Anyone who says online dating isn’t tough is either lying, delusional, or hasn’t actually ever touched a computer before. As easy as it is to create a profile and start clicking through potential dates, actually finding someone you connect with can be a challenge. Dating is hard, therefore online dating is hard.

Occasionally you find yourself in a rut. Or maybe you haven’t even started in the first place. Either way, there are things you can do today – right now – to give your online dating experience a much-needed boost.

1. Start! What’s stopping you? Are you still worried online dating might not be for you? You won’t know until you try. Take the plunge.
2. Give your profile a makeover. When was the last time you updated your profile? Can you remember the last time you looked at it? Actually, can you even remember what you put on it in the first place? You are constantly evolving and your profile should be too.
3. Delete all the mirror selfies. You have friends. Get them to take your picture instead. No one cares what your bathroom looks like or what you wear to the gym.
4. Upload a silly picture instead. Professional headshots belong in two places only: on your LinkedIn profile and in a casting director’s hands. No one is looking to date a carefully crafted (and probably Photoshopped image) – they want to date the real you. Someone with a personality. Show it off in a fun, free-spirited snap.
5. Ask a friend to be your online dating support system.  Online dating can be intimidating, but nothing cuts down on the intimidation factor like having a trusted friend by your side. Motivate each other to keep meeting new people whenever the going gets tough.
6. Be proactive. Don’t wait for someone else to make the first move. Take action! Your potential pool of dates expands rapidly as soon as you start initiating conversations instead of waiting for others to do it. You may not always get the response you want, but you’ll gain confidence from knowing that you tried.
7. Set goals. As with most things in life, you achieve more when you set goals for yourself. Have you seriously thought about what you want out of your online dating experience? If you’re not sure, how can you find the person who will give it to you? Write down your goals – both short-term and long-term – until you have a clear picture of what you’re looking for.

Ever wanted to get inside the minds of thousands of daters to see what makes everyone tick? Maybe that seems cool, or maybe you’d rather sit in a dentist’s chair for five hours, but either way – it does make you curious.

So it’s no surprise that OkCupid Co-Founder Christian Rudder has decided to harness the power of OkCupid’s user data and create a book that piques our curiosity. After all, we all watched with fascination as the dating site’s blog OkTrends revealed its latest research, informing us of what types of people we are attracted to, we’re doing wrong in our online dating profiles, or how to effectively message other users. Rudder found interesting trends in the details, helping us ask questions we didn’t even know to ask. For instance, why does the angle of the camera matter in a photo, or how you smile? Why is it preferable to write a less descriptive profile? Why is it more attractive to have a guitar in your hand than a tennis racket, or possess an unusually-shaped nose than to be considered average-looking? Or the million-dollar question: what do people lie about the most when they are online dating?

OkCupid has given us the sometimes surprising preferences of online daters, based on all of the data they mine from their thousands of users. Because of the site’s format of creative questions and answers, it’s allowed them to dig deeper than most.

OkTrends has been on hiatus since 2011, when Rudder started taking the information to compile it into a book, rather than just posting the information for free on their website. Rudder’s new book is called Dataclysm: Who We Are (When We Think No One’s Looking), which comes out on Sept. 9 and examines interactions for insights into whom and how we date.

For one of Dataclysm’s studies, Rudder analyzed how men and women approach attraction. It turns out that as women get older, they like older men. Men, on the other hand, consistently prefer younger and younger women. Men will message women close to their own age, but only up to a point. For example, men in their mid-40s rarely talk to women older than 30. “We have a lot of serial daters on the site—men who just keep dating women 10 years younger than they are,” Rudder told Business Week in a recent interview. “Eventually their tactics start to fail, and the young ladies they’re messaging begin rejecting them. The result is a lot of 40-year-old men and women who find it hard to get a date.”

OkCupid isn’t worried about user backlash for mining their personal data. Rudder recently wrote a post to address this issue, pointing out that all websites experiment on users, admitting that OkCupid once tested its matchmaking algorithm by telling users who were not suited for each other that they were a near-perfect match. “We got maybe five complaints,” Rudder told Business Week.

Since OkCupid users don’t pay for the site or its advice, does Rudder have an audience willing to buy his book? We’ll have to wait and see.

Check out our review of OkCupid for more information on this popular dating site.

Have the neighborhood children ever mistaken your home for a zoo?

A) Start charging for entry, because you might as well be making some cash off your tendency to horde animals.

B) Join a dating site designed for pet lovers, so that one day the human-animal balance in your household won’t be tipped quite so far in the animals’ favor.

There are dating sites based on religion, ethnicity, financial status, occupation, and political preferences, so it was really only a matter of time before someone created a dating site for you and your furry friends. The idea is exactly the same: by pairing people with shared interests, you increase the odds of emotional connection and lifestyle compatibility. Having a theme to your search can add a sense of purpose, and make that haystack you’re looking for a needle in more relevant and more appealing.

It also makes for an easy icebreaker. Bring your adorable pooch on your first date, and you’ve already got a built-in conversation starter to get things going. Date doesn’t love your pet as much as you do? Then there’s a good chance they won’t be a good fit for your life, and you’re better off knowing that sooner rather than later.

Still, not all dating experts are on board with the idea of puppy love that involves actual puppies. “When you consider how challenging it already is to find someone who offers what you are seeking in a romantic partner, and who seeks what you are offering, and where there is also mutual chemistry, and the timing is right … you have to wonder who in their right mind would want to make it even more challenging by insisting on canine chemistry,” says Trish McDermott, who spent 10 years as the dating expert and spokeswoman for Match.com.

