You should never answer below “Somewhat Important”, and even then you should use that sparingly and only with binary answers

The third is to answer carefully. You want to pick questions that will give you the most amount of compatibility points with your match, and to weight them appropriately. “Mandatory” gives a weight of 250 points to a matching answer while “Very Important” gives you 50 and “A Little Important” only gives you 1 .

The fourth is to pick the right questions. You want to start doing your research on which questions matter to the women you’re interested in. McKinlay found the 500 most popular questions through a combination of Python scripting and creating bogus profiles, which frankly isn’t an option for most of us. However, OKCupid actually gives you that information, if you know how to look for it. You can actually compare your answers with your prospective matches by looking at the “The Two of Us” tab and choosing the “Questions She Cares About” option. These will tell you which questions your match weighted the most heavily. By answering several from each of your most compatible matches, you will develop a strong cluster of questions that will help tweak your match percentages. Again, I stress that it’s vitally important to honest answer honesty. There’s no benefit to be had by trying to guess the “right” answer rather than the one that actually matters to you. If the question doesn’t matter, then just skip it. It’s better to not risk losing the compatibility points.

Do Your Due Diligence

The match percentages are only the first step. Those make you more visible. It’s your profile that needs to intrigue them. If your profile doesn’t let them know that you’re exactly the person that they’ve been looking for all this time, then they’re never going to want to message you, never mind actually go out on a date.

One of the keys to a good profile is to make sure you have one that’s getting the right kind of attention. You want one that prompts people to respond and shows that you have plenty of commonalities. Except… you’re not going to hit this magic ratio on the first try. Or on the second. Or even the third. There will always little things you can do that maximize your returns. You should be revising your profile regularly; there is always room for improvement, especially when it comes to to making sure that other people like what they see. And that means doing your research.

Both Webb and McKinlay went out of their way to research both the people they were interested in but also their competition in order to stand out. McKinlay would data-mine his top matches to find what they were interested in and responded to and made sure to adjust his profile accordingly; http://besthookupwebsites.org/misstravel-review when teaching proved to be of great interest to the women he was interested in, he made a point to emphasize his job in academia. Webb created male profiles in order to figure out how to fine-tune her photo choices; as it turned out, the most popular women who were interested in the same sort of men she was had photos very different from the ones that she was using.

Remember, you’re not spear-fishing for specific women; you’re looking for trends of interests that occur with greater frequency amongst the women you’re interested in. Don’t forget: you’re marketing yourself to women in general. The more appealing a product you can put out there, the better your response rate will be.

Get Noticed

One of the things that was notable about McKinlay’s results: he was getting more cold-emails from women messaging him first than he was sending out. He made a point of getting women’s attention by visiting their profiles – as many as possible in fact. He wrote a Python script to systematically visit every profile within his parameters that had a high match percentage, sorted by age; it would start at the oldest potential matches and work it’s way through all of them at 41 years old before resetting and then going through everyone who was 40 years old. As a result: he was showing up in the visitor logs of hundreds to thousands of women. Out of those, a percentage would be intrigued enough to click through and visit his profile – which at this point had been carefully optimized and incredibly intriguing. As a result: women would start to send him messages, giving him a better rate of return of interest than he was getting by cold-contacting women.