Food Bloggers Community Hangout

of the Google+, the circles, and how you can get more use out of Google and how to turn it into more of a community for you. Alright, first thing we want to cover is the use of circles. And for your circles, what you want to do is you want to set them up with the bloggers that you most want to follow, or all the bloggers, however you want to set it up, breaking them up into different segments. And what you'll have when you come to your homepage then is you'll have a set of bloggers that you can easily follow, and you'll be able to click on the bar that will show up when you go to your homepage. In fact, let me screen share. Let me see if I'm on it. Okay, so when you go to homepage, what you'll have is you'll have your— at the top of the page, I have Active Food Bloggers, Food Bloggers, and the rest of your list. So you can set these circles up so you can have the bloggers right at the top of the page at a touch of a hand, so you can see who's posting and follow the bloggers that you used to follow all the time. This makes it really, really easy to keep track of your friends and what they're posting. Alright, so that's a great way to use the circles. And you just set up your circles so you can do some easy, very easy navigation around. Alright, let's come back to me then. Alright, we're back. Alright, so that's one good way to set up your circles so the community can serve you better and you can find everybody. Alright, so So once you've got your circle set up and you've got them broken down so you can follow everyone, the next thing you want to do is start being a good pluser and a good community member, and you want to start leaving comments, you want to +1, and you want to share. So the more you do this, the more likely people are going to do the same thing for you too. So in order to get shares you know, you're gonna have to give— you have to start sharing some other people's work too. And very important, before we get away from this, in sharing, if you don't post public, if you post limited, which means when you put your post up, you're just sending it out to the circles that you have, or certain circles, or even just all of your circles, if you do that, you're restricting anyone from sharing it publicly. And what that does is that won't get you as much exposure. So when you post, you want to post public all the time. Okay, thanks, Ty. I gotcha. Hey, Grace. So anyway, um, you want to post public so that way when you go to share, you can share public, because if not, what happens is you're gonna run across people that have shared limited, and then you're only going to be able to share that to your extended circles. Okay, so you want to be able to share public. Alright, that gives you more exposure, and that's how you're going to get more new followers or any new followers at all. So that's very important. So when you're sharing, you get to share to public, and that also does another thing. When you share your post to limited, to like different circles, that you're sending notifications, and that's not something you always want to do either because especially if you're sending emails along with it, because people start to get a little upset when they get too many emails. So you want to keep your sharing to public, and that eliminates a lot of all the extra notifications that are going out to people, and especially the emails. Okay, anybody has any questions, you can type them in the sidebar, and I will, uh, try to pay attention to it as we're going along. Alright. I will do that for you, Kim. There you go. Alright. I just muted you to see if that helps. Okay. So now we're talking about leaving comments. Now when you leave comments, another important aspect of leaving that comment is You want to put the person's name in the comment too. So you want to plus, like if you're using my name, be plus Chef Dennis Littley, I really enjoyed the post you left. Boom. So what you're doing by leaving the comment with a name on it is you're giving them another form of being recognized on the Google search engines. Okay, because every time your name is mentioned, it's like a positive mark for you. And the search engines will be able to find you more often. The more you're noted, the more your name is posted, the more chances you have for being found. Okay, so I hope that makes sense. So again, when you are communicating with each other, you know, you don't have to do it all the time, but think about putting the name in there when you do leave a comment. Alright, and that way someone will leave that back for you the same way. Okay, now we talked about posting to public, and now lately I have been posting just an image with a link under it. Alright, what that does is that lets you have a much bigger image, and Google+ is really a picture-driven community and they love food porn, and by putting up a picture that's lot larger, you're going to get a lot more attention, you're going to get a lot more pluses, and you're going to find some new followers that way too, because people will share it more frequently if it's something that really looks appealing and it's a big enough picture. Now, if you just put your link in and you get that little thumbnail-sized picture, it's really hard to see, you know, how good something might look. But when it's a bigger size image you do draw a lot more attention. Okay, so put up a picture, put a link under it, and then just put a little blurb about it. Alright, so say a little something along there with it. Don't just pop it up and expect everyone to just know it's you. Okay, so make sure you write a little something too. How you doing there? Okay, so We've talked about using the circles. We've talked about