Tactics Tuesdays: How to Approach Lots of Girls (Without Spam Approaching)

One of the easiest ways to develop skill with women is cold approach, and one of the greatest progress accelerators when you go out is to talk to lots of girls.

There’s a problem with talking to lots of girls, however, and the problem is that in many guys this quickly devolves into ‘spam approaching’.

Spam sucks, and it hardly works. The good email programs are effective at keeping most spam email in your spam box. On websites, the good spam filters keep most of it out of the comments sections, but some still slips through (we probably delete about 50 spam comments every day here). Despite the filtering, deleting, and quarantining, there’s still a market for it, because it still works... sometimes.

However, the volume has to be high, and the margins are slim.

This is not a practical approach to use for meeting girls.

Nevertheless, sometimes men can fall into ‘spam approaching’ to meet their volume quotas (or simply because it’s the one thing they know to do).

There is a better way, however.

Why Do Guys Spam Approach?

Here’s what spam approaching looks like, in a nutshell.

Cliff walks into a bar. He sees a girl nearby. Immediately he approaches her and delivers his opener. She isn’t receptive, but he hangs around another minute more to see if he can get somewhere. She still doesn’t respond, so he ejects.

Nearby, he spots another pair of women. He immediately turns and engages them both. They talk with him politely, but aren’t giving him much. After a minute or so of this, he ejects.

He circles the bar, until he spots a girl in a sequined dress dancing by herself on the still-mostly-empty dance floor. He walks in front of her, slaps on his best grin, and starts gyrating. She smiles a little, then dances away from him. He walks off the dance floor.

Then he spies a mixed group of guys and gals over at one of the tables. He stops by and asks them how their night is going in a high energy way. They respond positively, and he plops down at a stool next to their table. He chats with them for a while, and they seem like a fun group. However, none of the women in the group appear to be biting, so he slaps a few of the guys high fives and gets back up to continue his wanderings.

Immediately, he spots another girl walking by in a red dress. He loops his arm around her and turns her to meet him. She responds warmly, and he chats to her a moment. She seems flirtatious, but wriggles out of his grasp and continues on elsewhere. He makes a mental note to look for her later.

Then he sees a pair of girls, and homes in on them...

And so on, and so forth.

If you go out enough to bars and parties, you will see men spam approach. Some of them are men who’ve studied how to pick up girls, while others are particularly extraverted naturals. They’ll be at various levels of calibration; some of these guys are new to socializing in general, and come across as a little ‘off’ or creepy or just incongruent, while others are old social pros and walk around like they own the place and are simply welcoming the folks they meet into their world.

It’s okay if you’re doing this at the start of an outing to get a feel for the venue and the crowd within it, build some social momentum, and create some connections you can pick up things with again later. However, you do not want this to be your strategy for the whole outing.

Hopping from girl to girl, group to group, conversation to conversation, over the course of an outing, is simply not a terribly effective method... for several reasons:

1. It can generate negative social proof: guys often mistakenly think that bouncing from person to person makes them look ‘cooler’, when in fact it has a neutral, at best, effect on social proof. Remember the Law of Least Effort: you want maximum results for minimum effort. If you’re constantly circulating and sparking conversations with new people, they may like you a lot, so you are getting good results. However, you’re also exerting a lot of effort to get them – it’s high effort, high return. On the sprezzatura chart, you are a Peasant, not a King. And if the folks you initiate with don’t like you a lot, you can actually create negative social proof by doing this.

2. It shifts you into ‘social butterfly’ mode: once you start thinking like a social butterfly, you’re no longer focused on finding a woman, attracting her, and seducing her. Again, it’s fine to do this to work the room at the outset and build a bit of a base, but when you’re ready to start approaching for keepsies (e.g., after your warm-up approaches are done), you don’t want to keep butterflying around.

3. You convey the wrong message: a woman wants to feel like you are approaching her because she is special. She wants to feel like you have recognized something attractive or unique in her, and that you are there for her. When you’re bouncing around like a pinball, it doesn’t feel like you’re there to talk to her... it feels like you’re just there to talk to whoever will talk to you. Unless she’s extremely hard-up for a man or you are the catch of a lifetime to her, she will not go out of her way to make herself available to you.

4. You may wear out: I suppose it depends on your disposition somewhat, but I’ll tell you... I don’t know many guys who can spam approach for 3 or 4 hours. You usually don’t get anything but the most superficial positive feedback from others while doing it (since you’re not typically having many meaningful connections with them), and eventually you just tire out.
   

The result is this: many women who would ordinarily be open to you close themselves off when you spam approach. And even with women who do show interest in you, you risk moving right along once you’re in the habit of social butterflying about.

However, if you’re not spam approaching, how do you get the volume in to meet those women who would otherwise be open to you?

