Social Bookmarking – Orkut

Orkut is likely one social networking site you’ve never heard of. That’s simply because it’s not as popular here in the United States as sites like Facebook and MySpace. However, India and Brazil have found Orkut to be their number one social networking site. I mention it here because it is yet one more way you can help promote your online existence.

The site was created by a Google employee for which it’s named, Orkut Büyükkökten. I personally set up an account here after reading about it on Google, but I don’t use it much. This is mainly because there aren’t many people from the U.S. on it.

What is Orkut?

Orkut is your standard run-of-the-mill social networking site with a few minor differences compared to Facebook. One major difference is the use of themes to change your profile layout, much like MySpace. Another difference is that you can upload videos on the site and have them appear on YouTube directly.

As stated above, the majority of this site’s users are from India and Brazil, so if you’re doing business in either of these locations, this site is a great addition to your existing Facebook and MySpace page. In fact, check out the traffic chart to give you an idea of where this site is currently ranking worldwide. The U.S. used to be the top visiting country when the site launched in 2004.

Should I use Orkut?

I always say use every tool you can to help bring in more traffic to your site, but I would stay focused. If you have too many social networking sites, you won’t be able to keep up with all of them. Just pick a few that you know will serve your interests best. If you or your expected visitors are going to be coming from the high traffic countries, then use this site.

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Social Bookmarking – StumbleUpon

Over 10 million members have made this site a place to go for organizing your “corner” of the Internet. More importantly, it allows you to use a simple toolbar to share websites that you’ve been to so others with similar interests can find them.

Over time, people who share the same interests as you are more likely to be recommending websites that you’ll also enjoy. This can be a drastic improvement over standard web searching because you won’t have to filter pages and pages of search results that are exactly relavent to you.

What is StumbleUpon?

Install the toolbar and get browsing! When you “stumble” on a site that you enjoy or one that you found very helpful, you can click the Stumble button and instantly share it to the rest of the community. The system then matches this result to your previous recommendations. In time, StumbleUpon will get to know you and be able to make recommendations of other sites it thinks you might be interested in.

  • People-driven – StumbleUpon now has over 10 million web users all with unique interests. The combination of human interaction with computer-based learning technology makes find relavent websites fun and easy.
  • Up or Down ratings – Using a thumbs up or thumbs down rating, you have control over which sites are ranked higher than others. This will then affect which sites other like-minded people see (or won’t see).
  • Toolbar – The toolbar is always available and you can rate any website that you travel to.
  • Dynamic content – StumbleUpon changes as the web changes–which is every minute of the day! As older content becomes lower-rated, it eventually drops off the site while newer, higher rated content stays fresh.
  • Better results – Because the content has been recommended by other users that share common interests with you, you will receive more relavent websites than you would from a basic keyword filter on most search engines.

Can StumbleUpon help my site?

It sure can! When you become a StumbleUpon member, you can download the toolbar which allows you to Stumble any site you wish. All you need to do is simply navigate to your own site and say that you like it by giving it a thumbs up.

You can also add your site or a specific URL from within your user account. At any rate, once your site is listed, it gets broadcast across the network for others to see. If your content is good and everybody likes it, you’re going to get a lot of thumbs up ratings and this means more and more people will be seeing your page!

How do I get more thumbs up ratings?

Of course, the first way to do this is to create awesome content. Make people want to click on thumbs up. However, even when people do like your page, they may not take the time to vote for it (good or bad). Fortunately, if you’re using WordPress, there’s a plugin that will look at where the user came from and if it says they came from StumbleUpon, you can display a custom message to remind them to vote!

The name of the plugin is called Increase Sociability and it’s free.

Join StumbleUpon now and let the world rank you! You’d be surprised how fast your traffic can grow from submitting a few great content pages!

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