Your emails are a potential source of income.

Yes, even if you don’t have a website or blog, and better still, using email signatures properly amounts to free advertising!

If you run a small business, you probably send a fair few emails each week; messages to suppliers, customers, prospects, associates and other businesses and organisations.

Your signature at the bottom of these emails is a great opportunity to send a message out to the people you deal with about what you do and why it might interest them.

Here’s what I mean…

Let’s imagine you run a small business selling hand-made wedding stationery. Your email signature probably looks something like this:

Best regards,

Jane Smith
Hand-Made Wedding Stationery

But it could be:

Best regards,

Jane Smith
Hand-Made Wedding Stationery

This month only - Buy One Get One Free on Our Entire Range - call now for our latest brochure.

Or:

Best regards,

Jane Smith
Hand-Made Wedding Stationery

Visit our website today for 50% off our entire range of products.

There are only one or two elements you need to consider when writing email signatures:

Your Promotional Message

The content and structure of your message is very important. There is a simple formula for writing these kind of messages that is easy to learn. To find out more about it read How to Write Headlines that Sell.

Hyperlinks

Hyperlinks can be a very powerful part of an email signature. They enable the reader to go straight to the information or offer concerned without having to spend additional time looking for it.

You can include just one, or several links in your signature.

They can be to your own web pages and blog articles, newspaper articles about your business, other websites, other peoples products and services via affiliate links, your social networking profiles on sites like Facebook – pretty much anything really. To find out more about affiliate links, read Affiliate Programmes Explained and to find out more about social networking, read Social Bookmarking and Social Networking in a Nutshell, The Social Media Marketing Book and Inbound Links: The Good, The Bad and The Ugly.

Once you’ve written your promotional message and added any hyperlinks, just look for “Signature” in the menu of your email software. In Microsoft Outlook 2007 for example, you just open a new message then choose Insert and Signature. Virtually all email software has a signature function – if you’re not sure where it is on yours, just click on help and type “signature”.

Now, every time you send an email or reply to one, your signature is added, either automatically or with a click or two. Just remember to update your signature regularly to stop it getting boring and being ignored.

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