... in response to addresses, posted by chevy on Jul 31, 2002I suspect you would probably have a better response rate with the newer ads, but I do know that just as few of the men who start this succeed in marrying, the women also do not find it easy. Around 6% of the ladies at our site end up finding someone in the approximately two years their ad runs. It's probably a higher rate at the sites with higher sales though.
I think the important thing to do when corresponding is to write to lots of women. In order to get a decent price on addresses, you should buy in volumne. The overwhelming majority of men I deal with buy one or two address (the one or two hottest on the site). That's definitely not the way to go if you want to succeed.
TLC sells a catalog of several hundred women's addresses quarterly that can lower your cost. Of course, you will not be interested in them all and a web site that provides good quantity discounts will let you select only those you're interested in so the large catalog may not be as economical as it seems at first glance considereing that you're only going to write to a subset of the ladies.
AFA is probably the second biggest address seller behind TLC (who also run tours) and I believe you can get good quantity discounts through them. SOTB is most likely the third biggest.
Whatever you do, do it in volumne. I wrote to 30-40 women from each TLC catalog when I was searching. I ended up corresponding with a handful who responded. I would strongly advise setting a time line to visit up front and telling the ladies about it. The percentage of men who write and then actually travel to meet anybody is pretty small and after wasting months with a guy who's never going to visit, some ladies will be hesitant to waste the time again with someone who's never going to travel. I'd tell them up front that you plan on visiting their city and give them a month (perhaps 3-4 months out) in which you plan on doing it.
One other thing a site that lets you select from the women provides is the ability to limit the ladies to a single city or country. With the TLC catalog, you have women from all over Latin America and unless you want to make a trip in which you travel through several countries and cities, you'll want to keep the ladies to a managable area.
