As a part of setting up your ActiveRain blog, you should give some thought to your "signature". AR gives you the opportunity to create a signature, or footer, that will display at the bottom of each of your blog posts. If a person has discovered you by means of "google" - the article that they just read is the first they had seen you. Your footer (signature) then is a chance for you to redirect them to your main website or other call to action so that they hopefully won't "surf" away from your sphere.
Your signature should be concise and interesting. In some ways it is like a business card. There is only so much space on a business card, you have to really give thought to picking just the right info. Unlike a business card, your signature in AR doesn't have actual size 'boundaries" - it could go on and on but you should not let it.
First let's look how to get to your signature editing box. On the left side navigation menu, choose Settings. On the page that you are taken to, notice there is an edit box for your signature. Whatever you put in this box will show up at the bottom of each of your blog posts. Also of note, your signature is dynamic which means that when you make a change here, ALL your articles will show what you put here (regardless of whatever signature may have been active at the time that you posted the article)
I wanted to show an example of a signature to illustrate this blog topic, so I got in touch with Michele Miller (one of my subscribers and frequent commenter on my posts!) Michele had a good signature already, but I wanted to make it even better. We worked on it together and came up with what you see below.
Here are some notes on the design of Michele's footer. First of all, I offset the footer with a header bar with blue background. It creates a visual boundary that the main article has ended. I added Michele's portrait because in the virtual world of first contact it makes a stronger impression than just your name. You are trying to get someone to feel comfortable to reach out to you. This way they can "see" who you are. Michele had recently added her handwritten signature to her signature. I like that. It softens the all rigidness of the font-only computer look. Finally, we put the basic contact information such as what you would find on a business card. How do they contact Michele or look at her website? It's all right there.
So we worked on the goals of concise and interesting. How did we do?
I'm going to be writing a couple more articles on signatures. For instance in this example I used an HTML table with cells. I had better teach you how to do that because I know you'll be asking. Also, how do people do those "social media icon buttons"? I'll get to that too! Stay tuned. You can subscribe to my blog if you want to not miss anything!
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