They’re not going to approach you themselves, after all (well, not usually).

High Volume in a Practical Way

Let’s say you go out for four (4) hours, and your goal is to meet up to 20 women.

I say “up to” because your goal should be “I will continue to meet new women until I meet the girl I like whom I will take home [or get a date with, whatever your goal is].”

(Up to) 20 women divided by 4 hours is 5 women an hour. That’s one new conversation every 12 minutes. Not spam approaching.

Even if you have some 24-minute conversations in there – say you hit it off with a girl and chat for 24 minutes, but you leave with a phone number instead of an invite home – that still means you just need to approach two women in a 12-minute span, or one per six minutes, to stay on-target. Still not spam approaching.

The way you work in high volume approaching without doing spam approaching is to take frequent breaks from approaching that aren’t so long (i.e., the breaks aren’t long enough for you to lose any serious momentum).

Here’s how that’d look with nighttime approaching:

• You reach the first bar you’re headed to tonight. You take a few minutes to wander around the venue, see the room, and get a feel for where the high traffic areas are likely to be (if this is a new place for you)

• You spot a cute girl with a friend resting against a railing near the edge of the dance floor. You drop in next to them and spark a conversation. They speak to you politely, but aren’t crazy interested. No worries; you figure you’ll chat with them for a bit anyway. The night’s still young, and you’re warming up. They both turn out to be pretty cool, and you have a decent conversation with them that goes about 7 or 8 minutes. Eventually you excuse yourself to go grab a drink and tell them you’ll catch them later

• At the bar, still relatively empty, you order a drink – maybe it’s a beer or a cocktail if you’re drinking, or maybe it’s just a water with lime if you’re not. You hang about for a bit and chat with a cool-enough-looking guy who’s near you at the bar. Eventually a few girls come and place themselves near you to order drinks; you open the one nearest you, but she’s dismissive. You let the conversation die for a moment, then reengage, but she’s still uninterested. No worries. That was another warm-up

• The girls leave, and after a few more minutes you opt to go take a walk around. The place is beginning to fill up more. You stop a girl just walking in to compliment her on one of her accessories, and she seems receptive, but her friends keep walking and she excuses herself to catch up with them. They just got here and want to settle in before they start to socialize. Understandable

• At this point, you’ve been here perhaps 25 minutes, and you’re already about 50% ahead of schedule (and still not spam approaching). It’s a marathon, not a sprint – so even though you’ve only approached three women so far, there’s no need to panic about your numbers being low, because you’ll continue approaching (and warming up). The goal is not to cram in as many approaches as possible; it’s simply to give yourself the best chance possible to find a girl you click with and whisk her away with you (or, alternately, to practice whatever new techniques you’re out to practice if you’re more focused on training up a skill)
  

• Several minutes after Girl #3, you notice a cute girl you hadn’t seen come in who seems to be checking you out. She’s with a couple of friends, but they’re talking excitedly to each other and she’s kind of disengaged from them. You saunter up to her and say hello. She’s quite happy to meet you. So, you settle in for a good chat. You and her connect well, and 10 minutes fly by. You realize you’ll need to move her soon or else risk seeming like you’re scared to pull the trigger or just being social/friendly, so you propose her grabbing a seat with you. The timing’s not quite right though, and when she turns to chat with her friends they say they want to go check out one of the other rooms, and she turns back to you apologetically to say it looks like they’re moving. You smile, give her a small squeeze on the arm, and tell her you’ll catch up with her later

• You look around and in the 10 minutes you were talking to Girl #4, the place has really filled up a lot. You spend another 10 minutes just readjusting to the higher energy vibe of the venue, and then you set off walking again. Another five minutes later you spy a girl you’d like to meet, and go in

• All this continues for a few hours. Sometimes you take a break of up to 15 minutes, just hanging out and soaking the venue in, but never for too long because you don’t want your momentum to fade. Sometimes you meet two or three new girls within the space of a few minutes, but for the most part your approaches are fairly well spaced out

• After three hours in the venue, you’ve done 15 approaches. Some have gone fairly well, some have not gone anywhere, and you took a phone number from one cute girl with an accent. At one point you took a long break and had to re-warm-up. The best connection of the night was Girl #4, but you haven’t seen her since you chatted with her earlier. Then you run into the first two girls you spoke to at the beginning of the night. They were neutral toward you earlier, but now they’re excited to see you. You reopen them, and focus most of your attention on the cute one. She happy to talk to you, and her friend is supportive of the pairing. You notice her friend has a guy she’s talking to too. Perfect. After a few minutes of chatting, you tell Girl #1’s friend you’re going to steal away with her for a moment and say you’ll “just be over there” (pointing toward the couches), and she gives you an emphatic “Okay!” You whisk Girl #1 off to the couches, then after a few minutes change her to the quietest room in the venue and ramp up the sexual tension. Eventually you want to tell her you want to head outside and grab some food, and she agrees. You take her out and hail a ride back to your place
  

