We write emails to our friends, relatives, anonymous people around the world etc. Many of the people with whom we communicate may already be knowing about our blog and there is a high chance that they already are our subscribers.
But still adding RSS feed signature or adding the “Headline Animator, which displays rotating headlines” will bring some traffic to our blog, as it shows our old article titles and they might be interested to know more and they may endup clicking on the title and visiting your site. Anyway, adding a small piece of code doesn’t hurt or take a lot of time.
Feedburner has got this feature and you can integrate the small piece of basic HTML code to get the animated banner. But the limitation here is, you can see only five most recent items cycling through your feed’s. To over come this you can use some other RSS widgets, but while selecting see that these widgets are created only using basic HTML(for faster loading and user experience).
To use Feedburner animated banner feed as your email signature in Yahoomail, follow these simple steps:-
1. Log into your Yahoo! mail.
2. Click on Options.
3. In the “Management” section, click on the Signature option.
4. Drag and drop your Feedburner animated banner and click on “SAVE“.
If you want this email signature in Gmail, then you have to take some more steps:-
Gmail currently doesn’t allow us to add HTML codes directly into emails. But there are always some workarounds to get our work done!
Actually, you can over come the Gmail signature limitation by using Gmail’s POP3/SMTP features by making use of standard email program (Outlook, Thunderbird, etc.), create a signature in that email program that has your Headline Animator in it, and send your emails through your Gmail account. This is an easy task for those who are already using Outlook etc software.
But for people who are not using such email programs and who are not willing to use such things, there are some other solutions:-
To use the animator in Gmail, all you need is the “Better Gmail” Firefox extension. It adds a check box in your gmail account settings to enable HTML. Remember you must be using “Mozilla Firefox” only to get this to work.
I think everyone needs to give this Firefox extension a try. It also adds many cool features to your gmail, like:- Add Google Calendar link, Add Google Reader “Feeds” link, Air Skin, All pages’ mailto: links compose in Gmail, Attachment Icons, Attachment Icons (Bigger!), Conversation Preview, Attachment Reminder(now integrated in Gmail by Google), Date Search, Filter Assistant, Fixed Font, Folders4Gmail(Great isn’t it?), Force encrypted Gmail connection (https), Forward Thread, GrandCentral Voicemail, Integrate Google Reader, Mail.app(Mac-like skin), Show disk usage as progress bar, Signature Settings: Float/HTML/No dashes, Smart Read Button, Super Clean Skins, TinyURL selected link (Cmd+Shift+T), Unlabeled Message Search etc etc etc etc… So here is the link to download “Better Gmail”.
Drag and Drop:-
One more option to use with Gmail, Yahoomail, hotmail or anyother mailing service is, just drag and drop the widget at the bottom of your email and it will be working fine. But it requires you to do it manually all the time you send an email. Many people follow this simple drag and drop work, as this would provide us with the option of when to add and when not to add the email signature(with feed banner).
Copy the HTML codes generated in Feedburner(animated banner creation) and paste it in a notepad and save it on your hard disk with file name ending with .html. Run it(by clicking on the html file) whenever you write an email. Now drag and drop the animated banner into your email. Its that simple..
It seems like- “this method will not bring any traffic”, and its partly true. As you will not get heavy traffic out of this method. To get more traffic, you must be active in mail groups like yahoogroups, gmail groups etc and you should be sending interesting emails to a group with large number of users. This will surly bring some traffic, as people may forward that email to their friends and then their friends may mail it to their friends…like this, your email(along with your email signature) will reach many people and you may get many visitors and they may even signup to your RSS/email feeds and may become your loyal visitors(but please keep your fingers crossed!). Do not expect a heavy traffic from this method, which dries up your blogs bandwidth.
And another thing I want to mention here before ending this article, is, never think that your emails are marked as SPAM because you are using some HTML codes in your email messages. This will not happen, as today’s email systems has gone far from the basic text, to a high multimedia messaging. So no email service provider is going to mark you as a SPAMMER, for using some basic HTML in your email.
