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A favicon is a custom icon that sits next to your web site title in a persons favourite’s menu when they have bookmarked your site, it is an easy way to create an ‘eye drawing image’ to ensure that people always see you link in their favourite’s and should hopefully encourgae them to check out that ‘great site that they haven’t visited yet today!’

This is a quick guide that will provide instructions on how to create one for your site, it really is very easy and will help to create a extra tool to maintain your site in the customers mind.

All it takes is four easy steps…

1) Choose an image that you would like to use to represent your web site. Most people use a small version of their logo but you can use any image that you want. I would advise however that you choose an image that is reflective of your web sites theme and an image that will still remain recognisable when the size is dropped to 16 x 16 pixels.

2) Take your chosen image, which should be as high a quality as you can get, in .JPG or .GIF format and convert your image to the 256 color Web Safe Palette or the Windows 16 color format. This can very easily be done in most graphics packages and as a guideline I would say that the less colours you use the better so as to maintain image clarity and professionalism.

3) Using your graphics package, reduce the image down to 16 x 16 pixels, at this point you need to ensure that you preserve the image resolution. This is a key factor as a larger image that has been reduced can loose all clarity and just become a tacky blob, is this how you want your web site remembered? The key here is to keep perservering until you are happy with the finished icon and it is a great advertisement for the professionalism, and the theme, of your web site.

4) Once you are happy with your completed icon you need to save it as “Favicon.ico”. This is the default name that web browsers, such as Internet Explorer, look for. This file then needs to be copied to the root directory of your web site and then whenever a customer bookmarks your site your image is cached and will display when they use their favourites menu.

This can very easily be tested by clearing your cache and re-bookmarking your site and ‘hey presto’ your new shiny, professional and eye drawing favicon will appear next to your site title and will also appear in the address bar of your browser.

This is just another simple trick that aims to get you ‘thinking outside the box’ when it comes to developing your website presence and reminding your customers to come and re-visit your web site.

Mike - Forum Webmaster at

Online Auction Trader - a community forum dedicated to developing you a sustainable, profitable and long term online income.

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QUESTION: The new Sony e-book reader is getting a lot of publicity, and I’m concerned that it may kill the market for selling used books online. It can hold thousands of book-sized files like an Ipod.

ANSWER: I’ve always been a skeptic about e-books for a simple reason: Most people hate them, and so do I.

For example, I’ve looked at some of the most popular e-books available on Amazon for download (and not available as a hard-copy book) and a lot of the reader reviews, even when they are positive reviews, mention something like “I was very hesitant about buying an e-book …”

That tells me that your average consumer is not interested. Based on my own experience, I’ve bought a couple of e-books and in each case I’ve been extremely disappointed with the quality of the writing and content. And what happens then? You’re stuck. There’s no way to get your money back. Lots of people have already been through this experience, generating even more more hatred of e-books.

Nobody talks about how these Sony readers have already flopped in Japan. And I predict they’ll be an even bigger flop in the United States. They’d flop even if Sony gave them away.

People keep saying the paper book is dead, but regular books are more popular than ever. Every year, the number of titles authored, printed, and purchased goes up. Plain old books can’t be improved that much because they’re already a great deal — they’re cheap, portable, nonfragile, and require no batteries.

Nevertheless, technology could have a big negative impact on used bookselling in the next 10 years, but the scenario I see has nothing to do with e-books. The potential nightmare I see for used booksellers is “print-on-demand.”

One reason it’s fairly easy to sell used books profitably is the publishing industry (and book retailing) is terribly inefficient. Publishers never print anywhere near the right number of a title. Either they print way too many, or not nearly enough. Either way, it’s an opportunity big enough for online sellers to drive a bookmobile through. We create value by organizing and handling the publishers’ mistakes, whether it’s selling (overprinted) leftover books at low prices, or (underprinted) scarce books at high prices.

