Photographs and profile text

Two things decide whether a listing is contacted: the photographs and the first three lines of text. Everything else on a profile is read after a client has already half-decided. Men consistently underinvest in the first and overwrite the second.

Photographs

Listing sites ask for six to ten. The requirements they set are sensible and worth following even where they are not enforced:

• Recent. A photograph more than two years old causes a problem at the door, not before it.
• Unfiltered and unblurred. Editing reads as concealment.
• Face and body, both. A profile with no body shots gets fewer enquiries; a profile with no clear face shot gets fewer still, unless the face is deliberately obscured for privacy, which is handled differently.
• Clothed. Casual or a jacket. Nothing explicit.
• No sunglasses, no hats, no cigarettes, no drinks, nobody else in the frame.
• Friendly rather than stern. The single commonest mistake is a hard, unsmiling expression, which is read as arrogance rather than intensity.

Natural light near a window beats any amount of equipment. A friend with a recent phone, half an hour, a plain wall and two changes of clothes will produce better results than a studio session, because the pictures look like a person rather than an advertisement.

Profile text

Most sites ask for eighty to a hundred and twenty words. That is a tight brief and it is the right length. The pattern that works:

1. Open with something specificNot "I am an easy-going guy who loves to laugh." A concrete detail that could only apply to one person: a job, a place, a habit, a thing actually done at the weekend.
2. Say what a booking with this person is likeUnhurried, talkative, physical, calm. One or two adjectives that genuinely describe the experience, rather than a list of every quality a person might want.
3. Give one point of reassuranceDiscretion, punctuality, comfort with a nervous first-time client. One line, stated plainly.
4. Close with what is on offerDinner, an evening, a weekend, travel. This is where availability belongs, not the opening.

What to leave out: superlatives, references to being the best at anything, explicit description of services, complaints about time-wasters, and any sentence that could appear unchanged on a thousand other profiles. A profile that reads like a person outperforms one that reads like a brochure by a wide margin.

The details clients filter on

Directories let clients narrow by age, height, build, location, languages and rate. These fields exist to be filtered, so they should be filled accurately rather than flatteringly. An escort who overstates his height by four inches has bought himself an awkward first thirty seconds.

Languages are worth listing properly. In London in particular, a second language opens up a client base that the rest of the directory cannot serve.

Voice notes and video

Some platforms offer an optional voice message or short introduction video. Both convert well, for the same reason: they answer the question a photograph cannot, which is whether this person is easy to be in a room with. A thirty-second clip of ordinary speech does more than a paragraph of adjectives.

Rewriting

A profile is not finished when it goes live. After the first ten or twenty enquiries it becomes clear which sentences attract the wrong contact and which do the work. Most escorts rewrite within three months, and the second version is almost always shorter than the first.

What a well-built listing looks like in practice is set out in the profile examples, which annotate the choices behind eight sample listings.