Google+ Guide
Part 2a

NOTE: As of April 2019 Google no longer offers the Google+ platform. BOSS offers a free Expert Step-By-Step LinkedIn Guide to Get Your Business Seen Online Click here for the whole guide.

Continued on from: Google+Guide Part 2 Creating Our Google+ Profile

Creating Our Google+ Profile Continued…

And Explore gives you this:

This is Google trying to find you pages that you might find interesting.

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Hovering over the Home button at the top left of your screen gives you a drop-down menu like so:

Profile is where you go to edit your profile.

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People is where you go to edit your circles.

Photos is a place to store and even edit your photos.

Collections is where you can group your posts by topic. So, for example, if you’re a restauranteur then you might want to create one group about recipes and another about the people working behind the scenes.

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Communities are just that – communities of people you can engage with by topic:

Events is both a calendar and a way to send invitations out to people for events you create. The events can be either in person in a physical location or online, like a video conference.

Hangouts is where you go to work with messaging, voice calls, or video conferences.

Pages is where if you go if you have more than one page to manage and you want to flip from working on one to another.

And of course Settings has a variety of items that you can change to better suit the way you want to work with Google+.

Optimizing Your Google+ Profile

Let’s get to work making your profile professional and engaging. Hit that Profile button under the Home button at the top left to get yourself back to a page that looks like this:

At the top left of the screen you see “View profile as: Yourself” next to a down arrow. Clicking that down arrow gives you the option of viewing your profile as the public would, letting you check to see how things are shaping up. And of course you can always switch back again.

As for the profile itself, you have the blue icon again. This is your profile pic, the place where you would stick a professional photo of yourself or perhaps your company logo. You should get a photo that is a minimum of 250 x 250 pixels in order to maintain image quality.

Below that picture is a count of how many times your profile has been viewed.

To the right of the profile picture if your cover picture. The optimum size here is 1192 x 2120 pixels. This size is the same as the size of a Youtube channel’s cover picture, so if you have both a Youtube channel and a Google+ profile linked together for your business it will help with your branding to have the same image in both slots.

That blue box to the bottom right is Google helping you through the various stages of setting up your profile by giving suggestions as to what you should do next.

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The “Share what’s new…” box to the bottom left is of course where you create new posts.

This page is where people will take their first impression of your business, so make it count. Remember to not only display what you’re selling, but how you’re selling it.

For example, if you’re in the restaurant business you can use the cover photo to depict if you’re fine dining, or perhaps more of a fun hang-out spot with a soda fountain and a jukebox.

At the bottom of the box containing the two photos you see some more options: About, Posts, Collections, Photos, Videos, +1’s, and Reviews.

We’re currently on the Posts page of the Profile section. This would be where our posts show up.

Continued in next blog post: Google+Guide Part 3 The “About” Section

Google+ Guide
Part 2

NOTE: As of April 2019 Google no longer offers the Google+ platform. BOSS offers a free Expert Step-By-Step LinkedIn Guide to Get Your Business Seen Online Click here for the whole guide.

Creating Our Google+ Profile

This is the face of our Google+ presence, the images and text all of our visitors and potential customers are going to see. It’s important to take the time to spruce the joint up a bit, creating a professional first impression.

There are two main factors to keep in mind when creating our page. The first of course is that we want to show what we are selling.

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The second thing to keep in mind is how we are selling whatever it is we’re selling. In other words, what kind of experience will clients or customers have when they deal with us?

Are we a streamlined, no frills, incredibly serious institution, or are we a fun-oriented start-up? This is the voice, vibe, or culture of our business, and it can be a big factor in people choosing us over our competition.

So keep those two points in mind – what we’re selling, and how we’re selling it, as you build our page.

The outsourced accountant..… With a minimum of 50 hours per month only, you can have a dedicated professional accountant!

Get a Google Account

If you already have a Gmail account you can skip this step. If you don’t, you’ll need to get one since all of the various Google programs are connected.

Go to Google.com. Create an account like you would with any other service. You will need another email address because Google sends you a confirmation email to that address to create your new Gmail address.

You can create more than one account on a computer, say if you want a personal account and a business account.

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To create additional accounts, click on the blue icon at the top right once you’re signed in with the first account you created:

From there simply choose the “Add account” button.

