Add a link to your last blog post to your email signature

Some bloggers and webmasters put links to their blogs on their email signatures. It’s another way of publicizing. But when your contacts see the same signature with the same links on every mail, they learn to ignore it. This can happen with anything that doesn’t change for a while. This is why you see new ads on TV every few months for the same products. If you seriously want to promote your blog through email signature, you should make your signature dynamic.

This can be done with a little utility called Blogspreading.

BlogSpreading is a free tool that automatically appends a link to the latest post in your blog to your email signature. So instead of a static link, your signature changes every time you update your blog. Not only can that break the signature-blindness your recipients may have developed, it can even entice them to actually click on the links to read your post.

How does it work?

Blogspreading will work with any email client that allows addition of email signature through an external signature template saved on your hard disk. Almost all modern email software have this feature, at least Microsoft Outlook, Outlook Express and Thunderbird has it. BlogSpreading can process this signature file in such a way that it always contains a link to the latest post in your blog.

To begin, you have to first configure BlogSpreading and then configure your email client. On BlogSpreading you have to enter the URL of your blog’s RSS feed and click “Get Data”. The title and link to your last blog post will be retrieved. You can’t edit the title but you can edit the template of the signature. Add your custom messages and arrange the position of the link, title etc. Once you are satisfied with your signature export it as a template. 

Next, open your email software and configure it to add this signature template to every outgoing email.

Now every time you update your blog, launch Blogspreading and click on “Update”. This will update the signature file with your latest post. The next time you write and send a mail, your email software will retrieve the signature file from your hard disk, which now contains the link to your most recent blog post, and append it to the mail.

Unfortunately, the process of updating the signature file is not automatic. You have to do it after every new post. In case you don’t want to open the application there is a smaller command line tool that you can use to update. BlogSpreading is sorely missing the auto-update feature, otherwise it’s a useful software. Besides, it isn’t likely we will see one in future because the software hasn’t been updated since November 2007.