Gamification is the strategy of incorporating digital game design techniques, game thinking and game mechanics for improving non-game contexts, business and social impact challenges to attract and engage more users. It is very useful strategy for motivating users to different non-game applications and processes you want the users to partake. For increasing the traffic in your website or blogs, you might encourage users by rewarding for sharing content or leaving a comment. You may introduce elements, like points, leader boards, rewards, ways to “level up”, virtual currencies for this purpose.
If you want to ensure a constant flow of users and customers visiting your site, a strong recommendation would be the use of Gamification plugins. The plugins makes your site a hub of contents and blogs within a very short time and promotes your branding and social networking. As the use increases, people become more involved and encouraged. Google ranks sites with bounce rate and engagement. So, obviously more engagement will bring your site to better ranks. Gamification can help you in this regard. It is a two-way convenience strategy that brings your site to better rank on one hand and facilitates users with rewards on the other hand.
Some features and wonderful upshot of gamification plugins for WordPress website are discussed here:
1. Captain Up
Captain up, a Game Mechanics plugin acts as an engagement platform for your WordPress site. It enables your users to connect with Facebook or Twitter, earn points, develop through the levels, win badges and compete in leaderboards after a fast installation.
2. CubePoints
CubePOints is a point management plugin for rewarding users with virtual credit. Your visitors would be definitely enthused to visit your site if they are offered with credits for creating posts, posting comments or mere logging in. This can be used for viewing posts, commenting, exchanging for downloads and similar purposes.
3. Incrwd
Incrwd is a more inspiring program for blogs as it offers real rewards to users. This is more effective a plugin to capture visitor traffic on a frequent basis. Awards are given for different situations, like registering to your WordPress blog, visiting the site on frequent basis, liking your Facebook page, sharing on Facebook, Twitter, Google Plus, commenting on blogs. You can offer your visitors gift cards or rewards and this would surely ensure a persistent flow.
4. Kazooky Loyalty
The Kazooky Loyalty plugin is a potent plugin to create repetition of visit of your users and customers. You can easily access a large mass beyond your website at a time through the integrated social sharing buttons.
5. Simple Badges
This plugin is a very simple but amazing. If you want to incorporate badges into a BuddyPress-driven social environment, this plugin is very helpful. You can award points by using Cubepoints, which are exchangeable for things. Badges can be granted by admin manually or the process might be automatic for some certain activities.
6. WordPress Quest
WordPress Quest is another plugin that helps you to attach ‘Quests’ to your site. These incentivize users with named achievements and points for some interactions and activities.
Example of using a gamification plugin:
Here we will show how to use a gamification plugin in your WordPress site. The plugin we use is cubepoint.
Steps:
- Download the cubepoint plugin from http://wordpress.org/plugins/cubepoints/
- Upload the plugin in .zip format from your WordPress site.
- Activate the cubepoint plugin.
- It will appear on your dashboard.
- Configure the plugin. You can give points to users for different actions. For example, for registration 100 points, for login 5 points, for comment 5 points. You can change the points for different actions according to your wish.
- Every user can see individual point from dashboard-> cubepoint-> my points option.
- According to the points scored, user may get some special permission. For example, an user can be rewarded by giving some special permission for the site(i.e editor, administrator).
Gamification plugins increases user interaction with a website. More they do actions, more they are rewarded, and thus they get more interest in your website. So, it is a significant way to make your website popular using different gamification plugins.