posting and commenting and sharing. Alright, now another thing you can do on here that really makes this a very, a community is that you can send messages to each other. It doesn't have to be to a whole group. It doesn't have to be, you know, to just one person if you want either. But when you type in your message Okay, all you have to do— let's go to screen share again. I'll show you. Alright, so when I'm typing a message here, see this box Public? I'm just gonna get rid of the Public. Let's say I wanted to send it to Kim. I start typing the name in and then hit Kim and then put it in there. Okay, so whatever I type is only gonna go to her. Alright, now if you wanted to include any more people in it So you could send a message to 1 person, to 2 people, to 10 people, to 20 people, or to the whole world. So it's up to you. Alright, so that's a good tool to use, and it'll help you to communicate with each other and have a better sense of community. There we go, and I'm back. Alright. Kim, do you have a question? And for those that don't have microphones, you know, feel free to type your questions on the side. I guess not. Okay, alright, so then we're talking about holding your own Hangouts, holding your own events. Okay, what I did tonight you guys can do. You can schedule them with your friends. Say you wanted to meet up on a Thursday night with some of your food blogger friends at 8 o'clock. If you want it to be private, don't schedule it as an event. If you don't wanna have a YouTube video of it, you don't want to do on air or broadcast it. Alright, so you can either keep it private amongst yourselves, or if you want to have a roundtable discussion and you think it might be something you want to save for posterity, make a video of it. So if you want people to be able to view it from the outside, then you have to click the On Air option when you're setting it up. So when you go to set up— if you're going to set up an event— let's go to screen share again. Alright, let's say we're going to set up an event, and do we have it here? Events. Okay, create an event. Right here we're going to create an event, and the event options— before you post this, you want to go into advanced, okay? You want to make this an on-air event. See, the little red box will pop up. So by doing that, when you, when you do go live with this, this will let anyone who can't get in the Hangout watch it live as it's going on. They can watch the link. Okay, and then you would type your information in here, what the Hangout was. You can change the picture very easily. You can put your own theme in. If you have a picture this size, you can actually even use your own picture. Okay, then you would put the date in, the time in, and then later on when you start the Hangout, you come back and you put the location in, in this bar. You copy and paste it and put it in here. Any details you want, you add in, and then you invite whoever you want to invite. Anyone from your circles, all your circles, make it public, whatever you want to do. Alright, so that's how you create an event. So once the event is created and then you send it, you make your invitations, you send your invitations out, then people get notified about the event. Alright, let's go back. Oops, sorry. And back to the page. Okay, so now what you would do is you will start your Hangout. Once you start your Hangout and then you go up to the top of the toolbar after you filled out things to start the Hangout, and you'll copy and paste the address bar and then put it in the event thing., and then boom, people start showing up. And then right in the top right-hand corner of this box, there is a broadcast button. And until you start broadcast, your YouTube video is not being made. Once you start broadcast, then the video is getting started. Okay, so then once the video started, and once the video is made, it's there for posterity in your YouTube account, or until you delete it. One of the two. Okay. Alright, another thing we wanted to talk about that Google has advised us was when you do post, start using some hashtags under your post. Alright, so we already talked about instead of just posting a link, you're gonna post an image first, then you're gonna put your link under it after you write a little blurb about it, then underneath the link you want to start throwing some hashtags up. So if it was a cake, you would put #cake. If it's a Halloween or Thanksgiving or something for the fall, you might hashtag #fall. Alright, you might hashtag #desserts. And a lot of times, once you start typing your hashtag, it'll give you some options, it'll give you some suggestions of what you can use for the different hashtags. Okay, so that's a good, that's a good thing to do. People that are searching for certain things may find you where they may not have otherwise. So by using the hashtags, you're giving yourself some opportunity for more visibility again. Okay, so another, another area to help yourself on Google is the Google Authorship. Okay, I don't know if everybody knows about Authorship, but if you do not, this is something that you really should apply for. It takes about 2 or 3 3 weeks to get it, but if you Google Authorship, you'll find some links to it. Actually, on the very first Community Hangout I did last Thursday at 4 o'clock, the people from Google put some links in there for you. So if you go back on my page or on the events page and go back to past events and open it up, you'll see some links there. But you can just as easily Google Authorship. And then there's a few steps to follow to claim authorship. Now what this does is when you have authorship, when you search, when someone searches for a recipe and it's one of yours, your picture will