Black Belt Web Marketing.pdf - Costa del Sol

Exercise 3-1 -- Publicizing Your Site with Signatures
A signature (or "sig file") is a text file automatically appended at the end of your emails and
discussion groups postings by your email program or newsreader (if it doesn’t, get a new
program). The sig identifies you to others: your name, position, company, how to get a hold of
you. Sort of like an "electronic business card". It conveniently provides pertinent information
about you automatically each time you send an electronic correspondence without you having to
laboriously provide it every time.
Unlike a business card, a signature doesn’t involve printing charges and isn’t handed out
gradually over time. It’s massed distributed instantaneously. It even likely that thousands of
readers around the world read your "electronic business card" within seconds after you send it.
Signature as Promotional Tool
In view of the widespread readership of your signature, it offers an excellent opportunity to
promote your web site. While the announcement should be relatively free of hype, the same isn’t
necessarily true of your signature that follows it. After posting to a discussion group, a
promotional signature will help your site experience an increase in traffic. Readers will read
what you have to say and be interested in talking a look at your site.
Also, like some business cards, promotional wording added to the bottom of your signature
further stimulates interests in your web site, product, or service. This is what I did for my
signature. The addition of promotional wording at the bottom dramatically improves the
signature as a vehicle for promoting my service.
Netiquette Applies to Signatures Too
Signatures are an unobtrusive, acceptable means of promoting your web site if you don’t get
carried away with it. An acceptable signature is 4-8 lines long. Long, over-hyped signatures will
attract some negative attention. Some discussion groups may cut it off if the signatures is more
than four lines or so.
Don’t Stop at One Signature
Just as some enterprising business people have several different business cards to hand out
depending on the recipient, so should your have several signatures – one for each target
audience. Consider developing a signature specifically for each targeted audience.
Customized signatures that reflect the interests of the recipients are usually more effective
than one generic signature.
Lesson 3 Pg. 5