Without a doubt online dating has become one of the most effective means of finding friends and lovers for many around the world. One reason, mainly due to the way most online datingmatchmaking service sites are set up, is because a person can view the profiles of several others together, at his or her leisure. Although there are advantages to this type of mate searching - and those are mostly for the searcher - there are also several disadvantages - and the biggest is against those being sought.

If you have your profile on one or more datingmatchmaking sites, you have serious competition! Your profile is one among many, and unless you have something that makes you uniquely different, and thus cause you to stand out from the rest, you could be easily overlooked. Of course, the more sites you have joined, the greater your odds of success finding that special someone. But you should remember, whoever that special someone is, he or she must still wade though hundreds - possibly thousands - of others to find you. Only the most vain (or exceptionally attractive) would believe that their special someone won't pause and at least glance at the profiles of a few others while trekking toward them, especially if there are photos to look at. Unfortunately, quite a few have lost quite a number of special someones like this.

(A note to women: men are EXCEEDINGLY visual when it comes to checking out women, and whether you want to believe it or not and regardless of what the "experts" say, what a man sees comes before anything else. It doesn't matter how intelligent, thoughtful, cheerful, fun-loving, brave, clean or reverent you may be, if you are a female seeking a male and you don't include at least one decent photo of yourself with your profile, you're almost guaranteeing yourself to be overlooked! Especially if you are buried within the company of many other females WHO HAVE included their pictures.)

So, the question is: is there a way to make yourself stand out, even if there is very little to nothing about you that is noteworthy?

Yes. Have your own personal web site.

No - I don't mean a page on MySpace, or a video on YouTube. Doing that still places you amongst competition! Furthermore, you're extremely limited to what you can do.

What I'm talking about is a separate, private site that you can send potential mates to view without the interference of others that are also vying for your visitor's attention.

There are plenty of advantages to this. First there is the domain name. Having your own domain (especially if it is a your name dot com-like domain name - i.e. www.marysmith.com) means you are Internet savvy and can swing with the big boys. An added advantage is that it is yours to keep forever, as long as you keep it renewed. Look at it like this: if your name was Angelina Jolie Jackson or Tom Cruise Harris and you where able to snap up Angelinajolie.com or Tomcruise.com before they (or a crazy fan) did, how popular do you think your site would be? And there is nothing the celebrities with these names - or their lawyers - can do about it.

Even if your name is as common as Mary Smith or Joe Jones, you still have an advantage over all the other Mary Smiths and Joe Joneses out there in the world.

The second advantage is that with your own site, you have complete freedom of expression. Even someone with no or limited HTML experience (HTML is the language used to create web pages) can create an attractive site. All you would need is the right tools. I won't go into details about that here, but just know this: if you really want to do it, you can!

The added benefit of having your own site is the space you'd have to present yourself in the greatest light. Instead of being tied down to one page of a few paragraphs about yourself (generally limited to height, weight, age, hobbies, and the type of person you're looking for), you can really give a full picture of your personality, interests, aspirations, goals, etc. Instead of one or two simple pictures, you can place tons of family, vacation, work or even sexy photos of yourself. Depending on how much space your hosting provider gives you, you could have page after page of profile and photos, giving a potential mate the greatest overall depiction of the person you really are.

It should be said that one of the most popular and effective forms of personal site ownership are blogs. Although blogs limit creative site design somewhat, presenting oneself with possibly with an online journal in this manner may be the way to go.

As far as hosting providers go, there are free hosts and paid hosts. Free hosts, as the name implies, gives you web space for free. Of course, there is a catch. Most free hosts offer very, very limited space and bandwidth, and they place their own advertisements upon your pages. For some, this may be all right.

Paid hosts, as you probably figured out, removes the advertising catch and gives more space and bandwidth - in most cases more than the average person needs for a personal site. Some add other incentives to sign up with them, such as free domain registering and scripts for a guestbook and other add-ons.

Please don't misunderstand. I'm not suggesting that you should remove yourself from the dating/matchmaking sites. They're still an effective way to let yourself be known to the world of mate seekers. In the case of having your own web site, all you would need to do is place a link inside your profile to your site and a visitor - maybe that special someone you've been waiting for - would have access to the complete you!

In any dating situation, the "selling" of oneself is an essential part of the game. It does not matter if it is at a bar, on the street, in a café or restaurant, or online, the game is played the same. People must put their best foot forward and do it quickly, confidently and convincingly.

There is much more I could say about this, but I think you get the picture. Having your own site is a great way to enlarge and extend your online dating efforts. Give it a try.