Favicons – Stand Out From Other Sites and Bookmarks
A fun but good tip article from our collection of free affiliate marketing tips.
So some are you asking “What is a Favicon?” Favicon is short for “favorites icon”. It is the very small image that appears in your site’s browser address bar just to the left of your URL.
If you do not have your own favicon set up then you get a default favicon, whatever your browser or site builder sets for you.
So “why is a favicon important?” you ask. That is a good question.
As an affiliate marketer you hope your visitors to your website will bookmark your site and return, hopefully often! If you are like me you have hundreds of bookmarks in dozens of folders.
Have you ever had problems finding that one bookmark you want to use because it has the same default favicon beside it as almost all others in your bookmark folder? I know I certainly have.
Having your own favicon for your site means when the visitor visits your site and bookmarks it the bookmark will have your favicon next to it and it will be easily found by the visitor when he wants to return to your site.
Besides, they are kind of cool!
Now a favicon is only 16 by 16 pixels in size and that makes it a bit difficult to make one that is simplistic enough to be identified.
Most will use websites to make their favicon and then download it to their hard drive to use.
Some good websites to make your own free favicon are:
Now if you are fortunate enough to own Adobe Photoshop there is a site to go for instructions and a plug-in:
My favorite site not only has a generator but hundreds of favicons you can download free and use for any site:
FreeFavicon.com – Just download the favicon you want (rename it favicon before using it).
Now the FireFox browser many of us use is very favicon friendly. You could build and save a 16×16 px file in the following names and formats and FireFox will know what you are up to:
- Favicon.ico
- Favicon.png
- Favicon.gif
- Favicon.jpg
However, Internet Explorer (IE) does not recognize all these formats and you will have to use Favicon.ico or it will not recognize it as your favicon! With that in mind I would only use the favicon.ico format.
The next thing you need to know is that the favicon needs to be in your root (home) directory folder of your website.
In many cases once you have your favicon loaded correctly it will show up for you in the address bar and the tab in your browser. Now you may have to dump your cache or refresh a few times. I know the first time I did this it did not show up and I thought I had done something wrong. Browsers have long memories (much longer then mine).
If you have a WordPress site there are several plug-ins to use to make things even easier to install your favicon. The one I would recommend is:
I hope you take my advice and install your own favicon.ico for your website!
You never know, it might give you a few extra sales you would not have gotten otherwise!
From a collection of Free Affiliate Marketing Tips from Free Affiliate Marketing Tips and Tools