If you’re in the camp that thinks it’s hard enough to begin a new romance without the added pressure of using your pooch to assess compatibility, stick to traditional dating sites. But if you’re the “Love me, love my dog” type, there are plenty of dating sites available to match you and Fido with someone who will fall in love with you both.

PetsDating is one of the biggest dating sites designed for you and your pet. There’s also DateMyPet.com, YouMustLoveDogsDating.com, PetPeopleMeet.com, MatchmakerPet.com, and the bluntly named LoveMeLoveMyPets.

Long walks in the (dog) park are only a click away.

Some users have reported due to Tinder being down on Wednesday that they have lost all of their matches. According to The Wire and their communication with Tinder's VP of Communications, Rosette Pambakian, the Lost Matches bug has now been fixed.

No matches have been deleted and all you need to do to get your Tinder matches back is to log out of the dating app and then log back into it again.

We also learned that the reason why there was a Tinder outage on Wednesday was because Facebook went down. Tinder relies on Facebook to retrieve the user information for their members. If the Facebook service is not accessible then Tinder will not work either.

There are a few common complaints every online dater has, and at the top of the list is "They looked nothing like their picture.” You could call it superficial, but let's be honest – who doesn’t appreciate truth in advertising?

There's always an embellishment aspect to dating, especially when dating means filling out a profile and answering personality tests, but there's a point when embellishment becomes flat-out lying. And that’s not cool, folks.

There’s never going to be a way to ensure that everything said on an online dating profile is fact, but a new feature from Zoosk will at least ensure that the photos associated with the profile are real. The new feature is called Photo Verification, and it uses a patent-pending process to compare members’ photos to videos they submit of themselves.

The verification service is currently available only on iOS, but an Android version is in the works. To use it, open the Zoosk app on your iPhone and select a profile photo that you want verified. You will be prompted to record and submit a video selfie that captures your face from multiple angles. Zoosk will then compare the video to the photo to ensure it’s an accurate representation of your real life appearance. If you pass the test, you will be certified with a badge on your profile. It’s basically the dating equivalent of Twitter’s verified profiles for celebrities, except you don’t have to have a famous face to use it.

Note: the video will remain private, so don’t worry about how much more awkward it is to take a video selfie than a photo selfie.

“One of the most important concerns of online daters is going out with someone who doesn’t really resemble their profile picture,” says Shayan Zadeh, co-founder and CEO of Zoosk. “By innovating a system for our members to validate the accuracy of existing profile photos, we believe we can create better first-date experiences that will lead to lasting relationships.”

By adding a new layer of transparency to online dating, Zoosk hopes to create a more authentic experience that will boost trust between daters and increase first date satisfaction. "Zoosk developed this feature in order to address its members' interest in having more transparency and trust in their potential dates," the company said in a statement. "By creating a Photo Verification process, Zoosk has become the first company in the online dating industry to directly address this concern."

To find out more about this dating service and the other features they offer you can read our review of Zoosk.

The end of August marked a very special milestone for eHarmony: the website’s 14^th birthday.

All those years ago online dating was still a young industry, and founder Dr. Neil Clark Warren (yep, the guy from the commercials) revolutionized it with his research-based approach to matching people for marriage. eHarmony famously created algorithms based on 29 Dimensions of Compatibility scientifically proven to predict successful long-term relationships. Fourteen years later, those algorithms are still going strong.

Since its inception, eHarmony has racked up more than 45 million subscribers – meaning approximately 1 out of every 7 people in America has subscribed to eHarmony at one point or another. The site is responsible for more than 600,000 marriages in its lifetime. On average, 438 people marry every day in the U.S. after being matched by eHarmony (that’s nearly 4% of all new marriages in the country!).

eHarmony has seen many major changes in the last 2 years, when Warren returned as CEO after previously leaving the company. Amongst the milestones are:

• The launch of eH+, a premium matchmaking service
• A cross-platform redesign of the website
• Record numbers of subscribers and mobile users
• New levels of profitability

“We are so proud of what we have achieved at eHarmony,” said Dr. Warren. “Our success in online dating underscores an opportunity to impact areas beyond online dating. We are launching new verticals in the coming months and years that broaden our reach--verticals that will build eHarmony into a relationship site. Soon, eHarmony will influence the way we look at finding a job, finding friends and solving loneliness.”

As it enters the next phase of its teens, eHarmony has big things in the works. Chief among them is Elevated Careers, a service to match employers with prospective employees and help people find their ideal jobs.  After 3 years of research, eHarmony hopes Elevated Careers will help users find fulfilling, meaningful jobs that last longer than the national average of 4.6 years.

When asked how eHarmony plans to make it work, Warren told Business Insider “The first thing we do when getting involved with a company is we want a short inventory filled out by every person in the company. Just asking how they perceive the culture of the company. We want that culture to be matched up with the culture of the person who’s the applicant.”

“The second thing we do,” he continued, “is we want the org chart of the company, so that if an individual wants to work in a particular part of the company, we want to know what skills are required of the applicant.”

And finally, he added, “we want to know whether the personality match of the applicant and the person they’re going to report to is a good fit for the company and individual. If we can get the culture, skillset, and personality right, we’re convinced that the typical 4.6 year average duration at a company in America, we’ll be able to take that way up.”

For more on this dating site and to find out why it has been such a popular online dating service you can read our review of eHarmony.