What is an easy way for you to reach hundreds of people every single day with your marketing message?

In your email signature!

Many of us send hundreds of emails each day to friends, family, and coworkers. Sometimes these emails are forwarded on to hundreds of additional people. The potential reach (just from your email message) is huge!

What if everyone of these people saw your marketing message? They can, if you include the key components in your email signature.

If you are an entrepreneur or small business owner, your email signature should be about promoting YOUR COMPANY. If you see yourself as the brand and are a speaker or entertainer, your email signature should focus on promoting YOU.

What should be included in every successful email signature?

• Your full name
• Your email address
• Your phone number
• Your company or store address if relevant
• Your company’s website

This information is equivalent to writing a return address on a piece of mail – it ensures that what you send can easily get tracked back to you. Everyone, no matter what their business, should have this information in their signature.

Now, in order to up your online and social media reach, you may want to include the following:

• Link to your Facebook profile
• Link to your company’s Facebook page (if you have one)
• Link to your LinkedIn profile
• Link to follow you on Twitter

Why are all these links necessary? Simple--you have profiles and accounts on these websites for a reason – to get yourself out there and connect with people. How can you connect with people if you don’t make yourself available?

There is incredible possibility for return from setting up an email signature. If only five people request to connect with you, wasn’t that worth the five minutes it took to set up your signature?

MORE ABOUT ALYSSA

Alyssa is a graduate of Cornell University. She has worked at companies including CNN, FoxNews, the Embassy of Israel, & Ruder Finn. She and her husband currently reside in Tel Aviv, Israel.

Even though I live in Israel, one of the most important tasks I do for one of my clients is event-planning for a monthly gathering she hosts. It’s an entrepreneur-oriented happening where people apply to present their ideas to a panel of experts. An audience of their peers and industry leaders come to watch and network before and after. Some of the key steps I take to plan and manage this event involve:

Venue

My client is lucky in that she has local corporate and collegiate sponsorship that provide her with a space to hold her events. Over the course of the month, I keep in touch with the support staff of the sponsor organization, arrange for refreshments to be ordered and paid for, create a customized guest list for the building’s security, and ensure everyone on site understands the seating and technical setup required.

Applications

Since starting, I have become the primary contact for all applicants to this event. Via email, I communicate on a daily basis with potential presenters about the application rules, I collect the documents required, and then I file them on a shared system called DropBox so my client can access them. When the decision has been made, I contact the winners and losers. Up until the day of the event, I remain the first contact, answering questions, updating their presentations, and ensuring that presenters are as well informed as possible.

Invitations and PR

My client uses Meetup.com as her primary event-planning tool. Each event is written up and posted there as soon as they are scheduled. Once a week for the month before the event, I sent an e-blast to our members with a reminder about the event with direct links to the RSVP page. On the week of the event, I send daily reminders. As it’s a popular meeting with limited space, we take no walk-ins, and it’s essential people RSVP beforehand.

I also create another brief listing with all the vital information that I post all over the internet in places where our demographic would surf. This includes Craig’s List, Crain’s NY Business, Bernardo’s List, and much more. Each of these listings is linked to the Meetup.com page, the only place RSVP’s are accepted.

Final Week and Event Day

The week of the event I communicate with the presenters, and I send reminders to the expert panel and the people who help set up. Finally, I double check the refreshments are being taken care of, and I send the venue and my client the final RSVP list.

That's it! Through email and phone, I'm able to plan events in New York City for my client, while I'm sitting here in Israel.

MORE ABOUT IRENE

Irene has over 10 years of experience in marketing and writing. An experienced editor, writer, and journalist, Irene founded the Contributing Relations department for the leading financial website, Seeking Alpha, where she served as a web editor and editorial liaison. Prior to moving to Israel, Irene worked as the Media Relations Manager for the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago. Irene received her Bachelor’s of Arts from the University of Chicago, and her Master’s of Fine Arts from Middlesex University London. She is also a graduate of the Tadmor Culinary School. Irene is originally from Chicago, and lived in London, Dublin, Paris, Moscow and Bangkok before settling in Tel Aviv.

With the news that Oprah will not be hosting her now-famous “Favorite Things” show this year, in which she promotes her favorite items for the holiday seasons (bringing a boon of publicity to the products and making them holiday season must-haves), I began to think about my own “Favorite Things”.

As the Director of Marketing for Secretary in Israel, I help my clients increase their presence via both traditional and online media. This work often ranges from helping to secure interviews, schedule and promote my clients’ events, book speaking engagements, and connect with and continue to build their online following through Twitter and Facebook.

To succeed in all these tasks is no simple feat, and I often rely on some free online tools to help my clients in their marketing endeavors.

One of my favorite online tools is Screenhunter, a free online tool that you can easily download onto your desktop. Screenhunter allows you to take photo/screen images of anything that appears on your computer. I often use this software when creating flyers for my clients’ events or when building their online media portfolio. Oftentimes, my clients or their products are referenced on a blog – however, blog posts are not permanent and can be removed at any time. In order to show that my clients’ received mention on a blog, I will take a screen capture image to add to the “As Seen In” page of my clients’ websites.

Another fantastic free tool is Scribd. Scribd is a simple to use website for uploading documents and photos. One of my clients has a large following on Facebook and she likes to share with them articles she has written or appeared in, presentations she has made, poems that inspire her, and more. Unfortunately, Facebook does not currently have an application for uploading documents to share with the general public; however, this is where Scribd comes in. Simply upload a document to Scribd and it has a permanent hosting spot on the internet. Scribd furnishes you with a link which you can send to anyone you choose so that they can read and download the document you have uploaded. If you choose, you can also set Scribd to sync with your Facebook and Twitter accounts so that as soon as you upload a document to Scribd, a Tweet is sent out, or your Facebook status updated to announce the document that you have uploaded and provide your followers with a direct link.

