Plain old gray, all-text emails get boring fast. That's mostly because many business people just don't know how to liven up their messages by adding varied type faces, colored text and varied font sizes, clickable links, images, divider lines, and so on. The worst offence, however, is to NOT send your emails in the HTML format.

Here are the top ten easiest ways to make your emails zing from now on.

1. SEND IN HTML: Be sure you send your emails in HTML and not plain text mode. To switch from boring plain text to HTML (lets you customize your emails in dozens of ways), open your Outlook email sender/receiver box, and at the top menu, choose: tools>options>mail format, and then, after the line "Compose in this message format" appears in a window, select HTML from the little drop down menu there.

Now, at last, since you are using HTML format instead of plain text, you can dress up your emails and have some fun as well as make your emails stand out when compared to your competitors. Use colors, varied typefaces, font sizes, insert photos, both still and animated images, add cartoons, lines, tables, boxes and other imagery.

However, let's use common sense -- if you are emailing a bereaved family after a funeral don't be including clowns and balloons in your email. Still, you can send messages in HTML that LOOK just as gray and dour as plain text messages do. But why do that now that you can make them zing with so many features?

2. INSERT DIVIDER LINE: Open a blank Outlook email box after you have set it for HTML, and then click your cursor once in the empty typing space. Notice that as soon as you do that click, the top EDITING part of your email box comes alive and the formerly shadowed area on the formatting bar now has bright colors.

To insert a horizontal line from margin to margin, click in the box again, exactly where you want to insert the line, then, on the Insert menu above, click Horizontal Line. The line magically appears across the page. Or, click to the extreme right of the formatting bar, on the box with two tiny "As," and a line, and you can insert a line, too.

Including a line is valuable in dividing sections of a long email, so that the reader understands where one part ends and a new one begins. It simply adds ORDER. It is also a nice tight way to set off a series of photos that are one on top of another.

3. INSERT AN IMAGE: Almost every businessperson has to send a photo eventually to a customer or client. In HTML it is so easy to imbed the picture right inside the email window. The advantage of doing this is that the recipient sees the image right away instead of having to find it in the attachment and laboriously open it with his photo manipulating software. Imbedding the photo is faster and he can STILL save the photo if he needs to. Here are the steps to inserting an image:

• Open a blank email window and click where you want the image to appear.

• On the top menu, click on Insert and choose Picture.

• When you do this a small window opens up. Click on Browse and find the image that you want from your computer or camera, etc.

• Click on the image you want. Click on open and then click ok, or just double click the image and then click ok.

Bang! There's your inserted image in all its glory inside your email and visible.

4. ATTACH AN IMAGE OR FILE:

• In either HTML or plain text emails, click on Insert on the top menu of your email window. Click on File. When you do, you can then browse all the files in your computer.

• Select the file you want to attach, double click it, and it is attached to your email. You can also attach images the same way ... an image is considered a file, too.

5. ADD HYPERLINKS: A hyperlink is another name for a link ... those blue, underlined things that when you click on them, you go to a different web page or to a pre-addressed email window. Well, you can add them to your emails yourself to cut down on the length of your emails and make them far tidier than ones packed with, say, four decks of impossibly long links.

For example, you COULD have a bunch of sentences like this one:

"Sarah, read about the tall ships festival in Dan Point Harbor: http://blog.debbieferrari.com/2007/08/31/dana-point-harbor-real-estate/.

Or, you could shorten the sentence in this way by adding a hyperlink: "Sarah, read about tall ships festival in Dana Point Harbor ... ."

Here's how you do it.

• Highlight a piece of text or an image in your email message.

• On the top menu choose Insert and click on Hyperlink.

• In the little window, type or paste in the URL or email address you want the person to go to when they click on the hyperlinked item.

• Click ok.

You'll see that your text or image has now become "hyperlinked" to an outside location or email and has likely turned blue. To test it, left click on the hyperlinked item and see if it takes you to what you typed in.

Stay tuned for Part II of this series.

Published: November 28, 2007

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Bill Koelzer is a Web marketing consultant to web-proficient agents nationwide. He is co-author, with Barbara Cox, Ph.D., of the Prentice-Hall books, Internet Marketing in Real Estate and Internet Marketing. Bill is also webmaster of Orange County Real Estate, among the most-awarded known Realtor® sites. Visit his website, Koelzer.com or e-mail him at .