Home For website owners Get yourself listedReference Buttons

Advantages:

You don't need an account - instant listing!

Automatically promotes the CucuMe service to your visitors

You can use buttons on any page you can build.

Disadvantages:

You can't track the performance of your Cucu's

Your competitors can read your Cucu's

You need to set every page's Cucu's independently

What you need:

You'll need to be able to put links on your page.

Create a CucuMe reference button

You can tell us where you want your page to appear by placing a CucuMe Button on your page. At the same time, you'll be telling your visitors about CucuMe. That means: more CucuMe users. And that means: more hits for you.

Are you an seller?

Drive customers direct to your eBay business from all four corners of the Internet.

All you have to do is Cucu your eBay product pages, and you can steal business even from mainstream suppliers!

We've got special facilities for eBayers, including

Automatically re-index your relisted items.

Automatically redirect Cucu's from your sold items to your other items

To find out more about how we make your eBay life easier, click here.

Show the world that you're Cucu'd!

A reference button is a special hyperlink which you put onto your page. The link has special codes embedded in it which tell us where you'd like your page to be Cucu'd.

It also tells your visitors that you're using the CucuMe system.When your visitors click on the button, they are sent to the CucuMe home page which explains to them what CucuMe is about. Once there, we'll encourage them to subscribe to the service and download the client. And of course, once they've got the client, all your Cucus will pop up every time they hit one of your target sites.

Step-by-Step:

Step 1:

Create your Cucu button.

You can either create them by hand, or else use the reference button wizard.

Step 2:

Add the button you've made into your webpage.

(You'll need to do this for every page you want to be Cucu'd)

Remember to upload the modified pages.

Step 3:

Creating a Cucu button by hand:

The reference button is a link (<A> tag) which you place somewhere in the body of your webpage. It is coded as follows:

The HREF points to the CucuMe homepage www.cucume.com, or some other page on the CucuMe domain which may be more useful to your visitors
The TITLE (which appears when the user moves his mouse over the link) should provide some explanation, such as Find us on CucuMe or We're listed on CucuMe
The content of the link (the bit between <A> and </A>) should be either:
- The same text as the title, or
- An image whose source is one of the images which you can find in www.cucume.com/linkimgs. Make sure you set the BORDER to 0.
The TARGET should be _blank to open the CucuMe page in a new window - you don't want your users clicking away from your page, do you!

Like this:

<DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC etc..>
<HTML>
   <HEAD>...</HEAD>
   <BODY>
      ...
      <A TARGET="_blank"
       HREF="http://www.cucume.com" 
       TITLE="Find us on CucuMe!"
      >
         <IMG BORDER="0"
          SRC="www.cucume.com/linkimgs/cucusmall.png"
         >
      </A>
      ...
   <BODY>
</HTML>

In addition to this, you'll need to add in the list of target pages where you want your webpage to appear. You do this by adding a query either to the image (if you're using one), or else to the HREF in the <A> tag.

The query's tag is Cucu
The query's value is a list of the target urls. (Note: You may need to url-encode this list)

Like this:

<A TARGET="_blank"
 HREF="http://www.cucume.com"
 TITLE="Find us on CucuMe!"
>
    <IMG BORDER="0"
     SRC="www.cucume.com/linkimgs/cucusmall.png?Cucu=www.tgt1.com,www.tgt2.com" 
    >
</A>

or this:

<A TARGET="_blank"
 HREF="http://www.cucume.com?Cucu=www.tgt1.com,www.tgt2.com"
 TITLE="Find us on CucuMe!"
>
    Find us on CucuMe!
</A>

Other things you might need to know:

You should always use an image button (rather than a text link) if you can. Not only is it more attractive on your site, but it gives us more information about where your tags are being seen.
The text of your Cucu will be taken either from your page's description metatag, or if there's no description, from the TITLE tag. (You must specify one or the other)
You don't need to put http:// in the query value, but it won't hurt if you do. But don't list any https:// pages in the tags: CucuMe won't put your Cucu's onto someone else's secure page.

What makes a good Cucu?

When you place your Cucu's, you should consider some of these:

Be concise: Users see only the Cucu's title - and perhaps only the first few words of it. Make those words count!

Be precise: A Cucu that's placed on just one page will be more relevant than a Cucu that's placed on a whole website.

Be specific:A Cucu should be directly relevant to the page on which it's been placed.

Want to know more? Check out our hints and tips page.

Hints and tips

You can add more than one CucuMe button to a webpage. You can even mix CucuMe buttons with reference tags and control files.

We will come back and check your page from time to time, to see if the tags have changed. If you set an expiry date for your page, we'll use that to decide when to re-visit.

If you build your page using a database, you can use it to generate CucuMe buttons dynamically! If you do, be sure to set the page expiry date so we know when to re-read your buttons.

You'll find lots more hints and tips on our Hints and Tips page.