Issue 4 – Refreshing your Cache

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One easy and yet often underutilized FREE outlet for marketing your own business is your e-mail signature. The little tag line at the bottom of all of your correspondence is an easy tool to keep your business at the forefront of people’s minds

How many times have you received an e-mail from a potential client, or potential vendor yet had no immediate method of contacting them, other than a reply e-mail? If it’s a yahoo, gmail or any other free e-mail account, many people stop right there. E-mail snobbery exists! To appear professional, an e-mail address using the same domain as your company website is the best way to go.

Keep your signature as simple as possible. While a certain celebrity or authors quote at the bottom might be inspiring to you, it may potentially be offensive to others. Yes, you might take pride in your country, religion or political views, but unless you intend to upset, irritate or annoy others, best to keep those gems to yourself or your personal e-mail account at best.

Start with your name, your company name, contact phone number and your website address. Adding your company logo is also a good idea as quick visual recognition. It is relatively easy to use your logo and website url in conjunction with one another and create the logo into a direct link to your site.

The formatting of your signature is also important. Try not to make the fonts too fancy, too big or too small! Also, stick to neutral colors, black, grey, navy blue for the least obnoxious results. A signature at size 20 font with pink swirly text can be extremely off-putting and a quick way to ensure your recipient will not take you seriously as a person or a business.

A full signature can often be enough for the first e-mail you send out. If communicating with customers or potential clients, e-mails can often turn into a long thread of responses back and forth. Having to scroll through your signature several times can be annoying. Set up your signature so it only occurs on the initial e-mail but not on replies. Or, if you still feel the need to end each e-mail with some sign off, have a condensed version of the sig tag for replies only.

Finally, make sure the signature is consistent. This doesn’t mean using the same one each day (although that should be a given). It means having some uniformity across your company. Each employee should be using the same format and same specifications for their signature. Set this policy early on for your business. Even if it’s just you sending out the e-mails, have a standard signature that signifies professionalism. Considering that every e-mail you send is a reflection of your business, make it a signature that counts!

To get a PDF version of this information, click here:Issue2

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Rich Site Summary, or Really Simple Syndication (RSS as it is commonly known), is a quick way to deliver updates for websites that make changes to their content. Commonly it is used on blogs, news sites and entertainment pages.

So what does it do? Let’s say you have a conservative 5 different websites that you go to on a daily basis. You are looking for updates, new content and typically go to each of the sites in turn to see if anything is new. YOU are spending YOUR time looking.

Now imagine if you don’t need to look and instead have one central point to go to and see all of the updates from these 5 sites in one area. The updated information is now coming directly to you, rather than you needing to go and search for it. Better? Of course!

Next time you are out at one of your favorite blogs, or informative websites and see the RSS logo (these come in MANY shapes and sizes but should be orange in color), simply click on the icon or link labeled RSS.
the updates is to use a feed reader.

The easiest way to keep in touch with all of this information is with a feed reader. This allows you to grab the feeds from each individual website and keep them all in one place. A good one to look at is the Google Reader. You will need a Google account to login with but they are easy and free to create.

Once you have your reader set up, click on Add a subscription from the top left corner. Either paste in the url you previously copied using the RSS button, or just type in the web address that you wish to start capturing.

Once you have your 5 sites subscribed to, you now only need to come out to one site, your Google Reader. So, now you have more time and can add more sites to review each, helping you stay informed and reading more fun and interesting stories and ideas!

RSS is standard on WordPress, Blogger and other blog tools. Twitter comes with RSS feeds standard. You can also add RSS to your website with some fairly basic programming.

To get a PDF version of this client library issue, click: Issue3

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