Shrinking Sig Lines

Some people wonder about how to handle their signature lines and what to put in. Yes, you want the marketing message, but there is the danger that the sig line gets waaaaay too long and people dread looking at it. I've had that reaction to some people's, and realized that my own had become bloated with listings for my writing site, photo site, and four blogs. What I had read as follows:

Erik Sherman
Writer and Photographer
Writing site: http://www.eriksherman.com
Photo site: http://www.erikshermanphoto.com Flash in the Pan blog: http://www.eriksherman.com/the-pan
BizBlast blog: http://www.eriksherman.com/bizblast
En Words blog: http://www.eriksherman.com/enwords
WriterBiz blog: http://www.eriksherman.com/WriterBiz

Ack! Who wants the equivalent of the Cliff Notes for War and Peace staring at them? So I moved all the blog links to a single page on my web site and combined descriptions as follows:

Erik Sherman
Writer and Photographer
Writing site: http://www.eriksherman.com
Writing, Food, and Business Blogs: http://www.eriksherman.com/index_files/BlogPage.htm
Photo site: http://www.erikshermanphoto.com

I could even take a further step and use a redirecting URL, like Tiny, to create something short that would stay within the line. An additional possibility that I literally just considered and put up on my web page (there's something to be said for learning to maintain it yourself) is creating a new subdirectory or subdomain. In this case, http://www.eriksherman.com/blogs leads to the page with all the blog links. So now I have the following:

Erik Sherman
Writer and Photographer
Writing site: http://www.eriksherman.com
Writing, Food, and Business Blogs: http://www.eriksherman.com/blogs
Photo site: http://www.erikshermanphoto.com

Much tidier (and in an email the blog information is all on a single line). Notice that I could have changed the blog line to read "Blogs: http://www.eriksherman.com/blogs". That might have looked simpler, but then I would have gone too far in reduction, no longer giving the reader a clue as to the topics and whether to potentially be interested in clicking the link. The art here, as in writing, is to communicate exactly what you must and nothing more.

Another reason to simplify and centralize where possible is maintenance. If you start including time-dependent things, then you have to remember to edit the sig line. For example, I've seen writers list upcoming articles they have in their sig lines. Talk about something that will look old quickly. Ever get a voice mail with an obviously out-of-date message and shake your head? That's exactly not what you want a potential client to do, and if you have multiple email accounts, you might have to change the signature for each of them in your email program.

For something that will change regularly, like a list of current articles or new book releases, you can do as I did with my blogs. Include one line for a link to your latest and greatest page on your web site, and keep that updated. That reduces the amount of maintenance and you can enhance the look and marketing effectiveness over what will work in an email.