5 Great Tips for Creating Your Online Dating Handle

You've decided to join millions of other singles who are signed up for online dating.  You are over spending your time in fern bars, tired of the nightclub scene, speed dating was a bust and you've exhausted all of your friends' and family's candidates for blind dating.  Or maybe you just moved into a new area and you are too busy with work to meet new people. For whatever the reason, you are ready to make the move into cyber dating, but the competition can be intense.  One way to stand out from the crowd is your internet dating screen name, or handle.  Here are five tips to help you distinguish yourself from the masses.

1)  Look at others’ screen names and notice the ones that stand out from the rest.  Are they clever, unique or funny?  What is it about those particular handles that caught your eye?  It is okay to use ideas of other people and make them applicable to your situation. Just make sure not to lift their entire handle, this is just about getting several useful ideas.

2)  Have the handle say something about who you are or your interests.  If you are a doctor, a librarian, police officer, pilot, designer, actor or any other profession that you feel defines who you are, find a way to incorporate it into your screen name.  The same goes for interests.  If you are an avid golfer, surfer, reader, writer, biker,  hiker, dancer, camper or foodie, you may include that in your handle.

3)  Keep your handle short, catchy, easy to remember and easy to type.  Long, complicated screen names can easily be partially forgotten, transposed or misspelled.  You can miss the love of your life because they accidentally entered a variation of your handle.

4)  Your online handle should reflect your gender.  You don't have to use your real name if you prefer to remain anonymous for the sake of safety, just use your middle name or a nickname.

5)  Make sure your internet dating handle is easy to read and understand.  Go back to the rules of basic English and use capital letters for your online screen name. Communicating on the internet has relaxed our writing style and given us a whole new set of rules for written interaction, which is fine.  This is about clarity and the ability of potential daters to decipher and understand your dating handle.  For example,  DancingQueenNY is much easier to read and understand than dancingqueenny, which some may read incorrectly as dancing queeny.  And by the way, Dancing QueenNY is a good handle because it is short, memorable and lets you know that this is a woman from New York who loves to dance and may be a fan of Abba.  Now anyone who contacts her not only knows some things about her, they also have several topics of conversation from which to choose when first communicating with her. If she is an Abba fan, her handle is also clever.  AnyaLoves2Read is another good online dating screen name.  Using her middle name keeps her a bit more anonymous and lets you know her gender, while replacing to with 2 in Loves2Read makes it snappy and easier to read and remember.  Now you know she's a literary woman, and any potential dates who share that interest will have plenty of great conversation about books they both may have read.