Your personal email is a great way to improve your site traffic, for at least two major reasons:
- You are sending a personal message to someone. You should have a great deal of trust in what you say and recommend. Your signature link to a site leverages that trust.
- It helps create a mindset to tailor your site to optimizing your links and ALT tags to effective communication to Google about what your pages are about.
If you can’t put a good reason in your email for someone to visit your online presence to the people you are emailing, then you are doing something wrong. Sorry to be so direct, but is it that hard to have something worthwhile to share with those you are emailing?
If you are trying to promote or market yourself and you cannot put a softsell reason to have someone visit your online presence (website, Facebook page, Linkedin page, any of your blogs, where you have posted on someone else’s blogs) then you are either too selfish in not helping others out by sharing your information, or you are way too shy about your knowledge and wisdom.
To paraphrase podcaster (et al) Douglas E Welch puts it ‘if you have one more piece of knowledge than someone else in some area’ then you are an expert.
Your expertise is what you want to be sharing through your online presence. That presence should be linking back to your website. As you share your expertise, you should ‘naturally’ be creating more content that the search engines can use to understand why you should rank high in their listings.
So the key is to be altruistic and give your expertise and wisdom away. Think about how you would ‘gently’ let others know about your knowledge and put links in your email signature. Then look at how to describe that wisdom in short snippets -
- 5 ways to work more efficiently
- 3 ways to lose weight
- My favorite wines in the last year
- How I improved my business 15%
- How I improved the health of over 1000 patients
- How I helped 200 people save money with xx product
- My favorite flowers for clay soils in the midwest
These quick descriptions belong in your email signature. They also belong in your blog posts, comments where appropriate on other sites, and in your links to specific pages on your site. These descriptions also tell Google what your pages of content are about.
These links should not just be to your home page, but specific links to specific information on your online presence. I would recommend creating a catalog of signatures and rotate them on a regular basis so that people know to pay attention to the extra ‘nugget of knowledge’ you give in each of your emails. That little bit extra you give in each interaction with your visitors/clients/friends/community.
Start thinking about helping others with your email signature, and you can help yourself.
Thanks to Dr. Kent Christianson for the inspiration to this blog
