Over the past few months I’ve been doing just that, reaching out to various members of this gigantic global online community. It’s brimming with great people who are interested in, supporters of, service providers to, and active participants who devote their efforts to helping single people everywhere with dating, love and relationships.

Do you know what I’ve learned from these efforts?

There’s a whole lot of love out there!

So many virtual strangers have been willing to connect, willing to advise, willing to share, willing to make introductions and willing to promote eloves me, eloves me not and me as an indie author. I guess the quest for love, promotes a little love of it’s own. As a new member of this supportive group, I’m happy to show a little love too!

Here’s one lovely lady I’ve met on this journey. Neely is about as focused on dating, love and relationships as a girl can be. And, she’s offers some pretty unique expertise.

For the past decade, Neely Steinberg has been writing and speaking about dating, love, and relationships. She has been a featured expert in a wide array of media outlets and has created and hosted two radio shows and an internet TV show on the subjects of dating, love, and relationships. Drawing from her Master’s degree in Counseling and her passion for helping others, Neely’s dating coaching practice The Love TREP™, based in Boston, is dedicated to teaching and coaching smart, educated, professional women across the world, ages 27-45, how to use an entrepreneurial spirit, mindset, and approach to find healthy, happy dating lives that lead to healthy, happy relationships. To check out her coaching services and packages, and to learn how dating enTREPreneurially can work for you, you can visit her website at www.thelovetrep.com and tell her LA sent you!

It’s time for The Great Dating Blog Awards 2013.

eloves me, eloves me not and I have been nominated for the following:

Best Newcomer Award http://www.greatdatingblogs.com/best-newcomer-round-one-2013/

Best Niche Blog http://www.greatdatingblogs.com/best-niche-blog-2013-nominations/

And the one I really, really, really want to win…

Best Dating Book Award http://www.greatdatingblogs.com/best-dating-book-2013-nominations/

If you feel so inclined and would like to cast a vote for any/all of my nominations, I’d be most grateful.

It’s great to be nominated (but it’s better to win) and to win you need votes!

Seriously, I am honoured to be nominated and happy to be getting a little more acknowledgement for the website, for the book and for all the activities I’ve directed promoting it through the dating world. So whatever happens, happens and I’m happy to be nominated!

Cheers,

LA

I recently chatted with Stephanie Campisi about eloves me, eloves me not. I was very impressed by how prepared and thoughtful her questions were. We covered a lot of ground including the book’s inspiration, my writing choices especially around featuring technology so prominently, the world of online dating and current perceptions of it, the challenges and opportunities associated with independent publishing and what’s required by an author as they move into the marketing phase.

You can find the full interview here: Interview: LA Johannesson on writing “technological romance”

Favourite interview quote: “self-published authors need to look for every opportunity to tell, and sell, their stories.”

Thank you Stephanie for the opportunity to share my thoughts with you and your community!

Shows like Catfish sensationalise the negatives of online dating, rarely, if ever, showing the up sides.  The media, so-called web and relationship experts and  internet fear mongers everywhere jump at the opportunity to promote their hypothesis that everyone on the big, bad internet is either psychologically twisted, out to steal your money or your identity and no one online is to be trusted. The sub-text is “offline=good, online=bad”, especially when it comes to looking for love.

To that I say, “Rubbish, bullocks, bullshit!”

As in the offline world, online you will find good, bad, honest, deceitful, trustworthy, dishonourable, exciting, boring, intelligent, ignorant, happy, morose, passionate, apathetic, beautiful, unattractive, tall, short, young, old… (you get my point) people.

The online world is a microcosm of the offline world.

Offline or online, do you not try making friends because you have one enemy? Do you not trust anyone ever again because you had a promise broken? Do you stop looking for love because you’ve had your heart broken?

Worse yet, do you you cower in fear, paralysed into inaction because someone, somewhere, at some point in time had a bad a experience?

No, you don’t!

You find balance. You respect that there is the potential for a negative experience, but you focus on the positive. You take calculated risks. You learn from others. You implement safeguards. And then you harness your inherent optimism, create some truly great experiences and share them with everyone who’ll listen.

The positive needs promoting. It’s out there. Everyday, people using online dating sites are having a few laughs, making new friends, getting lucky, forming relationships and falling in love.

While not every time, these sites deliver lots of the good stuff lots of the time – the entertainment, the self discovery, the companionship, the sex, the romantic dreams and the happy-ever-afters.

We need to get better at sharing the positive stories and helping others to see the plus side of online dating.  This is one of the reasons I wrote eloves me, eloves me not.

And, it’s a key reason I started this Google+ community for fans of online dating to share their stories, their milestones, their inspiring experiences.

If you’re still reading, I suspect you might agree with the notion that the positives far outweigh the negatives when it comes to online dating.

So, if you do and you have great experiences to share, then step over to the Google+ platform, find your voice and start shoutin’ from the rooftops.

There’s a lot of negative noise to overcome. So, online dating fans, let’s crank up the volume on the positive side and drown out the naysayers.

Because there’s a lot that sits on the plus side of online dating!

Smarter Dating brings you a once in a lifetime interview with eloves me, eloves me not author, LA Johannesson
Step aside Bridget Jones, Kayte Wexford is the new poster girl for singletons in the digital age! She’s fit, healthy and IT-savvy and she’s not afraid to turn to technology for help finding love!

Smarter Dating recently shared this interview with their membership in the UK. This isn’t the first time I’ve heard the Bridget Jones reference, but I continue to be delighted by it. 

If you want to learn a little back story about the eloves me, eloves me not story, then have a read of the full interview here:

Smarter Dating Interviews LA Johannesson

As I reach out and connect with the both reader and online dating communities around the world, these tips continue to come in handy.

Recently, I was asked by Smarter Dating to provide some content for their site for launch and Roman and his trusty Rules made yet another appearance. The post, Smarter Dating Means Doing Your Homework, drew upon some of his trusty tips and hopefully they’re out there helping a whole new site full of singles as they try to meet their match.