Signatures are essential on business email. They provide your customer with your contact information. But some businesses turn their signature block into a billboard of advertising: awards won, credentials earned, specials offered, all dressed up in a rainbow of colored fonts bordered with inspiring quotes and exclamation points.

Why? In everyday business emails, you’re emailing someone you know. Your recipient isn’t a complete stranger: You’re emailing to follow up with a potential customer, confirm an appointment, send a proposal, thank someone for a referral, whatever.  You don’t need to “sell” her; you need to communicate with her.

Put your message into the …

According to Rachel Metz of the Associated Press, the website Yelp! is planning to roll out a new feature that will allow business owners to respond to reviews posted by the websites users.

This new feature will address one of the concerns about Yelp! which I mentioned in my previous entry, “Yelp! Not Just Another Exclamation.”  While business owners will still be unable to take down reviews that they dislike, the new feature will at least allow them to contest or address negative reviews.

This feature will be especially important to companies that are new to …

This is a very interesting question, and one that is not as easy to answer as it might first seem.  What looks like a single question is in reality four.
1)  Is it possible to copy text from another website onto my own site?
2)  Is it legal for me to use text from another website on my own site?
3)  Is it ethical for me to use text from another website on my own site?
4)  Is it effective to copy text from another site onto my own site?
Is it possible to copy text from another site onto my own site?

The first question …

Hey! Stop It with the Exclamation Points!

Wow! I get lots of emails that shout at me! Maybe the sender is on her third espresso! Or maybe she hopes her excitement is infectious!

She’s wrong. Exclamation points are more annoying than exciting.

In your business communications, email, newsletter, web content, brochures and flyers, don’t rely on punctuation (or fancy fonts and words in color) to make your point.

Use too many exclamation points and your readers will stop paying attention to any of them. Be deliberate: Exclaim when you know precisely why you’re doing so it and how the punctuation aids your message.

Exclamation points …

So you’ve been told that one of the ways to encourage visitors to visit your site is to post comments on other people’s blogs, but you’re not sure how to go about it.

Here are some tips to make sure that you’re neither too timid nor too aggressive.

Start by Introducing Yourself

The main point is to establish who you are and why your opinions are valuable. One or two sentences should be sufficient. After that, people are going to want to see what you actually have to say.

Respond to What Has Been Written

If …