Last but not least of my favorite free tools is Twuffer. Twuffer is a free online service for scheduling and sending out Tweets via Twitter. One of my clients likes to connect with her followers via Twitter at least once a day and has provided me with a list of Tweets to send out on her behalf each day. While it is not difficult to post to Twitter on a daily basis, this client wants the Tweets to go out at a certain time each day PST, which is already late evening here in Israel. To solve this dilemma I investigated a few Tweet scheduling services but was disappointed by their inconsistent postings. Twuffer allows you to schedule month’s worth of Tweets in advance and sends them out at the exact time and date you select. (One piece of advice – it takes 24 hours for Twuffer to sync with your Twitter account, so your first one or two Tweets may not go out as scheduled. After that, however, it is smooth sailing.)

Though I may not yet have the same reach as Oprah, I hope that this list of “Favorite Things” is helpful to you in all of your online marketing endeavors!

MORE ABOUT ALYSSA

Alyssa is a graduate of Cornell University. She has worked at companies including CNN, FoxNews, the Embassy of Israel, & Ruder Finn. She and her husband currently reside in Tel Aviv, Israel.

One of my clients has had great success attracting new clients by attending industry conferences and trade shows. These give him a chance to get his company’s services out there in a short time period, thereby enabling him to attract new clients. (He can also check out his competitors, which is a bonus!)

My client lets me know when there is a big industry conference coming up that he wants to attend. I then check out whether it is financially worth it for him to go as an attendee, speaker, or exhibitor.

To answer the question, “What are the potential returns?”, I delve into previous year’s exhibitor lists – these can be obtained from the conference organizers and can also usually be found online. The conference would normally charge a few hundred dollars for the list around the time of a conference, but a year later, they are happy to pass it on. This list contains a lot of valuable information.

I scroll through list, which can be as long as 2,000 attendees, and I pick out those companies with whom we are already working. These are the companies my client will definitely want to “catch up” with at the conference. I also look for companies that my client would love to make initial contact with.

If there is a lot of potential (meaning if there are a lot of companies we want to meet with), my client then considers taking a small space – even just a table and a chair. Also, my client considers taking a colleague, so while he mans the stall, getting people’s reactions to our service and taking down contact details, my client can do the critical networking, taking on the important initial ‘chat’ and following up with current clients to see if there are ‘any other business’ needs they may have.

Since my client is confident, we offer him to be a speaker. The speakers get wonderful advertising and can talk to a large audience in one go, getting the company message across to the ‘masses’. (But be sure if you go this route, you can speak well, your presentation looks great (get your VA to work on this with you!), it is interesting, captivating and you have rehearsed it well!!).

Further pre-conference preparation includes prioritizing prospects and pre-arranging networking opportunities through meetings, breakfast, lunches and dinners. The more meetings set up in advance I can do, the happier my client is, knowing he has secured face to face time with some great potential customers.

During the conference, my client can go on to collect 100+ new contacts which he faxes to me. I then create a spreadsheet and database with these contacts. I then follow up with each customer by email, sending over a copy of our company materials and asking to make a short appointment with the contact and my client. This gets the ball rolling ‘while the iron is still hot’ and works very well, as it has lead to some wonderful new business opportunities.

By working closely together throughout the year and knowing about my client’s business, current customers and potential customers, I’m able to take a lot of the preparation and follow-up workload off him. This helps him to free his time up for his sales pitches which then ensures that his conference opportunities result in new clients!

MORE ABOUT JACKI

Jacki has been a top-level executive assistant for 20 years. She spent nearly 6 years working for the top lawyer at Goldman Sachs and has since worked for a variety of businesses, both in-person and virtually.

For one of my current clients, I am doing a fascinating telemarketing project. In short, I am calling a list of prospects in the USA (that my client gave me), and I'm inquiring to see if they're interested in attending my client's online classes. I'm just asking for an email address; my client will email more info later on.

I started the project with our client training us via a free conference call (using FreeConferenceCall.com). The conference call has great call quality; and it sounds like each of us are in the same room.

The initial training call was at 9 am California-time, which is currently 6 pm Israel-time. (Normally it's 7 pm Israel-time, but due to daylight savings time changing earlier here, I are now 9 hours ahead of the West Coast as opposed to 10 hours.) Our client trained us on the project in less than 1 hour! Not bad, especially considering I'm sitting in a completely different time zone.

I use my Skype phone to make the calls, through which I have a USA phone line (in the Los Angeles area code). I pay a small monthly fee and am able to have unlimited calls to the US. Plus, the people I speak with can call me back, too, using my 323-phone number. They have no idea that I'm not in Los Angeles!

Since I don't share an office with my client, I track my telemarketing progress in Google Spreadsheets, the live-editing, shared document program.

All the people on the project--myself, another VA, our Director of Client Relations, and our client-edit the same spreadsheet. Our spreadsheet for the project updates in real time. I'm able to enter my information into the spreadsheet, and my client can also login and enter information or see my progress at the same time. If my client needs to clarify a detail, they can call my “Los Angeles” landline that rings here in Israel, and I can speak to them directly.

Why would I, as a college-educated professional from America want to do a telemarketing project? It's because my husband is doing full-time, post-graduate studies here in Israel, so this year, I am the primary breadwinner in the family. And as much as I love living here, it is hard to find good-paying jobs, no matter how qualified I am by American standards.

That's why I enjoy this project so much. I get to work in English with other Americans (the prospects that I am calling). Plus, I work from home (which means I save on commuting time). I realize how lucky I am to be employed by my client.

Living in Israel has taught me true lessons about taking opportunities. Secretary In Israel, an English-speaking, innovative, American company, is a true gem of an opportunity for me.