A couple of months back I did a guest post on How To Introduce A Free Loyalty Program On Your Blog on Spice Up Your Blog . PunchTab ,the company responsible for it has now come up with a new product called the Achievement Program. Rather than awarding coupons to users for showing their Loyalty (a.k.a. Liking ,+1'ing ,etc ) , it focuses on giving users Social Rewards to drive behavior. Users unlock badges for visiting, liking, tweeting, +1'ing, sharing or commenting. This creates a healthy competition between users to earn more and more badges and achievements ,in the process promoting your content.In this post we will be discussing the following:
- How the Achievement Program Works
- How to integrate it into your Blog
- Some things to Note
How it Works
It requires the user to authenticate using Facebook Connect. After that they can start earning Badges for the following activities:Visiting – for their first visit they get the Bike Badge and these are followed by other badges in the category
Liking – for their first Like on your site users will get the Smiley Badge
Tweeting – for their first Tweet on your users will get the Budding Badge
+1'ing – for their first Google +1 on your site users will get the Tuned In Badge
Commenting – for their first comment users will get the Megaphone Badge
There are two secret badges which are awarded when you become really active on the specific blog/website
How Do I integrate it into my Blog
1. Go to Punchtab and register yourself there if you haven't and then Login to your account , you will be redirected to the Dashboard
2. Now click the Achievement Program in the main menu above and then you will be asked to choose your platform
3. Now click on the Blogger Icon and then you will be asked where would like the Badges to be positioned on your blog.
4. After choosing the position ,click the Install Achievement Program button below it and you will be asked to install its widget in your blog
5. After successfully installing the widget, you will see the Badges banner in the position you selected before.
6. Now click this Badges banner and register yourself through Facebook. Now you are ready to earn some badges
Some things to Note
- Currently there is no Leaderboard for the Achievements you earned so you will just see how many badges you have earned and not how many others have earned.
- You can run this exclusively on your blog or with the Loyalty program. Even though this will cause two notifications to appear together when you do a action. In my opinion a integration of both these programs would be a step forward in the right direction
- In the near future PunchTab will add support for customized badges which will allow you to award them for actions define by you like following ,voting, etc
- Placing the Badges in the top of your blog ,irrespective of whether it is right or left, sometimes causes problems of the posts being pushed up my a little. See the screenshot below
- The problem about +1 still exist , so if you Un +1 any content and +1 again , then you will be given a badge for it
- The number of badges currently for offer are measly and doesn't really provide a rush in the users mind to respond to the call of action immediately . It would only take 3 days to earn all the badges in the +1'ing ,Tweeting, Liking, Visiting and Commenting category.
- Blogger comments are supported but this feature became non-functional after the release of the Threaded Comments
- Repositioning Badges other than their default position is a near impossible as moving them with CSS causes the whole container to shift which takes some part of the badges-won window out of the screen. See the screenshot below to get a idea of what I am talking about.
- None the less , its still in development and we expect that a lot of new features to be arriving soon enough
Announcement : I have introduced Badges on Stylify Your Blog , so you can also earn them by +1'ing ,liking ,tweeting and visiting. Make sure to claim your badges by doing these actions. Also from now on they will only load on Post pages in a bid to make SYB faster and also because only here does the real action (+1,Like,Tweet) happens.
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My dear Prayag Verma Thanks for the indispensable tips. Will you help me how do I put a link in the comment column. My blog is http://www.thisismyheaven.com/
This is a bit of out of the blue , but to add links like these Google in comments ,this is the code
<a href="http://www.google.com/" >Google</a>
Thanks for your early reply. Is this support span? I want to change the color.
Majorly Blogger marks comments as spam when it sees a lots of links. In general use it rarely marks them as spam when it only has a single link.
About changing color , that would require adding the following CSS
.comments a {color:green;}
As you can see this would be only possible if you are the blog admin. And also you can't assign individual colors to links.
Thanks for the info... this is great thing, people visiting our blogs will get something in return for visiting our blog.
Hey really cool stuff Prayag. I dint know about this term "Punchtab". Thanks for introducing it to us but does it take more time to load (asking because you are already using it)
Thanks Prayag for this new stuff. I would like to give a try.
Thanks a lot for sharing it with us.
The Achievement Program widgets has a size of about measly 70KB but the Loyalty program widget has a size of about 110KB
Not much but still can effect Page speeds therefore I only use it on the Post Pages
110 KB means we can use it :) BTW I'll wait for the latest version with more updates. Try to update this post when it's done.
Sure thing will keep the post updated
Thats the whole concept behind it, users visiting are always benefited in terms of content as well as rewards
When do you release a next template?
Thanks my dear friend.
very soon
Thanks using PunchTab's Achievement program and for spreading the word to your readers!
You had some great thoughts and questions and we wanted to clear things up. (some of your ideas are already in the works1)
That leaderboard is comin'. It's on the roadmap... and you'll also be able to install a new sidebar widget with both rewards and badges really soon. (Keep an eye on the PunchTab blog. Blog.punchtab.com for updates.)
We think would be fantastic. And we're looking forward to adding that soon.
About the number of badges, the first ones are easy to get, but it'll take longer to get all of them.... we want to help you better encourage a bit of competition and keep your users coming back!
About the bugs:
For the top positioning, we're gonna fix it!
For the +1, you can +1 once a day, it's not a bug, it actually IS a feature ;-)
Hope that helps! We're always open to more thoughts Feedback@punchtab.com
Cheers,
Robyn
Thanks for responding , its nice to have somebody from PunchTab itself to clear things up.
Had just one more question , about the comments, are they non-functional or is that a problem with me only ? ,After the Threaded comments were launched in Blogger , none of my readers were able to earn any points for comments.
Thanks Prayag for making the whole topic easier to understand.
Hi Prayag, please help me in hiding the punchtab loyalty active feedbar from main page. I tried but not able to make.
You will have to use conditional tags . Check out the 4th point under Customizing in this post http://www.stylifyyourblog.com/2011/10/side-floating-social-media-buttons.html
Yes , I know about the conditional tags, but where to keep those conditional tags ?? do I need to paste it inside the widget , because I can not find active feedbar code in the template code .
Thank you so much , its done :) thanks alot.
Just wanted to let you know we've got custom badges up and running! Take a look. We'd love feedback. http://blog.punchtab.com/index.php/2012/04/announcing-custom-badges-customized-gamification-for-your-website/
Thanks for sharing the PunchTab story with your readers!
Cheers,
Robyn
Hi there..i tells this application is setup for another domain. help