Print-on-demand could throw a money wrench into our gravy train by allowing publishers to get a lot more efficient. Printing machines are already available that can print a single paperback for a few dollars. In the past, publishers were locked into printing huge quantities of books on traditional printing presses. If they start using print-on-demand, they can efficiently print a the right number of copies — even if there’s only one buyer for the book.

Will this nightmare come true in our lifetimes? I’m not losing any sleep yet. The “experts” have been predicting the death of the paper book for more than a decade now, and they’ve been predicting the “paperless office” for a couple of decades now, and they’ve been dead wrong on both.

See a real-time list of the most highly sought after used and collectible books.

Read more free articles on selling used books profitably online: http://www.weberbooks.com/selling/selling.htm

Steve Weber is author of “The Home-Based Bookstore: Start Your Own Business Selling Used Books on Amazon, eBay or Your Own Web Site” (ISBN 0977240606). Got a question for Steve? Send to: steve_weber@yahoo.com

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QUESTION: I have lots of books I haven’t been able to sell on Amazon or eBay. How many months do you let books sit on the shelves before you begin lowering prices?

ANSWER: I used to have very limited storage space, especially when I started selling books online. Back then I lived in a small apartment and had to rent storage lockers to hold my books. So after my first 18 months of selling used books I had about 10,000 unique books and was paying more than $1,000 a month in storage fees. I was making plenty of cash to cover the rental fees, but didn’t want to commit to more storage bills. So I decided to delete all my listings for books where the price on Amazon Marketplace was under $4. Getting rid of those books was a pretty big hassle, so I’ve been more careful in selecting low-priced books since then.

But to get back to your question, deciding when to cut the price to remain competitive depends totally on the book, and how high the average price is online. For low-priced books that I want to sell as quickly as possible, I’ll cut the price every week or so, just to try to get rid of the book before the price falls too far. But for higher-priced books — say over $40 — I am much more reluctant to cut the price. Maybe I’ll cut it a penny or two if it will make the listing more visible. But if I think the other prices are abnormally low, I’ll let the book sit there for six months or a year without even considering lowering the price.

I base this on two observations:

– Buyers of low-priced books don’t consider feedback much in their buying decision. So even though you might strive to have high feedback to be competitive against other sellers, buyers of low-priced books either aren’t informed enough to consider a seller’s feedback or just don’t want to take the time to consider any factors other than price. So to sell a low-priced book you have to compete on price, just because most of the buyers for these items aren’t going to scroll through to compare listings for feedback, condition, etc.

– Over the long term, prices of low-priced books tend to fall, and those of high-priced books hold steady or go up. That’s because low-priced books tend to become more available over time (more used copies appear for sale online and price-cutting ensues), but higher-priced books tend to be more scarce and as used copies are purchased, price tends to go up as they become more scarce. This is why out-of-print books are such a hugely profitable area for used booksellers. Also, the buyers of these books usually pay a lot more attention to the book description and seller feedback, so you don’t have to compete just on price.

One more interesting observation I’ve seen in the past year: Last summer I moved to a house where I could store all my books in the basement instead of paying for off-site storage. I had to hire movers, everything got disorganized, and most of my books I had to delete until I could locate them again and organize them on shelves in my basement. I’m still re-listing them, and I’ve been surprised to find that many of my relatively low-priced books — say those that were going for $5 or $10 on Marketplace last summer — have doubled in value during those six months. Some of them, may a quarter of them, had become essentially worthless, worth less than a dollar or two, and I’ve been getting rid of them. But in most cases, whereas six months ago I’d have been beating my brains out to sell them at the lowest possible price — now I’m selling them faster at double the price.

See a real-time list of the most highly sought after used and collectible books.

Read more free articles on selling used books profitably online: http://www.weberbooks.com/selling/selling.htm

Steve Weber is author of “The Home-Based Bookstore: Start Your Own Business Selling Used Books on Amazon, eBay or Your Own Web Site” (ISBN 0977240606). Got a question for Steve? Send to: steve_weber@yahoo.com

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