.sig, or “Dot Sig” as it’s affectionately known, stands for “Signature File” and is text and (usually) other contact information placed at bottom of email or other computer-based correspondence. It is traditionally used for things like phone numbers, alternate email addresses, mailing addresses, web site addresses, etc. However real truth is, it can contain anything author wishes to include. It is like having your very own piece of legitimate, non-intrusive, socially acceptable, 100% SPAM-free advertising space on every piece of email you send or posting you ever make!

Think about that a moment. Really think about it. Do you have a .sig on your emails? Have you ever noticed other people’s signatures? Have you ever clicked their links out of curiosity? Have you ever noticed that links can have absolutely nothing to do with topic being discussed, and yet it is still considered acceptable to use this space for what amounts to advertising much of time?

Have you ever stopped to think about how many eyes could potentially be reading your online postings for years to come? Or how far an email you type could go if it is forwarded a few times to various groups of people you don’t even know? You may not realize this, but many online forums, Yahoo Groups, etc. are publicly readable; you only must be a member in order to post something to group. But since anyone, including bots, can read messages, they are some of most widely “spidered” content on internet (see sidebar). This means that your comments or postings could potentially be read by millions of people beyond one, two, or ten people you intended it for. What would you pay for that kind of targeted advertising? Make sure your .sig is ready!

[SIDEBAR] Googlebot - Your Friend on WWW Googlebot is Google's web-crawling robot. It collects documents from web to build a searchable index for Google search engine. This automated process is commonly called "spidering" because these (ro)bots crawl web in their search for information. The key is that they love text. Google tends to rank sites with lots of text content very high - especially discussion forums! Because of this, your online forum remarks can live almost indefinitely, and may be seen by people years from now. This means any .sig you include at bottom of your post will be nearly eternal free focused advertising. [/SIDEBAR]

So, what is proper protocol for creating a .sig? The internet standard is to place two hyphens (dashes) at bottom of your email, and on next line begin your sig. For example, mine looks like this at moment:

Automate, automate, automate. It's darn good advice most of time. But what about occasions where you simply need to collect a one-time payment for various and sundry items or services?

PayPal recently launched a very handy and convenient service called "PayPal Invoicing" that makes job of requesting and collecting payment for products or services a snap. Here's process in a nutshell... (1) You log into your PayPal account. (2) From main screen, click dark blue "Request Money" tab. (3) The second paragraph (currently) says "To send a more detailed request, try out PayPal's new Invoicing tool". Click this link to go to invoicing page. (4) At "Select Template" dropdown menu, select "New Invoice" and click continue. (5) The next screen provides all of fields that you'll need to build your invoice. You can apply tax, charge for shipping, specify rates for each, and more. This won't take you more than about 10 or 20 seconds to complete. When you're satisfied with information that you've entered, click "Continue" button. (6) The next screen shows you what invoice will look like, and if you like what you see, click "Send Invoice" and your job is done.