Every day I get emails from people with professional looking signatures attached to them. I’ll admit that my old signature was from the dark ages; just text. I decided enough was enough and set about creating my own fancy signature, with some help from my good friend James Kontargyris.

It wasn’t as tricky as I thought it would be, here’s how to do it.

First, decide how you want the signature to look. Mine was easy: Images for Twitter, Facebook and my Blog all of which are hyper-linked to the relevant place

Next you’ll need to find the images that you want to use and host them somewhere on the internet. Photobucket and Dropbox are great for this.

Now load up Thunderbird and create a new email

 Click on the ‘Insert a Link’ button and select ‘Image’.

 In this screen you will enter the properties for the image that you have hosted on Photobucket, DropBox etc…

 On the location tab enter the url where the image is hosted, enter your Tooltip text (displayed when someone hovers over the image with their mouse) and then the alternate text as not everyone allows HTML emails

Next click on the ‘Dimensions’ tab, this is where you set the size of the image as not all of them will be the same size. Making sure all the images are the same size and not huge will make the signature look a lot better.

Click on ‘Custom Size’ and enter the height and width that you want the image to be. If you like, you can alter other properties on the advanced tab.

Almost there now, click on the ‘Link’ tab and enter the website address where you want the image to link to if the recipient clicks on it. This can be anywhere you want, but try to keep it consistent with the image! When you are done click ‘OK’

‘But I want more than one image in my signature’ – No problem, just repeat the previous steps until you are ready for the next step.

 When you are ready press Ctrl+A to select all the content in the email. At the top of the message window click Insert → HTML and you will see the raw HTML code for your email. Click in the box and press CTRL+A again, then CTRL+C to copy it to your clipboard.

 Now go back into the main Thunderbird window and go to Tools → Account Settings

 In the signatures box, ensure that ‘Use HTML’ is checked and all you need to do now is paste (CTRL+V) the HTML text which you copied in the last step. Click OK and go to create a new message and your new signature will be there.

 Should the signature not show, go back to Tools → Account Settings and under the Composition & Addressing tab ensure that ‘Compose Messages in HTML Format’ is checked.

 I hope that you have found this guide useful and it will help you create some fantastic new email signatures. Let me know how you get on…

Most of us at some point in our working lives will have taken a short break from work and come back to hundreds of emails, we then check through these emails and get behind on our work. I’ve found a few techniques that really help when trying to balance a heavy workload with a heavy inbox.

Scheduling

Set aside some time during the day just to check your emails. I usually do 15 minutes in the morning, 15 minutes at dinner time and then a quick check before I finish for the day. I find that this is far more productive than checking every single time and email arrives.

Don’t respond until you have to

If you have been cc’d in on an email that is going back-and-forth a lot, just wait until the first few responses have been made before replying. One of your questions/points may be made by someone else, meaning that you don’t need to do anything. If one of the questions in the email is directed at you, reply during your scheduled time.

Time Zones

If you’ve been sent an email from someone at the other side of the world, the chances are that they won’t be at their PC when you are at yours. Save replying to this email until one of your later scheduled times.

Auto responders

If you are going away for a few days, make sure enable your out-of-office message, along with a note to say when you are returning. Hopefully people will take notice and not send a lot of emails for you to go through when you get back.

Prioritise

Create folders within your email for different priority levels. If you receive an email about a night out in a month’s time, that’s fairly low priority – file it away until you have more spare time to go though it. Leave the very high priority e-mails on your home-screen so you can deal with them during a scheduled time.

Un-Subscribe

Most of us will get newsletters and other circulars that come through to us regularly. If they are not of mega importance unsubscribe from them and bookmark the relevant website in your browser to check when you are online.

How do you keep on top of the email overload?

This is the final part of this extended blog, I hope that you have read the previous 2 posts (links at the bottom) and have found something that you are able to implement into your business.

So far we’ve gone through the initial steps of getting yourself organised when you first start out with your own business (Part 1) and then looked at a few tips to help keep things in order when you are up and running and have a busy schedule (part 2). In this part I’ll list a few tips that will help you as your business continues to grow and space becomes a precious commodity in your office.

1. Try to store as much information on your computer as possible. How many of us raise an invoice or buy something online and then print out the invoice, file it away and never look at it again? By investing in a USB memory stick or an external hard-drive you can avoid all this paper and save everything directly to it as a PDF or HTML file to be viewed when you need it. Always make sure that you keep a back-up of these files somewhere just incase the worst happens. I suggest backing up everything to a CD/DVD at the end of each week.
2. Buy a large monitor. Whilst this may be a large investment for your business it will save you lots of time. A widescreen monitor will allow you to have 2 windows open side by side at the same time enabling you to view a document on screen and then enter the information on it into a spreadsheet, Word file etc.. It will save time and space becasue you won’t have the need to constantly switch between windows on the screen and you won’t need to print anything out
3. Make the most of E-Mail. Time is a precious thing in business so why waste time and money putting something in the post? When you raise an invoice send it via e-mail as a PDF or read-only file. Your customer will receive it instantly and cannot use the ‘it got lost/delayed in the post’ excuse. If you have to send a document in the post (perhaps it’s a signed document for the bank), email it as well to allow the recipient to see it before the hard copy arrives.

I hope that you have enjoyed reading these short blog posts and have been able to implement some of the ideas into your business. If you have any other tips that may help people, please leave a comment.

Tips For Keeping Organised – Part 1

Tips For Keeping Organised – Part 2