I’ve had a few requests asking me how to set up an email signature. Sorry for taking so long to get round to it.

The question you may be asking but why an email signature?

It is an easy way for people to make contact with you. One of the frustrations is when people send you an email and there is no way of finding out more about the person who sent you an email. The reality is people are lazy and if you don’t make it easy for people to find and connect with you, they will just move on. Don’t give people an excuse not to connect with you. Also have you considered the person receiving your mail may not know you have a blog, or a Twitter or a Fan page.

Here goes. I’m basing this on the fact that you use an email client which allows you to use html coding. I’m going to use Outlook 2007 for this example.

To begin, you will need the following:

• An html editor such as Dreamweaver or Kompozer which is free
• The images you want to use in your signature
• FTP server access with your FTP login details

In Outlook open up a new message and navigate to signatures, click on signatures.

• Click on option new
• Give a name to your signature file
• Design your signature, at this stage, just add the basic details, such as name, surname, and contact info.
• Then select options for new message and replies
• OK/Save

Now you want to go to your FTP server and upload your images to the images folder in your domain name so the url will look something like: www.mydomain.com/images/nameofimage.jpg remember the file extension, could be .png, .jpg

Once you’ve added all your images you are ready to open up your html editor

Copy and paste this code into the html section of your html editor

<a href=”http://yoursite.com” target=”_blank”><img src=”http://www.yoursite.com/images/imagetitle.jpg” alt=”website” border=”0″></a>

You may want to alter the size of the image but try and get a good size image to upload, e.g. 48px by 48px is a good size.

For each image you want to insert, you need to use the above URL next to the previous one. Add in the destination URL and the destination URL for the image. Once you are done, save this file.

Now it is time to find the signature file you created in Outlook.

For XP, Windows 2003 and 2007 copy the following: %userprofile%\Application Data\Microsoft\Signatures

Click on start and run – paste the line you copied and hit enter

Now you should see 3 files and htm, txt and rtf files. Open up the htm file (also stand for html) in your chosen email editor, copy the html code you created earlier and paste it beneath your contact details and hit save.

Restart your Outlook

PS. Save the html file you created for your signature, you can use this same code in online forums and communities which allow html coding.

Let me know how you get on.

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