Tech, Startups, Capital, Ideas.

BlogSigs makes it easy to drive more readers to your blog. It automatically grabs the title of your latest blog post from your RSS feed and puts it in your email signature as a link. When your email recipients read your email, they also see the title of your latest blog post and are a lot more likely to check out your blog. Now for the details:

• How do you use BlogSigs?
• How do I have time to work on this and have three lunches a day?
• Learning from BlogSigs
• Can BlogSigs write your blog entries for you?

Blogsigs is also a great way for startups to have their employees promote a company blog ” have all your employees run BlogSigs and it inserts a link to the company’s latest blog post in their emails. With just about every startup having a blog these days, BlogSigs is a must, and it works on both Windows and Macs.

How do you use BlogSigs?
Go to www.blogsigs.com. The Windows version works with Outlook, Gmail, Y! Mail, and Hotmail. The Mac version which currently supports mail.app and Entourage; Gmail support is in the works.

Simply download the version you want, run the installation program, and specify your RSS feed in BlogSigs. (On the Mac, you’ll need to restart mail.app or Entourage for your signature to update the first time.)

BlogSigs polls your RSS feed from time to time to see if it has changed. If it has, it updates your email signature with the new post title and a link to it. Of course, you could do this manually, but BlogSigs makes it a lot easier ” especially if you update your blog at least a few times a week.

How do I have time to work on this and have three lunches a day?
Trust me, it’s not easy. But as the song goes, “I get by with a little help from my friends.”

In addition to promoting my own blog, BlogSigs was a way for me to keep my toe in the water in a small way and for me to practice what I preach: that while it still costs a lot to scale a company, it’s easy and capital efficient to get a new idea to market with today’s technology building blocks.

I had lunch with Tom Cole at Trinity Ventures. We talked about a number of subjects at that meal and I mentioned to him my idea for BlogSigs. He expressed interest in collaborating; it was a great way for us to get to know each other better.

Learning from BlogSigs

• Draw out your design. Tom laid out the BlogSigs web site on a few pieces of paper and scanned them in as a PDF. I highly recommend this approach to web site design. It’s often hard to communicate what you want in terms of design in words, and drawing out a sketch of a site on paper and then scanning it in is a very smart approach and saves a ton of time.
• Be persistent. BlogSigs was developed by a set of developers on an online coder marketplace. The project proved too hard for the original developer, but a second developer was able to pull it off after some back and forth. (It was a relief after pulling the plug on the first developer, and in hindsight, as with just about every case where I have decided to make a people change, I would have done it even sooner.) Meanwhile, the web site was up and running in no time thanks to Mariano Iglesias, who is a real pro.
• Build for your users. BlogSigs originally started out as a Windows-only application. But a lot of bloggers are Mac users. A number of users asked for a Mac version, and Noah Kagan, thankfully, was especially insistent. Noah is not only an excellent marketer but also a great “voice of the user/customer,” which is a role that every startup needs. Nic Thompson of Full Function Software built the Mac version and made life easy by doing a great job.

Can BlogSigs write your blog entries for you?
That’s in the premium version, coming out real soon now…

While BlogSigs can’t write your entries for you, it can help you grow your audience. The more you tell people about your blog, the more you’ll want to keep it updated. So while BlogSigs can’t write your entries for you, it can give you the incentive to keep your blog updated. The rest is up to you!