Blogging Tips | Branding For Your Blog in Quick, Easy Steps: #1 Get a Favicon

As many of my blogging tips post are quite lengthy and packed with a lot of information, I thought I’d do a mini-series of posts giving you tips in quick, easy steps. Hopefully you’ll find these very simple and easy to implement straight away (that’s the idea, anyway!) and to start with I’m doing a series on branding for your blog.

Branding is important to reach, interest and maintain your audience. Brand consistency in marketing is one of the most important contributing factors to a company’s success because it constantly reinforces their identity to their audience. Blogging is no different!

I’m starting with what might be the easiest, quickest way to start branding your blog. I’ve mentioned this before in other posts and on social media, but it’s an important one to mention again:

#1 GET A FAVICON.

What’s a favicon…?

A favicon – meaning “favourite icon” – is what appears on the tab next to your blog name at the top of the browser window. Having your own logo or avatar (one that is consistent with your branding) as your favicon will set your blog apart when your readers have many tabs open in their window. The most platform for blogs is Blogger, and if you use Blogger you will automatically get a generic orange favicon that so many blogs have.

Why do I need a favicon…?

Unfortunately, this favicon – or any generic or blank icon – won’t do anything to make your blog (brand) stand out from the others. It’s the marketing equivalent of Apple forgetting to put their apple logo on the back of their mobile phones, or McDonald’s failing to add the golden “M” arches on motorway service station signs (yes I’m using massive brands as examples, but recognising them by their logo alone is everything)!

The logo or avatar you choose has to be recognisable when it’s a tiny favicon (16×16 pixels only), so choose something that’ll be consistent to your brand and recognisable at that size. The initials or first letter of your blog name in the same font you use in your header, for example, would work.

Without checking, I’d place a ton of money on Apple using their apple logo and McDonald’s using the golden arches as their favicons (if I’m wrong do tell me in the comments).

How do I add a favicon to my blog…?

This is the easy bit – and it takes less than five minutes:

Go to a favicon generator, e.g. http://favicon-generator.org to create a 16×16 .ico file
In Blogger, go to the Layout option
Click on ‘Edit’ in the Favicon box
Choose and save the .ico file you have just created (that’s it)

Don’t panic if it doesn’t show up straight away. Try clearing your cookies and cache on your browser – it can take a while to show up, especially in Chrome. Your new favicon will show up in bookmarks too which reinforces your brand even further.

If I have a WordPress blog can I personalise my favicon?

As I don’t use it myself I looked for a good tutorial on how to add a favicon to WordPress – this one by Elegant Themes is very recent: How to Add a Favicon to Your WordPress Website.

So that’s it – part one done. I’ll be continuing the branding series regularly so look out for colour themes, fonts, signatures, etc.

Let me know if you needed a favicon and whether you’re going to get one now – and if you followed my instructions previously, did you find it easy?