Creating signatures in Gmail
It's easier than you think and more useful than you probably realize today on dottotech
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With today's demo today, we're gonna be talking about creating
signatures in Gmail now, we do a lot of videos on how to use Gmail here on the channel and one of the most requested
Things people ask me is how do I create a signature like yours in my email?
I am going to show you how
Today, but before we do a quick message from our sponsors in the sponsor in this particular case is moi
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All right. Let me show you how to create your signatures now now signatures are the
Bottom of an email where you add information that you want templated you want to be able to send this information?
Every time you send an email, it's a sign off. It's a thank-you. It's perhaps
Contact information. It can be a marketing message
Whatever you want to put in the bottom of each and every email to sign off your email. That's what goes into your signature
I've got a little message. Thanks for being you my fittin handwritten signature and my picture and my name Steve
So that's what I've got added to this one
That's what the signatures are that you can add
Automatically and because it goes on every email you can use this for a variety of different communication marketing and encouragement
Purposes this is how you go about creating them though
We go under the gear menu into settings and in the settings menu in Gmail
You scroll down to the signature area
where you've got a
WYSIWYG
editor that allows you to compose and layout what goes into your signature now the term WYSIWYG stands for what you see is what you
Get so we can put anything in here in this little
HTML editor we can format it and it will look exactly as we create it here in
Our email when we go to send it with new emails when we attach this as a signature
so let's add I don't we'll add we'll add a
Call to action for webinar Wednesday, inviting people to the webinar Wednesday that I was talking about. So I'm gonna say join
us
Join us for
Webinar weddings day now. I'm gonna show you something that's important here. I am gonna put in the URL of the
Link to join us for webinar Wednesday, and I've got it right here web width. There we go now
You see something funny here. It's not showing up with a blue hyperlink like it's a link
That's because here in this editor you actually have to tell it that it's a link
so let me just highlight the text here and
I'm gonna click on the link now
if I've done this at the beginning if I put this in as a link at the beginning it would have actually brought up a
Whole different dialog box. I'll do another one
I'll put it in my
Cursor here and see if I click on the link. It puts it in and says do you want it to be a link?
No, what we can actually do this. Let's make it even nicer. Let's fix it up. I should have thought of that
Join us for a webinar Wednesday. I'm gonna highlight that text. I'm gonna make that text the link
I've got a little tool here that adds that overlay. There we go
And let's put in
There we go
Okay. Now I've got a nice hyperlink in my signature that says join us for webinar Wednesday now here is the most important thing
I'm going to teach you today
Don't just exit out of this screen in
Anytime you make any changes to the settings in Gmail
You have to scroll way down to the bottom of the screen and you have to find the tiniest button in
existence the Save Changes button
I don't know why
Google makes this button so small and why they don't make it big and kind of sliding up and down because if you don't click
On this none of the changes you in?
the in in the settings
Will take hold and I know people get confused about this all the time because it's really easy to miss that button now they will
If you try and exit, they will give you a prompt you with a dialog box
It says are you sure you want to leave but I don't think people pay as close attention to that as a big ass
Save button, I think a big ass a button is what's called for but that might be just me
Let's see if our signature worked
There it is. Join us for webinar Wednesday. So now people can click on that and they can join us for webinar Wednesday
Isn't that sweet now if you want to add kind of fancier things?
To it if you want to add photos or if you want to do a written signature
You can do that as well just by if we take a look here in that dialog box if we just take a look here
We've got the ability to add an image and insert an image
Now you're going to want to be careful about the size of the image that you include and making sure that it's small enough
But the WYSIWYG editor will show you just how that image looks so adding your logo or a photo of yourself
That's all a great thing to do. Now. I
also want to show you how to add a handwritten signature because this will actually
Flummox a lot of people getting a signature in now if you're really good
artistically you can go into a graphics package and use your mouse and
Recreate your handwritten signature. I can't do that
so actually creating a signature that I could put in the bottom of the email it took me a little bit of
macgyvering to figure out the entire process
I'm just gonna walk you through it really quickly one way to do it if you're competent in a Photoshop or graphics applications
You don't need this part of the tutorial, but if you're not you may need it
So what I did is I just took up an envelope and I wrote my signature on it and I used a black pen
I took my phone and I took a picture of it and then I uploaded the photo from the phone to the desktop of my
computer here
and now the image that I uploaded it doesn't look all that good actually if we take a look at it because it's
Doesn't make the paper really white behind because it's not perfectly wait. So if I was to put this signature in
my
Email it would look out of place because the white matte background wouldn't match
So I either have to make the signature a PNG so a transparent file or I have to make the background
Perfectly white so it looks okay in my email. So how do we go about doing that?
Well, you can if you are if you are comfortable using a tool like Photoshop
You can do it all yourself and you don't need me to show you
but if you're not comfortable with Photoshop and graphics applications
this is one way that you might consider doing it who is fooling around with Google Drive the other day I found that in our
Additional apps that we have available to us in Google Drive is one called pixel editor
there is
Pixlr editor
Which is a
Photo editing app when I open that up
it looks a lot like Photoshop and it's free and it's part of Google Drive now, so I
Open it. So what you can do is you can connect that app. Let's open it up and let's open the image
That I just saved which is the signature sample
and
There you can go through and you can clean up this image as you would in Photoshop removing the background in
Creating a nice white signature. Now. There's a couple of different ways you can do this
I I'm not a great great photo editor, but I know the first thing that I want to do is I want to rotate this
90 degrees clockwise, I think
Not being
Great. There we go. There we go
So we got the signature now and actually I'm going to do is I'm just gonna highlight the signature itself. Make it smaller there
We go. I've just reduced the amount of size now
What we want to do is we want to remove that that kind of beige ePaper background from the back now
They've got this magic wand tool which will select the similar color
but it's not going to do a nice job of cleaning out this background because
The there there's too many
Variations in the color so but there's a way to do it watch here. See here
You have the tolerance if we turn up the tolerance of this to here and then reuse
That tool that magic wand tool and click again. It's gonna find all the color that's even close to being similar on the outside here
Other colors you have to play with it a bit to get the right mix
There we go. That looks pretty good. Is that gonna do it? And actually it was a little bit too much
Let's turn it down just a bit
Maybe there what do you think?
As I say I'm not the world's best photo editor, but I get the job done that looks like it's getting it done
Oh that cleaned it out nicely
now we can also go in and we can select all of the stuff on the inside and this is how you can create an
a signature that's gonna look nice and clean at the bottom of
your
email now a couple of tips there is I did use a black pen that in a kind of a thicker pen that created the
Nice signature and it's worth doing and you don't have to do this once right
you only have to do it once go through and clean it all up and then you could save this as either a PNG or
just as a JPEG because it'll it'll be fine just as a jpg file and
We can then upload it. Let me show you how to do that into
The signature to drop it in the bottom of your email and you go here under the insert image and there you could upload the
Image to the to the file now
I realize that's getting down in the weeds a bit
but I know a lot of you want to do that signature and you can't necessarily figure out how to get it in and the
Cool thing is you can actually use that signature for other online purposes
You've now have a nice clean signature on a white background that you can use for a variety of different online applications
Now if you have any comments, I would love to hear what you have to say. Are you using signatures in Gmail?
What other tips do you want to learn about about using Gmail or any other of the Google online services?
I would love to know and I'll do my best
To create a video to support whatever it is that you folks are looking for if you found today's video to be useful
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Till next time I'm Steve dotto
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