The popularity of social networks (like myspace and facebook, for instance) have made posting our personal pictures on the internet quite commonplace. Only five years ago, it was a different story altogether; people were more likely to use cartoon avatars than actual photographs. The widespread use of our own personal pictures has, likewise, changed the face of adult personals - where almost every personal ad is accompanied by a picture.

In this article I will give you ten tips for success when using adult picture personals. Since these are picture personals I will, naturally, concentrate on the photographic aspects of such sites.

A personals site is, of course, intended to help people find a romantic date or an adult hookup. Before we consider meeting anyone for the first time we like to know what they look like (hence the reason for using picture personals) but, more specifically, we want to see their face. A body, after all, is a body; either slim, athletic, chubby or obese. A face contains far more character and when we say we're attracted to someone, we usually refer to the face.

A good quality picture refers to both subject (you) and image-quality. Digital cameras are cheap nowadays so try choosing one capable of shooting images with at least two million megapixels. When posing for your picture, try to relax, adopt a natural expression, and smile. People always respond better when we smile, a proven fact any salesman will tell you (and, after all, in adult personals, we are selling ourselves).

When using an adult personals site, people will usually browse profiles, before finally selecting one they wish to inspect in detail. You should attempt to stand out from the crowd by being different and you have two chances to do so: your title or heading and your picture.

Choose an eye-catching or compelling heading. A bad example: "I Want A Date; a good title: "10 Reasons Why I'm The Hottest Guy On Here". The last heading compels the reader to find out why this guy thinks he's so much hotter than every other guy on the site.

Your picture could stand out by being tinted in an interesting color or have you holding up a sign, for instance. The signs are proven to work very well - people cannot make out the words in a tiny thumb picture and so are compelled to see the larger image out of pure curiosity.

When you initially take a picture with your digital camera the file size is usually huge; we're sometimes talking as much as two megabytes or more. If all your pictures are this huge, it will take a long time to download each one, which of course is boring, tedious for the viewer.

I highly recommend adobe photoshop. Open up each of your images and scale down the size to about 600 X 800 and then optimize them for the web. All you do is select an image in your copy of photoshop and then click file and choose "save for web". You will then be given an opportunity to select the type of file you wish to save it as and also the quality. Always choose jpg for pictures and reduce your quality setting to about 50%. Your 600 X 800 picture has now gone from 2 megabytes, taking several minutes to load, to approximately 50k, taking only seconds to load.

I once saw a personals ad picture with a guy sat next to his Mother. A similar mistake to avoid would be one where you're sitting beside your ex-wife or, dare I say it, current wife!

Pictures of - how shall I put this? - body parts are so unappealing and yet, curiously, very widespread. Avoid the temptation to take a picture of your appendages; you will not stand out from the crowd, you will look silly, and you will get few people viewing your personals ad.

Poor image-quality is unforgivable in an era of inexpensive digital cameras and yet it does persist. There is simply no excuse for a blurred or over/under-exposed picture.

Adult picture personals are, of course, an example way to meet people off the internet. Why? Well because get to select people who we find attractive; improving our chances of a successful relationship. If you follow the five tips in this article you will put yourself in the top 5% of people posting adult personal ads. Good luck!