I was amazed when I had men and, occasionally, women calling me to complain when they'd reached the MatchNet "limit" of thirty contacts in twenty-four hours. Invariably they were furious that they were being cut off when they'd paid for the service. I said the same thing to all of them: "Why don't you wait for some of the thirty people to write back before you write any more emails?" Believe it or not, many never considered that. These folks got so caught up into writing to as many people as possible (I call that initial enthusiasm the "kid in the candy store" syndrome) that they never stopped to consider the consequences of doing so-namely that the vast majority would not write back and that, within a week or two, they would exhaust their resources on the website.
That means a paid subscription to a service on which you've now burned through all of your potential leads, and you must now wait for the stock to replenish itself. Lots of people take this approach of signing up, writing to everyone, failing miserably, and then signing up again three months later-only to use the same paper-the-town-with-your-resume technique. When I admonish clients for using this approach, about half the time, they fervently defend their behavior. Of course, if what they were doing was working, they wouldn't be calling me to begin with, but that's not the point. At this juncture, instead of arguing that my way is better, I usually trot out Ben Franklin's aforementioned definition of insanity and hope that they don't take me too literally.
I am obliged to note that you will never actually use up all of the members of a site. Internet dating is so big that there will continually be more and more people getting online in search of love. This includes first-timers, divorcees, recently broken-up couples, daters who gave up on the Internet before but are coming around again. Keep in mind that if you've written to everyone already, the only people available to you are those who have just gotten on the site and there's stiff competition when writing to new members. Better be prepared to monitor your favorites list and write to people multiple times if you want to get noticed. Personally, that's far too much work for me.
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