With daytime approaching, it’s even simpler. Just walk around and look for women you think are really cute. If you find you’re approaching a new woman every 3 or 4 minutes in daytime, tighten up your standards so you’re only coming across a new one every 10 or 12 minutes or so. If you find you’re only doing an approach an hour or something inefficient like this, lower your standards a bit and approach women who are slightly less of a perfect match for you. That’ll keep you warmed up and ready for the real stunners, and sometimes you’ll be surprised – you’ll approach a girl who seemed plain from a distance but looks gorgeous up close, or you’ll approach a girl who’s merely cute, but the two of you really click personality-wise.

This works tons better for folks who aren’t super extraverts, too. The little breaks between approaching allow you to recover some energy, but aren’t so long your momentum leaks away.

You can still do plenty of volume without needing to ‘spam approach’. It works better because you don’t tire yourself out, you don’t come across as the super social guy (which can make it hard for women to view you as someone interested in them, as opposed to just interested in socializing), and there’s little risk of negative social proof so long as you don’t take any too-long stretches of downtime.

The big risk here is stopping for too long: if you pause to take a break for, say, 25 or 30 minutes, you may find your social muscles are cold and you’ll have to warm up all over again... which you may or may not feel like doing at that point. So, when you take breaks between approaches, try to go for 5 to 15 minutes at most, with the occasional 20 minute break if you really need it. However, even after a 20 minute break, you’ll probably need to do one or two warm-ups to get back in the swing of things.

So long as you never stop for too long, you won’t cool off (and this seems to be the main thing spam approachers are trying to avoid – usually, guys who spam approach have had the experience of cooling off one time too many, so they overcompensate and become approach machines). Stick to the middle ground and you’ll do well.

Does It Ever Make Sense to Spam Approach?

There’s one time spam approaching can work, and that’s when you are in a large, packed, anonymous venue, and purely looking for a girl who is super into you and ready to hook up ASAP. In this case, you use spam approaching to float around, opening whatever women come into your proximity (or into whose proximity you come), and flirting a little bit to see how they react.

The scenes this seems to work best in really are large vacation resorts with large amounts of women partying where most women aren’t so worried about keeping up their reputations, so they’re more honest with their interest right off the bat. Even here though, spam approaching can be tiring, and after 30 or 40 minutes of it you can realize a couple thousand people is actually a lot fewer than you might’ve thought – pretty soon, you’re running into the same people again.

Spam approaching may also be worth trying if you find you can’t even take a 5 or 10 minute break from approaching without losing all your momentum. However, because it’s such an inefficient approach style, I suggest if this is you you work more on staying warm between approaches better and figure out a way to keep warm while approaching only intermittently (instead of constantly).

The (negative) psychological effect spam approaching can have on you is also important to understand for its impact on results. It’s really hard to ready yourself to seriously commit to an interaction with a girl if you’re meeting a new woman every 2 or 3 or 4 minutes. Even while you’re talking to the girl you’re currently talking to, you will tend to want to get moving again and start searching for the next one. You may even find yourself scanning the venue, searching for the next woman in line. Talking to a spam approacher can feel like talking to a junkie... everything seems a little too rushed, frenetic, and unimportant. All this detracts from your current conversation and makes it much less likely you and this girl click. When you cut it down to a new approach every 10 or 12 minutes, your approaches become much more substantial.

One other major benefit of not spam approaching is this: it gives you a little time to look around, evaluate the scene, evaluate women, and make predictions. This is important just so you can realize how often your predictions are wrong.

For instance, one of the things I’ve seen guys do when spam approaching is walk right past the beautiful girls and focus on less attractive ones, probably because they’ve found those girls respond better to a spam approach than their more attractive peers do in the past. Because they’re doing this purely by spur-of-the-moment, snap-decision instinct, they don’t stop to analyze that they’re passing up the really pretty girls. But when you’re taking breaks, you can spy a girl and say, “Wow, she’s gorgeous. I have no shot in hell with that girl,” then catch yourself thinking it, and say, “Haha, that’s a funny thought. Okay, well let’s go talk to her and find out if I’m right or not.” And then you chat her up and find out she’s quite receptive to you, and you’re forced to adjust your mental model just a tiny bit more.

So, take breaks. It’s perfectly possible to approach 20 or 25 women in a single outing without spam approaching at all. If you’re doing well though, you may not need to go anywhere near 20 or 25 approaches – you may just hit it off with a great and wonderful girl by approach # 12 or 8 or 4.

Always,
Chase