Branding Tips: Creating Favicons and Custom Error Pages

Today, we will talk about how to add favicons and custom error pages to your website. Both are popular branding techniques used by most businesses on the web and techniques you can use as a branding tool for you and your book. You can spend hundreds of dollars hiring someone to do these things for you, or you can do them yourself for free by reading and learning from this post. This week's free video marketing tip (the week of March 9th, 2009) also walks you through how to create favicons for your site. If you have not signed up for my free weekly video tips newsletter, you can do so here:

http://marketingtipsforauthors.com/videotips.html


Quick Definitions

Branding involves developing an identifiable element that people associate to you or your product. A logo (I.E., McDonald's Golden Arches) is probably the most common branding element. But a brand can be a voice (no one speaks like Barry White), a jingle (Subway's "Five Dollar Foot Long" song; K9 Advantix "Ain’t No Bugs on Me" song), a slogan ("Where's the beef?" "Flick my Bic", "Like a good neighbor, State Farm is there")

But a brand can be you; your appearance, your clothing, your public persona, and even your book cover. To effectively use branding as a tool to help others identify with you, you want to think about everything you put out to the public. If you do not portray a consistent brand, then you are missing the power of this marketing tool. How valuable is it? Well, you can spend thousands on image consultants, logo designers, and media coaches. But a marketing expert can help coordinate all of these areas so that you portray an integrated, identifiable image that the public will grow to recognize as your or your book.

While you may not have thousands, tens of thousands or hundreds of thousand to fully create and roll out a brand, you may be surprised at what you can do, even on a shoestring budget. What elements do you want people to associate with you every time they see anything about you? Perhaps your photo, book cover, color scheme, or a custom signature? Take your time thinking about it and once you decide, look for ways to include it in all of your on and offline communications. You want to use your brand to create an instant and automatic link to you or your book when someone experiences your brand.

A favicon (favorite icon) is one small branding tool that you can start using now. A favicon is that little 16 by 16 pixel picture that you see next to your URL on your browser. If you are reading this post on my Blogger page, you will see the famous Blogger "B" on the orange background next to the URL. AT&Ts home page has their blue and white ball. My new web site, Marketing Tips For Authors, has the white word "Tips" on a red background. Some even have a pic of a person, as does book marketing guru John Kremer's site, BookMarket.com. Incidentally, John will be a guest blogger on Marketing Tips For Authors in early April.

There are a number of ways to create and load these favicons onto your site. Here is a link that generated my favicon and gave me step by step instructions on how to upload my new favicon myself for free: Dynamic Drive.

A custom error page is another way to brand yourself on the net. You have seen them before. The dreaded 404 error page when you click on a broken link or mistype a URL into the browser. Again, most companies have their own custom error pages that keep the look and feel of their site. These error pages are also a great tool at keeping people on your site by offering navigation within your site and suggestions on how they can find the page they were initially searching for. To view my custom error page, click on this non-existent URL:

http://marketingtipsforauthors.com/beidwiedwoihdwc

You must have access to your website's server in order to create and upload the page. There are many different ways you can do this. I read the instructions on my Internet Service Provider's page to create my page. You will need to check with your service provider to see if you can create custom error pages for your site. Here are also a few articles that may help you.

1and1.com (My hosting company and the method I used): How to create custom Error Pages (They also have a cool favicon!)

Custom error pages using .htaccess

Creating Custom Error Pages

Favicons and custom error pages are just two of the many ways you can brand your image on the internet. With a little elbow grease, you can create both your favicon and your custom error pages yourself. And if you sign up for my free weekly Video Tips For Authors newsletter this week, you can watch the current video tip where I walk you through the process of adding a favicon today.

Tony Eldridge