One easy way to increase traffic and awareness of your blog is to include the web address (URL) in your email signature. According to a December, 2008 study by The Radicati Group, the average corporate employee sends 38 emails each day. That's over 800 outbound emails a month per employee. Whether you're self employed and have zero employees or you lead a team of 50 and each person makes the addition to their signatures, this is a great way to increase awareness of your blog regularly.
Most professionals have a common email signature and will usually link to their company website. If your company or department (or boss) has a blog, go ahead and add it to your email signature.
Here's mine:
Bill Seaver
MicroExplosion Media
Phone: 615-473-0396
Twitter: http://twitter.com/billseaver
Blog: http://MicroExplosion.com
Podcast: http://TheNewMediology.com
Be sure to do these two things on your email signature:
- Make it clear that the link is for a blog...meaning say: Blog - http://MicroExplosion.com rather than putting the address without the descriptive "blog" text. This will be especially important if you're promoting different URLs in the signature and people won't necessarily know what they all are.
- Always add the http://. It's not enough to just give it the "www.your_website.com" because many email services won't automatically hyperlink the URL without the http://. You want people to see the link and click it. Without the http:// you may be forcing them to copy and paste the URL in their web browser, and most people probably won't take those extra steps.
Adding the blog URL to your email signature may seem so easy or obvious that it's not worth mentioning, but if you're not doing it, you're potentially missing hundreds or thousands of people visiting your blog every month.