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Signatures -- The Long and Short of It>What is the accepted standard for signatures? Who sets these standards? The signatures in question are those blurbs that we include after the body of our main message content in our emails for the purpose of identification and contacts.I'm really not referring to signatures in the respect that Usenet Newsgroups see them. It is pretty much agreed by established netiquette that Usenet signatures should be limited to five lines or less. They should, or may, contain: You can shave a line or two from the above by combining your name and email address plus your company with what you do: Doug Davis dougd@cros.net Getting away from Usenet and, some lists, into the real nitty-gritty of internet marketing, signatures have become a way of sticking that extra ad in there. For better or worse we seem to be stuck with this practice, so don't expect it to go away soon. How wide should your signature be? Text terminals usually had and have a width of 80 characters; this means they can display just as many characters in one row. This is the practical reason why the ultimate text width of email messages and sigs should be no more than 80 characters. But this doesn't work very well in practice. We reply, we forward, we quote, and each time we do we add those little angle brackets to the lines of text in our messages, ">>>>." So we end up having short lines and long lines staggered throughout the text. This looks very unprofessional, even if you're just sending to friends. That's why all the recommendations for different line lengths. Some will not set their character length to anything greater than 72; some 74, others 76, etc. In publishing ezines and newsletters online, however, the standard seems to be 65 characters. This is what most submission guidelines that I have read, recommend. My ezine wraps with hard carriage returns at 65 characters. Almost all of the article submissions I receive are wrapped at 65 characters. If they're not, then I have to reformat them to fit my layout. I don't like reformatting -- it's a time wasting task I could do without. Naturally, sigs in my ezine, and many others, can't be longer than 65 characters either. How many lines? It depends, I suppose, on where you are posting or sending your emails. Discussion lists should be about the same as Usenet, in my opinion. On the other hand if you are posting to opt-in mailing lists for the purpose of advertising your business offerings, there are no rules. It's whatever you can get by with really. Who cares whether you have 20 lines of text and a 4-line sig? How about 4 lines of text and a 20-line sig? I have exactly 128 separate sigs in my MS Outlook 2000 sig file. Some of these are actually 12 line, or more, ads; it's just easier to paste them into the email that way. Remember the aim of your signature is to be read. If you have a humongous sig it not only won't be read, it will possibly provoke anger -- an emotion you don't need in your prospective customers. Signature Dashes The "signature dashes" actually is a line which is used as the first line of a signature. This is described in the "son-of-rfc1036": If a poster or posting agent does append a signature to an article, the signature SHOULD be preceded with a delimiter line containing (only) two hyphens (ASCII 45) followed by one blank (ASCII 32). The sigdashes act as a separator which allows easy recognition of signatures. This line consists of two dashes and a trailing space, ie "-- " (note the space) and thus can be recognized in a data stream as the character sequence "(newline)(dash)(dash)(space)(newline)". Some programs recognize a signature by the (sigdashes). Let me make this perfectly clear: There are no additional characters before, after or in between. This means no whitespace before the dashes, no additional dashes, one space at the end, followed only by an newline which ends the line. That's it! Synopsis: If you are posting to newsgroups or discussion lists keep your sig as short as possible; try not to go over four lines. Personal messages probably should be the same; why would you need all that sig space when you have the entire body of the message? When I'm posting ads to opt-in lists I usually don't include a sig at all. I want the ad to be the focus, not the sig. About the author: Doug Davis is the publisher of "Couch Potato Marketing Ezine", a veritable treasure trove of internet marketing information, plus a section highlighting the freebies available to help you increase your bottomline. We Have Bonuses: http://kabino.com/cpme Circulated by Article Emporium The Importance of Articles in Web Promotion No doubt you have come accross this time and time again; to improve your websites popularity, search engine ranking etc., you need to write articles. You will also probably think, as I did, that I can't do this. There are ways around this. You can purchase the rights to a... Online Marketing: Five Principles That Help You Succeed NOW I have been working for Internet companies since 1994. First at America Online and now in my own marketing and design business. The only online marketing rule I adhere to is that things are constantly changing. That could make marketing difficult. To keep moving forward, I use the ... 20 Totally Easy Ways To Turn Visitors Into Subscribers 1. You could offer your visitors a discount on all the products you sell if they subscribe to your free e-zine. 2. You could offer your visitors a free ebook if they subscribe to your free e-zine. 3. You could offer your visitors a free su... Signatures -- The Long and Short of It >What is the accepted standard for signatures? Who sets these standards? The signatures in question are those blurbs that we include after the body of our main message content in our emails for the purpose of identification and contacts. I'm really not referring to sign... There is a Time to Sell, And a Time to Educate It has often been said that the true nature of marketing is four-fold, what is referred to as the four p's of marketing: * Product * Place (distribution) * Price * Promotion Most people who do business online look at the sole element of Promotion and b... One Way Linking Campaigns This aarticle explains in detail the various issues related to the linking campaign that you will need to mount, to establish your worth in the algorithms of search engines . Some of the issues that we will be tackling in this & subsequent articles are: -Creating one way i... How To Approach A Guru In 5 Easy Steps It's in all the books and courses lately, to be successful online you have to joint venture and tap into established marketers (gurus) huge lists and high traffic websites. If you've ever tried it though, you know that getting ahold of a guru is not always ... Adding Fresh Content to Your Existing Ebook You have permission to reprint ©-by Brian Holte Ok, so you're at that stage where you've gotten just enough content to publish your first e-book, finally the grunt work is out of the way. Sit back and pat yourself on the shoulder for a job well done... What is Google AdSense? In the mid 1990's websites used to earn income by receiving money from advertisers by publishing or allowing companies to deploy a banner ad campaign on your website. Usually these banners would be brilliantly designed to catch the eye of the consumer along with a short message. Th... 10 Ways To Shift Your Sales Into Overdrive 1. Publish testimonials for your free stuff. It would increase their value and if they're viral marketing tools, you'll have more people giving them away. 2. Give your visitors a good time so they will visit your web site again. Use a few jokes, humorous gr... Is your website's link directory even worth having? A reciprocal link directory if a vital part of having a good Google page rank. However there are ways to make it a useful and important part of your website for reasons other than a high ranking in the Google directory. Let's face it, getting (and keeping) a good Goog... Great Site Ranking in Google The Secret's Out How many years did you register your domain name for? If it was only one then Google could hold that against you. Why? Because the majority of Spam websites only register a domain name for one year. A domain name registered for a longer period implies that the... How my page rank went from 0 to 5 in one update. How yours can too. Increase Your Google Page Rank! This article will put a damper on web sites that sell information which will supposedly increase your page rank. I may make some enemies here, but this is already common knowledge. In fact, to make sure it worked, I designed a new ... Buying Textlinks: the Latest SEO Craze With search engine algorithms changing seemingly daily, the quest to rank high in the search engines and stay there is proving to be quite the challenge for most webmasters. One of the more recent popular ways of achieving this is through buying text links on websites that have hig... Search Engine Optimization - Advice and Tactic Unique content is King. Search engines love new, unique and updated content. If you produce new content at a rate of just one reasonably sized page per day and tied in with the other advice throughout the site, I can almost guarantee you will get good listings. Remember though, wri...
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