What’s in Your Email Signature?

Your email signature file is the most over-looked and under-employed piece of screen real estate on the web.

How many emails do you write or respond to per day? That’s the number of times you’ve passed on a chance to promote a link to your web site or blog.

I’ve been testing you:
For the past week, in anticipation of this post, I’ve been monitoring the email correspondence I receive from other bloggers — especially my blogging peers.

Out of hundreds of emails I’ve received in the last week — guess how many of you have an email signature with a link to your blog?

FOUR.

Three out of the four bloggers who are taking advantage of the Simplest Link Promotion Opportunity Ever I know to have read my Problogging Tutorial — it’s just one little tip for free online blog promotion, but it’s an important one.

I won’t make you purchase my tutorial just to focus your attention on the importance of your email signature — I’ll jump up and down about it for a minute here. Even before I began developing blogs as a part of my marketing consultation business, this was the first bit of advice given to me by the old-school email marketers I worked with four years ago.

An email signature is:

• a standard optional feature of most email service providers, even the free ones like Yahoo and Gmail
• hardly a big secret
• doesn’t cost a penny
• fully automated
• takes a few minutes to set up

So — WHY don’t you have one?

Placing a link in your email signature:

• is less work than leaving a comment on another blog
• gets seen by people who already know you and are most likely to be curious about your blog
• is enthusiastically employed by the company that provides your email service — with good reason — it’s the basic viral promotion strategy used by Hotmail and Gmail and Yahoo that has resulted in their popularity
• matches the effort of your web presence, piece by piece

You can never anticipate when your emails could end up being forwarded to hundreds or even thousands of people… It’s truly the simplest, cheapest, most visible little virtual worker bee you have in your hive. I know the minute you read this you’ll say “Yeah, yeah… I know this one. I’ve been meaning to…” Make today the day you finally get around to it.

Before you write another email, blog comment, post in a forum — or publish another new article — take a few minutes to give your email signature its long overdue-attention.

Slade Roberson is an intuitive counselor, ATP®, professional blogger, and the author of Shift Your Spirits, Automatic Intuitive Response, and the PageCoach Problogging Tutorial Series. Slade on Blogging shares behind-the-screens internet marketing, self-publishing, and blogging strategies with other personal development writers, coaches, and healing arts practitioners.