Badge

Its been some time since Orkut started allowing its users to advertise their business on Orkut, with ‘promote’ feature: a free tool to help you spread the news to all your orkut friends…and beyond!

At first I thought this could be a great opportunity for bloggers and marketers to explore and leverage from Orkut community. But to my dis-appointment, there are many people who are randomly creating some community message and asking to promote it! And the dis-appointing things is, these communities are not at all taken care by anyone, people just create it, promote it and forget it 🙁

So, am I saying this Orkut promote is waste of time? No. Since many Orkut users have no idea about how to set this up or what to do with this feature, its a great thing for few people who understand and have some goals to achieve from it.

Here are some points to keep in mind to write a good copy
1. First make sure whatever you are trying to promote is of use to the users.
2. Let your message be clear.
3. Don’t tell half things and ask them to click the link to read rest of your story. Everyone is busy with their life!
4. Make sure you have a call to action.
Ex: You can ask people to promote it or you may ask people to do something after seeing your ad.

How Orkut promote works:
When you first create a promotion, only your friends will be able to see your promotion. Once any of your friends click on “Cool, promote it!” button, the promotion copy will be shown to their friends.. and so on.

Secret Link!
Some months back Orkut stated showing a secret link(promo URL) in the promotion page, using which we could ask our friends and followers to promote our ad copies. But in just 24hrs time, they removed that feature. Now once again they have introduced the same feature. So just grab the links and ask your friends to promote it.

Log into your Orkut account -> Applications -> Promote -> (Promo URL)

If you are on Orkut, promote our stuffs too.

Here are the links to some of our promotions:
Promotion 1
Promotion 2
Promotion 3
Promotion 4
Promotion 5
Promotion 6

Orkut Badge:
Recently Orkut also introduced ranking users based on some criteria, one of which is based on the number of views of your promotion.

So, if you still care about Orkut and want some exposure and the badge!, then go ahead, grab these secret links and promote them.

By the way, I am on facebook at http://facebook.com/technotip 🙂

Note:
It may not be a promotion as beneficial as that on Facebook and Twitter, but it has got me 500 – 600 visitors to my website so far, which is not bad for a small site.

As you all probably know, StumbleUpon doesn’t crawl the web pages automatically. It only adds those pages which are added by its users. And then it rotates or displays these user submitted/voted quality content to its other users (who share similar interests). Providing quality content to its users and good traffic to the source. So everybody is happy.

Over years we have seen so many products claiming to generate huge traffic to our websites through Stumbleupon, but the trick is simple. Produce quality content (suitable for StumbleUpon community) and make it easy for StumbleUpon members to find and submit, vote for the story.

Having quality content is mandatory. Next thing is making it more accessible.

All these days we use to have a simple banner or a link to submit the article to stumbleupon, but now we can show a badge and encourage or remind our readers to submit and vote for the story, if they find it interesting.

Get your content discovered with SU Badges
With 3 simple steps, add a StumbleUpon badge to your site so your visitors can easily submit your content to StumbleUpon and you can start enjoying additional traffic from StumbleUpon users who want to see content like yours! Simply copy and paste the code into your site and start receiving free exposure on StumbleUpon.

These new badges reflect a real-time count of how many times your page has been viewed by members of StumbleUpon’s community of over 10 million users. Show off your big numbers!

Users clicking these badges will be prompted to submit a page to StumbleUpon’s index (if not already in the index) so other users can enjoy your content or to view the ratings and reviews of your page from other StumbleUpon users. Your site will not be framed when users click any of these badges.

Reason for this post: I had seen these badges some time back, but had never used them. Out of curiosity, I took some time to put them on the blog and to my surprise – traffic from Stumbleupon has significantly raised. I still thought it’s a coincidence. But after watching for some more days, I thought I would recommend using this badge for all my fellow bloggers/webmasters to generate good traffic from Stumbleupon or atleast try this out and share the results with us, in the comment section.

The badges are somewhat similar to that of the TweetMeme/Re-Tweet Buttons. But what I feel is, the color is too dim to notice.

You can check badges in these posts, to see them in action:
7 Ways To Get Traffic – Before You Need It!
10 Ways To Make Your Blog Load Faster and Save Bandwidth

You can get the code for implementing the badge at: SU Badge.

The numbers really encourage visitors to take action and hit that stumble button. Try it and share your experience with us.
“Simple Steps, extra Traffic!”

Bonus Tip:
You can even use the StumbleUpon URL shortener, it provides some easy, lazy way to hit the thumbs up button.

Tag: Badge

“Cool, Promote it!” Orkut secret link: Get a rank badge

3 Steps, Extra Traffic! : StumbleUpon