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.

Over 40 million people trust Plaxo to store their address book in the cloud. At least that’s how it started out. Today, Plaxo offers the same address book features plus adds new social networking features that are very different than Facebook, MySpace and others because it isn’t a place where you simply add a bunch of people you don’t know.

Benefits of using Plaxo

Plaxo offers a new way to network with your friends. The approach is different than other sites because it isn’t a place where you see how many online friends you can collect. It allows you to connect with your real friends, co-workers and family.

Plaxo has something called Pulse that makes all this possible. It allows you to better see what everyone is creating and sharing online–things like blogs, pictures, videos, etc. They tout the fact that they have one of the strongest privacy policies out there and make sure that your personal information doesn’t get into the wrong hands.

Plaxo is part of Comcast

Comcast Interactive Media now owns Plaxo and this will allow them to offer more connectivity through the Internet and tv based connections. They intend to make Plaxo the most unified social networking site available.

Delicious started off as del.icio.us by Joshua Schachter in 2003 as a way to store, share and discover bookmarks with other people out on the Internet. The website was purchased by Yahoo! in 2005 and is still operated much the same as it was. Sometime in 2008, the website had amassed over 5.3 million users and 180 million bookmarks.

What is Delicious?

Rather than provide a huge list of bookmarks and cool favorites that people have found throughout the Internet, Delicious provides the list randomly by allowing tags to be generated for specific content. What this does is allows users to find related bookmarks based on the content they’re looking for while also following current web trends.

As more and more people save the same bookmarks, the counts go up and the links become more popular. There are countless websites out there that even add direct links right from their blogs into Delicious so users can favorite the page without having to leave the site.

How can Delicious help your website?

As always, the goal with your website is to create the best content you can have, but it’s even more important when your content is being ranked. Delicious is all about bookmarking the best sites (or pages) on the Internet and the more visible you content becomes, the more traffic you’re going to get.

If you use WordPress, you’ll want to install a plugin such as EG-Delicious to allow your site to automatically add content to your delicious account. This way, you won’t have to worry about keeping the site updated.

I doubt I need to explain to you what Facebook is, but I thought I’d give you some pointers on how you can maximize your Facebook experience while promoting your website at the same time.

Use Facebook to promote your site

If you’ve ever used Facebook to post blogs, you’re already at an advantage. The first thing to know is what each of the different Facebook pages are and how they can further help your cause. There are three types of Facebook pages:

• Profile Page — This is your standard Facebook profile. If you have an account, this is was you’re already familiar with. Beyond all the normal profile features you get, you can use a profile page to post blogs and events. This tools can be used to submit articles (as blog posts) and showcase this content on you profile wall.
• Fan Page — I wrote an entire article about how to use a Facebook fan page to advertise and promote your business. Before creating a fan page or even a group page, read it because there are some significant differences between them. A fan page is basically a public profile that you set up for your business and people will become fans of it instead of friends.
• Facebook Group — A group page is basically the same as a fan page except that you can’t promote it via social ads. Another difference is that Facebook users have to join your group to become a “friend”. Group pages tend to be used more for actual groups such as clubs and organizations.

Blogging tools

Another advantage to using WordPress is that there are many plugins that allow you to post links on your wall that lead back to your blog site automatically. What this means is that if you post an article on your WordPress blog, the plugin will automatically post the link on your profile page.

All of your friends will then be able to see your post with a small introduction of text that describes what the content is about. If you posted any images on the site, it’ll show a thumbnail on Facebook. The top WordPress Facebook plugins:

• Facebook dashboard widget — This is a simple solution to bring the Facebook data to you. Using the dashboard widgets available in WordPress 2.5 and above, this plugin will process your Friends status updates RSS feed, your posted items feeds and/or your Facebook notifications feed, and add a widget for each to your WordPress admin dashboard. So now you can keep up with whats going on in your friends lives from anywhere without needing to access Facebook!
• Add to Facebook — This plugin adds a footer link to add the current post or page to a Facebook Mini-Feed. While the plugin is activated a link will appear after the content of the post with the text “Share on Facebook” or the Facebook icon or both. Clicking this link will bring the user to the Facebook site. If the user isn’t logged in they will be prompted to do so. Once logged into Facebook the post will be added to the Mini-Feed of the account.
• Wordbooker — This plugin allows you to cross-post your blog posts to your Facebook Wall. You can also “cross polinate” comments between Facebook and your Wordpres blog.

  Various options including “attribute” lines and polling for comments and automatic re-posting on edit can be configured.

Facebook ads

Facebook ads works just like Google AdWords where you purchase ad space based on keywords which makes your site visible to a targeted audience. This is a great way to get your business in front of millions of users. I was reading a blog post that showed the 10 rules for advertising on Facebook and I think it’s some of the best information I’ve seen on this topic. Check it out now.