How to Use Signature Files to Give Your Email The Personal TouchWritten by Alvin Apple
If you have a home business, then you're probably constantly concerned with getting your name and your business information out there. You probably send out a lot of e-mails, post on message boards, and submit articles to business e-zines. These are excellent ways to get your name out there, but are you taking full advantage of visibility these forums create?One of best ways of creating new business is to include a Signature File with everything you post, send or submit. What exactly is a sig file? It's that little bit of bio information at end of an e-mail, article or posting, usually a sentence or two with your url. This is your opportunity to let people know who you are and to direct them to your business. If they liked what you wrote, then they can immediately to your site and find out more about your product or service. Now you may already include your url at end of your correspondence, most business people do. That's great, but is it enough? Not quite. Of course it's great to have your url so that anyone who's interested in what you're saying can immediately check out your business site, but wouldn't they be more likely to click if you included a short description of what you do? The trick to a catchy sig file, is that one sentence that makes you stand out. For example, rather than closing an e- mail or posting with
| | THE WORST E-MAIL MISTAKE Written by B.L. Ochman
The approximately 200 daily, weekly and bi-weekly online newsletters and e-zines to which I subscribe arrive among 5,600 or so emails I get every month. I zap 90 percent of them unread for one simple, maddening reason: message is hidden. And that's worst e-mail mistake you can make.The fundamental mistake made in vast majority of online publications has to do with physical limitation of e-mail. At most, recipient of an email sees 10 lines of text on first screen of an email. If you don't get your message in first 10 lines: it won't get read. Why then, do so many e-publishers expect us to scroll through three and more screens just to find what's "In This Issue?" I'm not talking about content. The content in newsletters and e-zines listed below -- some of best on Internet -- tends to be consistently worth reading IF you have time to scroll through many screens to get to actual content. Asking a reader to scroll through more than one screen just to find out what you want to say is not unlike taking five minutes to introduce yourself every time you call your sister. Neither practice is necessary or makes sense. Space wasters Between glitzy HTML mastheads, lengthy letters from publishers, boilerplate about privacy policies and just plain garbage prose, it's rare newsletter or e-zine that gives you a table of contents on first screen. Ways that e-zines waste space and time include: oHaving an HTML masthead take up entire first screen of e-mail then expecting us to read through advertising to get to table of contents. Among many sites whose newsletters waste first screen with a masthead are http://www.emarketer.com , http://www.eZined.com http://www.i-advertising.com , http://www.silicon.com , http://www.redherring.com , and http://www.zdnet.com While many of these newsletters are excellent when you finally get to them, I am willing to bet 90 percent of issues go unread because people don't want to be bothered scrolling to see a table of content. oTaking up entire first screen, and sometimes as many as three screens, reminding us that we actually subscribed to this publication so we are not being spammed; that mailing list will not be shared and that new subscribers are welcome. And only then, as many as 40 lines later - that's 4 screens in Outlook Express - are we told what issue contains. Of course I'll never know, because I won't still be reading and I bet you won't either.
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