Blogging Tips and Tricks: Managing your email

Now that I’ve been blogging for a year and a half, I’ve been able to figure out some neat tricks to help keep my blogging life organized when my offline life gets hectic. While I’m by no means an expert, I figured I would share a few of my favorite gmail tricks that have helped me over the past few years.

If you’re anything like me, you have more than one email account to manage and sometimes it can be a bit too much. You know, you started with one but then you decided to start a blog so you created an email address for that. And then you buy a domain, so now you have an email address for that. At this point, you potentially have blog emails coming into three different email addresses! It can be a lot to deal with, but luckily there are a lot of great tricks in Gmail that you can use to help keep your email organized. If you don’t use gmail, I would highly suggest switching over! 

Set up all of your accounts to forward to forward to your main gmail account. For me, this was an account that I had been operating out of for a really long time and I mainly use that for all of my email business. Since forwarding emails is different for every account that you use (yahoo vs hotmail vs your own domain), I’m going to skip over that step. I’ll wait here while you set up your forwarding.

All set? Awesome! Now we’ll move on to “reply to.” For me, “reply to” is really important. You don’t want to confuse people by responding from a different address. Luckily, with gmail you can set it up when you hit reply, it’ll automatically switch it to whatever email address the message was sent to.

To do this:

1. Go to Settings (the little gadget in the upper right hand corner) and click on the Accounts and Imports tab.

2. Scroll down to “Send mail as” and under “When replying to a message” click the button for “reply from the same address the message was sent to.”

That’s it! Next, we’ll set up your signature.

Creating a signature is also important for your blogging account and any other business accounts you may have. To set up your signature in gmail, go to the General tab in Settings. Scroll down to the signature section and select your blogging email address. The fun part about email is that you can add in any icons you may have (like your favicon or social media icons). I like to keep my signature pretty simple with my URL and social media accounts.

Since you already set up your “reply as” your signature will be inserted whenever you go to respond to an email!

In my next blogging tips and tricks email, I’ll go over how to use the filters feature to help keep your emails organized. 

Any questions? Leave them below or email me.