The outsourced accountant…..The best outsourcing offer up for grabs now with BOSS. Forget about budget write-offs and paying overtime/ annual or sick leave… for good!

Getting Familiar with Google+

If you’ve never had any interaction with Google’s various online entities before you’re going to get a starter page that will attempt to introduce you to things you might be interested in.

From then on when you first sign in you’ll get a page that looks something like this:

All of those boxes in the middle are filled with items that people you’re connected with have posted or pointed out. If you’re familiar with Facebook or Twitter, this section is like your timeline or newsfeed.

At the top right are two icons, under the blue circle icon. The one on the left, the outlines of two people, suggests people you might want to add to your friends list.

The icon that displays a quotation mark is used to start a new conversation.

You can feel free to click on either of them to have a look-see at what they do. They don’t immediately do anything beyond opening menus.

If you click on the 3 x 3 grid to the left of the blue icon it displays all of the various Google programs you can access. They’re all connected to your account.

The box at the top left in the main central section, where it says “Share what’s new…” is where you create new posts to send out to your circles. You can create posts containing text, photos, links, videos, scheduled events, polls, or combinations of any of the above.

Along the top you see All, Friends, Family, Acquaintances, More, Mentions, and Explore.

All, Friends, Family, and Acquaintances are all circles that are pre-made for you, ready for you to slot your connections into their proper places.

The More selection gives you a drop-down menu where you can change your stream configuration (how the boxes of texts from your connections appear) and add a new circle called Following. This would be a circle of people that you follow, but don’t fit into any of the above categories of circles.

Mentions is a timeline of posts mentioning you.

Get direct contact with the outsourced accountant dedicated to your business needs anytime Monday to Friday….

Continued in next post: Google+Guide Creating Our Google+ Profile Continued Part 2a

Google+ Guide
Part 1a

NOTE: As of April 2019 Google no longer offers the Google+ platform. BOSS offers a free Expert Step-By-Step LinkedIn Guide to Get Your Business Seen Online Click here for the whole guide.

Continued on from: Google+Guide Part 1 Why Your Business Should Use Google+

4. Be More Visible in Google’s Search Engine Results.

Those same boxes that show up on Google maps also show up in Google’s search engine results. If we try “coffee shop Perth Australia” we get:

The outsourced accountant..… With a minimum of 50 hours per month only, you can have a dedicated professional accountant!

Those boxes and pictures stand out from the regular text, don’t you think?

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5. Add Customers and Clients to our Google+ “Circles.”

“Circles” are Google+’s way of creating specific groups of people. So we might have one circle for family and friends, and then another for customers.

This means that we’ll be able to hit all of our customers at once with a promotion, freebie recipe, notice of charity work, tips, commentaries, blog posts, photos, videos, you name it.

As with all social media, the name of the game in Google+ is interaction. So while we’re sending our posts, we’ll also be able to see responses, and respond to them in kind.

The more engaged we are, the more we stay in the minds of our customers. The more engaged they are, the more likely they are to buy from us and to tell their friends about our business.

Added Bonus – We edit which circle sees what. So we can feel free to send friends pictures of our drunken revelry weekend without worrying about our bosses or clients seeing it.

Second Added Bonus – We’re more likely to show up in search results for searches done by people included in our circles. When people do searches they usually have the “private results” (which means personalized results) turned on instead of global (non-personalised results), like so:

This gives our output even more of a chance to make an impact.

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6. It’s Another SEO Avenue.

Not familiar with SEO? It stands for Search Engine Optimization, and it’s all the rage in getting recognized on the internet.

Specifically, when people search for a business just like ours they enter certain phrases or keywords into a search engine (Google being the biggest search engine by far).

So let’s say we own a lingerie shop called “What’s This Button Do?” Someone searching for a shop like ours might try, “lingerie” or “lingerie store” or something more local like “lingerie shop Sydney.”

These are all SEO key-phrases. Some phrases are used more than others. The more we “own” such a phrase, the more likely we are to show up higher in Google’s results.

Showing up high in the results is ultra-important. Think about whenever you search for a business – how often do you leave the first page of results? Do you ever go beyond the second page?

