There's no more sure way to get someone to lose interest when you're trying to hook up online than to bore them. And boring a women who is being inundated with other boring emails, profiles, and IMs becomes all too easy to do.

Passive language kills conversations. Words like "is" "are" and "have" don't propel you forward, and don't embed her fantasy image about you into her mind.

Here's what I mean.

If you love your dog, do you write "

"I love dogs"

You probably do, but I hope you don't any more.

Instead, paint a picture of you relating to your dog that she can feel, see, enjoy and project herself into.

"I like to spend Sunday mornings wrestling
in the sand with my black lab. Misty is hilarious
- running up to say hi to everybody.
You can practically see her laughing the whole
time, then we collapse and peacefully soak in the sun."

That's a happy picture - vivid with action. I don't merely HAVE a dog. Rather the reader sees and imagines me wrestling, and laughing, and collapsing with my little furry pal. What a playful guy. And there's room for her in the picture - I made sure there's room for her to see herself lying down next to me at the end.

Now, this is a picture created with words, and it's vitally important that you create images like this that come alive for anyone who reads your profile.

In this age of BLINK! instant decision making, what's one of the worst mistakes guys make when creating their online profile?

It's their photographs.

Did you see the first episode of Hooking Up? It's a show about online dating on ABC that was aired on Thursday nights last summer.

Well, in this first episode, a guy described himself as "Fabio, but thinner", in his 30's.

When he showed up, he was about as far from Fabio as possible. First, his picture was 15 years old. Turns out he was actually a 47-year old lanky hippie who confessed to his date "If I had shown you a current photo, you may not have ever agreed to meet me."

A few minutes into the date, she called on her cell phone and arranged for a friend to call the restaurant where they were meeting about an "emergency".

End of date.

My point is this. . . your photo -- it's accuracy and it's quality - have to be excellent.

David Ogilvy is one of the greatest advertising geniuses of all time.

"Did it make me gasp when I first saw it?" was his first litmus test for a new advertising campaign.

Does YOUR profile make women gasp when they see it? Your photo? Does your username?

Most guys have the same boring pictures in their profile that everyone else has.

In a Tux.
By their car.
Posing with a wine or beer glass.
With a former girlfriend (D'oh!)

You, too?

Well, it's time you had a profile and a photo that makes someone gasp. That way, there's a much greater chance of getting her to gasp the first time you meet.

Grant Adams is author of the wildly effective
"Net2Bed System Manual: How to Stand Out Online So That By The
Time You Meet, She's Already Yours"