Step 6 - Promotion (Continued)

When promoting your Website, don't forget your email signature. It's the easy way to promote your Website for free! A well designed e-mail signature can attract people to your Website, motivate them to e-mail you, or even call you for additional information, if you own a business.

A signature file, also called sig-file, is a short "ad" that is attached to the end of each of your e-mail messages. As a minimum your sig-file should include the following:

• Identify the person sending the e-mail message.
  
• Website or Company name.
  
• Your e-mail address
  
• Website URL.
  
• A short message about your products or services, or slogan.
  
• It can also include your company's 800 number.

To separate your signature from your e-mail message begin it with three small dashes (---), a hard return and then the above information. Why the dashes? If you send e-mail to a someone an e-mail who uses Majordomo (Majordomo is a program that automates the management of Internet mailing lists), the software will ignore your signature file, rather than attempting to process it - which could cause the program to generate an error message.

In general, never use "cute" ASCII art with your signature. More than likely it will be received skewed and could reflect badly on the sender - you!

    ______
     (O O)\     
     / v \          
    /º   º\         
     \m m/
I Don't Give A Hoot

Design tips:

• Use a text editor such as Notepad and save it using a short file name, e.g. sig-file.txt.
• Use a fixed width font, 40 spaces or less.
• Use a hard return at the end of each line.
• Use spacing if desired, i.e. center.
• Use ampersands (&) to keep it short.
• Five to six lines is enough, never more than 7 lines!
• Use the hot link format for your e-mail address - mailto:youremail@abc.net>
• Use the hot-link format for your URL - http://www.your-url.com/
• Test you signature file before you actually use it:
  1. Send it to yourself.
  2. Send it to a friend.

If desired, you can border your sig-file with a special character. For example, here is my sig-file:

---
*************************
Don't you have a Website yet?
http://www.1stSiteFree.com/
billgreen@1stsitefree.com
Bill Green
************************

Remember, the purpose of a signature file is to attract people to your Website, e-mail you for additional information, or encourge them to call your company.

Looking for some unique signature quotes, visit this site.

For more imformation about signature file visit:
E-mail Etiquette @ NetManners.com: Signature Files - Dos and Don'ts of Signature File Use.