It’s the same deal for people searching for a business or service like ours. Our Google+ page lets us associate key phrases with our business, giving us more ownership over them.

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7. Hangouts.

Google’s Hangouts allow for free phone calls or video conferencing right from our Google account. Easy peasy. We can even host a session for some of our closest customers, sharing recipes, giving tips, or holding lessons.

Continued in next post: Google+Guide Part 2 Creating Our Google+ Profile

Google+ Guide Part 1

Contents

NOTE: As of April 2019 Google no longer offers the Google+ platform. BOSS offers a free Expert Step-By-Step LinkedIn Guide to Get Your Business Seen Online Click here for the whole guide.

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These are the topics that we’ll cover over the next few blog posts….

• Why Your Business Should be Using Google+.
  1. Creating Your Google+ Profile.
  2. Get a Google Account.
  3. Getting Familiar with Google+.
  4. Optimizing Your Google+ Profile.
  5. The “About” Section.
  6. Linking Other Social Media Accounts to Google+.
  7. Google+ Example Pages.
• Working With Circles.
  1. Posting to Circles.
  2. Interacting with Other People’s Posts.
• Google+ Business Pages.
  1. Creating a Business Page.
  2. Get Familiar with the Business Page.
  3. Traffic Flow from Your Website to Your Website to Your Google+ Page.
  4. Connecting a WordPress.com Blog.
• Building Your Google+ Business.
  1. Gaining Relevant Followers.
  2. Finding People in Your Field.
  3. Organizing Your Circles.
  4. Consistency, Quality, and Communication.
• Social Media Do’s and Don’ts.
• Handy Google+ Guides.

The outsourced accountant..… With a minimum of 50 hours per month only, you can have a dedicated professional accountant!

Why Your Business Should be Using Google+

It feels a bit odd saying that anything associated with the monster internet company Google is the baby of any sort of technology-oriented group, but for many people Google+ has that feel.

Facebook is the big daddy of them all, and there’s also Pinterest, LinkedIn, Twitter, and so on. Since Google is one of the smaller fish in this particular pond is it worth the time to put together a Google+ page for our business?

The answer is yes. Why?

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1. It’s Google.

Facebook is indeed the biggest of the big players in social media, but Google+ has an immense advantage in at least one area – it’s Google. Google is the most visited website on the planet, earning over a billion visits in a single month.

As Google is forever working on their search engine algorithms, which social media service do you think they’ll most likely work towards integrating more? Probably not the competition. Getting into Google+ means already being at the destination when Google’s search engine algorithms arrive.

2. 300 Million People Worldwide Use Google+.

Some of them are movers and shakers in your industry. Others are potential clients or customers. A user base with a population just shy of the United States is a lot of people for our business to just ignore.
The outsourced accountant…..The best outsourcing offer up for grabs now with BOSS. Forget about budget write-offs and paying overtime/ annual or sick leave… for good!

3. We Can Integrate Our Business’ Info into Google Maps.

Some of them are movers and shakers in your industry. Others are potential clients or customers. A user base with a population just shy of the United States is a lot of people for our business to just ignore.

The outsourced accountant…..The best outsourcing offer up for grabs now with BOSS. Forget about budget write-offs and paying overtime/ annual or sick leave… for good!

We’ll use Perth as an example. Try searching for a business nearby. How about “coffee shops”?

Some of the results only have red dots. Some of them have neat little coffee cup icons. Which are you more likely to click on as a viewer?

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Whenever we hover over one of the results we’re given a little menu that looks much like the boxes at the top left. They show a profile picture of the business, a review rating, and the number of times reviewed.

Actually clicking on one of the dots or icons pops up a window to the left like so:

Visitors now have the ability to see more photos, see the business hours, get directions, get the telephone number, click directly through to the business’ main website, save the business for future reference, and immediately see some of the reviews.

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We can control all of this information.

By filling out our info we gain another advantage – we’ll appear the same as any of our big competitors on the map. Let’s say somebody looks up “hamburgers.”

We own a joint called “Between the Buns.” It doesn’t matter that there’s a McDonald’s nearby – we’ll both look the same at first blush. We’ll be even-Steven with one of the biggest chains in the world. That’s a huge boon to local businesses.

Continued in next post: Google+Guide Part 1a Why Your Business Needs Google+