Search for any word subject in a search engine and I guarantee that you'll be presented with thousands of matches. Repeat after me, thousands of matches. Right. So why should you care? The answer is simple: with the amount of competition in today’s e-marketplace, you need every single competitive advantage that you can find. Not everyone is an expert Webmaster, and it's tough to compete with huge budget sites that can afford to hire the best talent to develop and deploy their e-commerce strategies. I’m going to let you in on a little-known tip that is guaranteed to help you achieve brand recognition.

What exactly does that mean? Good question! Branding is a very important marketing concept that attempts to associate your company with a particular image, color or event (as examples). It helps people to recall who exactly you are when they see that logo and conveys as much information as possible in an easy to remember way. I’ll give you an example, when I say "Nike" what is the first image that comes to your mind? The little swoosh, right? Right. How about the McDonalds Golden Arches or the Pillsbury doughboy? Some companies are even associated with particular colors such as IBM’s blue. Get the picture? The simple fact is that people are more inclined to remember a simple logo or color than a complex phrase or picture.

Ok. So let's get down to the good stuff. I read recently that it takes a person viewing your ad, around three times on the Internet before they will buy. That means that traditional marketing concepts such as brand awareness can play a key role in your e-marketing campaign, and I can probably bet that almost 90% of webmasters aren’t using the simple trick I’m about to show you.

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Do me a favor and just open your favorites folder to take a quick look at it. Pick almost any site and what do you see? The site title, and of course, "Ta Da" a standard Internet explorer bookmark icon. Now, did you know that with the release of Internet Explorer 5.0 you could make your own customized logo appear there? (Apologies to you Netscape users that can’t view this yet!). This gives you a distinct advantage when your logo appears in not one but 6 places. Six places? Yes, six: The favorites directory located off the Windows start button, the favorites directory in your web browser, the location bar, the desktop, the taskbar and the links bar.

Your first step in this process is to get an icon. Your company logo is usually a good bet, but you’ll have to make it into an icon file for use on your site. If you already have an icon file then you’re ahead of the game! You can make an icon using any paint program but it is best to keep it to a 16X16 pixel, 16 color icon. Your icon must also be in the Win 32 ".ico" format and be called favicon.ico. I found a great site to create your icon, visit here and use their free icon generator (they recommend having Internet Explorer 4.01 or Netscape 4.5):

  www.Favicon.com

or download some free software (Microangleo 5.0) to do the job here:

  www.impactsoft.com

If you’d rather use a pre-made icon just type "icon" into any search engine and you’re bound to find a free one that will please you.

Take your new favicon.ico and upload it to the root of your site. You should be able to reach it through this URL: www.yourdomainname.com/favicon.ico. Obviously, "yourdomainname" is the name of your domain. Believe it or not, that’s it. Now all MSIE 5.0 browsers will bookmark your site with your icon.

It's quick and simple and I guarantee you it will help to differentiate you from your competitors. Repeat after me, thousands of matches. Right. Why not?

The author of this article is Melissa Martin, an entrepreneur and the creator of thefarmzone which is rapidly being recognized as a growing comprehesive resource for farmers. Explore our site (or pass it to a friend!) for an amazing selection of FREE services and great products or keep current with our FREE newsletter. Visit www.thefarmzone.com

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