A while back I wrote a short post about using feedburner to promote your hyperlocal site, you all read this and set up feedburner for your local sites didn’t you?
One thing feedburner provides is the Headline Animator which you can configure to show a number of headlines from your feed. Google mail which most hyperlocal sites use in one form or another now allows you to embed images in to your E-mail signature. This is a feature that was sadly lacking from Gmail for a long time and appeared a while back, as often happens with Google, they roll out a new feature and just don’t tell anyone.
Now you can embed images in to your E-mail signature on Gmail you have another powerful way of promoting your site, each and every time you send an E-mail.
Go to your feed burner account and click on the Publicise tab and then select headline animator as shown below.
Follow the simple instructions to create a headline animator that suits your needs.
Once you have created your animated headline save it and then just below your preview animation you will see an option to add to Typepad, MySpace etc and a drop down, in the drop down select other (just give me the code)
and press next. Next you will get a window that pops up with some code in it like the one below.
Click in the code and it will all highlight for you copy this by using CRTL +C or right click & copy, next open note pad or text pad and paste the code in to it so you can work with it. Now you need to select just part of the code, you are looking for the line of code that comes after src=” I have highlighted this in the code below.
Once you have found this bit of code you need to log in to your GMail account click on settings which is top right of the screen, then scroll down until you see the E-mail signature box, in here you need to click on the Add Image link.
Click on this button and the following window will open
Past the line of code you found earlier in to the top box and you should, if you have the right code, see a preview of the animator like in the screen grab above. If it looks ok press ok then scroll to the bottom of the settings screen and press save.
Now go back to your e-mail and compose a new message, you should see your signature appear in the mail.
Now we need to add a link to your image, you are probably more than familiar with how to do this, being a seasoned blogger, but for those of you who don’t know how to follow my simple instructions below.
- In the E-mail signature box, highlight your image the best way to do this is click on the white space on the right hand side and move the mouse to the left.
- While the image is highlighted click on the chain icon to add a link and the window below will open up
- Enter some text in the text to display (if you want)
- Enter the URL of your site
- Click OK
- Scroll to the bottom of the site and click Save.
Now you will have an animated banner in your E-mail signature which links to your site.
Mike Rawlins
Away from Talk About Local I take photos, fly my quadcopter and walk my two Beagles.
If I'm not doing any of the above then you'll find me volunteering at my local RNLI station as a press officer.
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Thanks, Mike, nice tip!
One thing – rather than trawling through all that code and getting scared (like me!), once the headline animator is created, you can right click it and select ‘copy image URL’
Less scary! 😉
Sas/karmadillo