given to individuals or organizations whom you would not want to have this data about you.

The one piece of real information you will have to provide a personal-ads site when you register with them is a valid email address that you have access to. US spam laws now require such sites to "verify" by email that you volunteered to be a member. You do so by clicking a link that comes in the email that they send.

Some Web personals sites seek to protect the ad posters by giving you an anonymous box number to reply to by email. You often type your reply into an online form and the service then forwards your reply to the proper email address. While this does insure that undesirable individuals do not get the ad poster's email address, it also means that your reply to an ad may be read by the individuals that run the service. To prevent you privacy from being compromised, do not post any detailed personal information about yourself that you wouldn't want a stranger or an organization having in this initial reply, but tell your respondent that if they write you back directly, you will be happy to provide additional details. Then set up a way to privately email with someone who interests you outside the ad site's system. The less information some anonymous runner of a website has about you, the safer you are.

Web personals sites that cater to conventionally sexed people and that also organize their ads geographically (for instance, by state) are much more time-consuming to browse than sites that use some other organizational scheme, because to find the relatively scarce kinky ads, you must search every single state, region, or country, one by one. These geographically-organized sites may be useful, however, if you can't travel and only wish to meet people from a certain part of the world. Keep in mind, however, that genuine dominants are rare, and you may have to search outside your local area to find the person who is best for you.

Read the ads from dominant men or women before you post your own ad. Many of the people who post an ad to a particular site are going to be reading that site regularly. If such a person responds to you, you will already know a little about him or her from reading his or her ad, and you will be able to tell if the response you got is consistent with what the person is claiming to want in the ad. Also, spend at least a couple of months getting to know this person via email. You can't get a realistic feel for a person, no matter how great he or she may initially seem to you, from just a couple of message exchanges or hot chats or phone calls. Over time, people reveal more of themselves, and you will become increasingly sure about whether this person is right for you or not.

A good number of "dominants" have taken to joining personal-ad sites and then posting little or no information about themselves in their profiles. These guys are out to troll, or they've got something to hide (perhaps the inability to write an ad). If someone like that contacts you, be extra suspicious and careful. If a genuine dominant is looking for a submissive in such a place, the last thing he's going to do is hide behind an empty profile. He'll want potential partners to know as much about him as possible so that they can see if he is what they are looking for.

Take the same care in responding to personnel ads or to others attracted by your ad as you would with any other method of contacting strangers whom you can't yet trust. Don't feel badly about taking it slow; don't let anyone rush you into revealing personal or identifying information about yourself until you feel completely comfortable trusting them with this information. Memorize the following: YOU ARE NOT A BAD SUBMISSIVE IF YOU REFUSE TO OBEY A COMPLETE STRANGER. No one has the right to make you obey except for your dominant. And no person is your dominant just because they read your ad and then proclaim it to be so. They have to be accepted by you as being worthy of owning you or of controlling you first. If they won't wait for that acceptance but try to force it on you, they are either stupid and inexperienced or trying to manipulate you.

It can be very tempting to post your photo on the personals sites which allow that. As you probably know, ads from women with photos typically get more responses than ads that do not have photos. But once again, before you post, consider your security and privacy. If you post to one of the huge ad sites, like Friendfinder or Alt.com, you never know who is going to find your ad and see your photo. It could be your boss, your husband, your grown children, or any number of people you wouldn't want knowing about your kinky interests. Ideally, save the photos for people who've corresponded with you many times and whom you've judged as trustworthy. While you may not get as many responses to your ad as the women with photos, the quality of the responses is going to be a little bit higher.

You're going to get a lot of inappropriate and even really terrible responses to your ads. The best thing to do with such replies is to throw them away without answering, no matter how tempting it might be to respond. Why write back someone who disrespects you so much that he didn't bother to read your ad in the first place or even if he did, completely ignored what you were asking for. You have no obligation to answer jerks, there is no reason under the sun to be "polite," to them. Also, replying "thanks but no thanks" to someone who is completely inappropriate to begin with just encourages them to write you back to either try to talk you out of your rejection of them or to slam you with abuse. Get enough of these abusive responses and you'll start to get really discouraged and depressed over something that should be exciting and fun. There are thousands of bitter, viscous men out there who are just looking for excuses to vent their frustration and anger at a woman. That's what most of the "online" social game is about: venting frustrations and hatred that you do not dare express in real life with real people, which is just one of the reasons why we encourage serious submissive women to STAY AWAY from all online forums, chat rooms, and other groupings. Don't volunteer to be the victim of these asshats. Don't answer back unless you are seriously interested in someone or see some possibilities to be explored. Don't let them provoke you, don't play their game, don't get sucked into a really unpleasant and useless correspondence with an attention hog. You're going to run into enough shitheads as it is in the guys who get by your initial filters and then turn out to be liars. Why invite even more of these ugly encounters with useless responses?

One popular bdsm ad site allows you to post a journal or comments about your search. Probably may more sites do as well. The above advice about not getting involved applies even more strongly in this situation. Do not fall into the trap of bitching about the terrible people on the system in your journal or even on the message boards they provide. You're not there to win popularity contests, to assassinate others' reputations, or to play other useless social games. You're there to find a master. Don't accidentally turn the rare real dominant off who may be reading the ads off by acting like a petty gossip or harridan, even if everybody else seems to be doing so.

Finally, steer clear of any "dominants," who, no matter how good their personal ad sounds, use their journals or the site's public areas to whine and complain about the behavior of others. These men, no matter how justified they sound, are so emotionally unresiliant that they let a stupid website and the people on it get to them. How in the world are the going to control you if they can't even control their responses to the common and very relatively small harassments that everybody experiences when posting and replying to personals?

What's Next: Features of Good Responses to Your Personal Ads

The next article lists some things to look for in the responses that you get from dominants. These things are indicators of someone who might actually be dominant and who might also be worth getting to know a bit better.