come up next to the search. So you'll have your recipe for your cake or whatever it might be, and next to it it'll have a picture of yourself.. And in some instances it'll have a picture of the item itself. Now it seems that I've had that happen more when I have posted the picture and not just the link, but you'll have one of the two. And if you have a picture of yourself, what that does is that gives you more of a personal edge for people that are searching for something, because people want to connect with another person. They don't want to just see all recipes, they don't want to just see, uh, uh, source of just recipes. They want to talk to a person and they want to connect with a person. So by claiming the authorship, that's one more point in your favor. That's one more step for you to take to get people to connect on a personal level with you. Okay, and some people had asked me about branding, about using your brand as a fan page. Well, on Google+, the fan pages are set up a little differently, and I think it's probably to help prevent a lot of spam from coming on here. But if you have a fan page, you can't follow anyone else other than other brands. So that limits how many people you can get to follow you, because, you know, most of the times you're going to follow someone first before they follow you. So if you can't follow a person, you know, you're going to end up not having as many followers. So I always tell people to stay with your personal page and just use your brand underneath of it as a tagline. And that, again, that's a step at people connecting with you personally, okay? Because you want other people that are on Google+ to connect with you. It's not just about the food bloggers connecting with you. You want to get as many regular people as you can because that's where your new readers are going to come from. That's where your, your gonna really start to see some increases in your numbers. Okay, any questions so far from anyone? Anyone want to type anything they'd like to talk about since we don't have any— or you have a microphone open? Any questions from anyone? Nope, pretty quiet group tonight. Okay. Like always, you know, you can, if you have any questions, then you can email me privately or send me a message on Google+ like I showed you to do. Just type my name in first and take out the public, and it's an easy way to communicate. So if you have anything you'd like to talk about, I'm here. One other thing I'd like to bring up is if you're in a city that has any Google reps in it, you know, do yourself a favor and reach out to them because they're really here to help us. They really want us to succeed. And they'll do everything they can to make that happen for you. So if you're in a city— like, I'm lucky Philadelphia has a Google office. And we met with the Google reps there, and they really were very helpful. And they actually, when they invited us over, they even served hors d'oeuvres and beverages. So they have a budget. So that's another nice thing. But they also own Zagat. And Zagat is another great way to get your name on Google More, and that is by using— if you go to the page again, let's do screen share one more time, and let's come down here to local. And when you click on local, what happens is restaurants in your area will appear. And if you've gone to any of them, what you want to do is you want to click on them and you want to leave review. Okay, and the review will be under your name. So, and there's also a place you can put other addresses and you can search. It doesn't just have to be restaurants, it could be any other services that you may take, like if you get your car worked on and they're in here, you can review them. If it's a hairdresser, you can put that in. If it's a hotel, you can put that in. So there's a lot of options here to do reviews. And they're looking for people like us to do these reviews, especially restaurants, because it's always better when a professional reviews something. And as foodies, you know, we're professionals. So it's a good way for you to get your name one more time onto Google. You know, every time your name is mentioned, it's like a little bell rings, okay? And it's a point in your favor. So you wanna do that as often as you can and get as many points in your favor. Okay? Alright. Well, that's about all I have for you. It's going a little fast tonight because we don't have much interaction here, any questions. If you have any questions, you know, now's the time. Okay. You're welcome. And thank you for coming. Okay. I guess that's about it. Again, you can reach out to me personally if you have anything that you'd like to talk about. I'm always here, easy to get a hold of. The review section, which review section, Candace? Oh, for the restaurants? That's on the sidebar in local. So let's go back to screen share. Okay, so see right here when you get on your sidebar, home is where you would start where you want to see your circles at the top, and then down here at local opens up restaurants in your area, and you can also do searches for businesses, or you can look in other towns like Collingswood. That's where I live, so when it pulls it up, it automatically knows that and it brings me up to restaurants in the area. And then, you know, you can keep going down further. You know, even Papa John's is even on here if you want to, if you're so inclined. You know, I would just leave them for restaurants that really deserve a rating. You're not here to bash anybody, but you know, it's always good to give your point of view on something. Okay. Alright. Well, that's it. We're gonna go. And thank you all for coming tonight. Yeah, don't be anxious about giving them. You can give a review. You don't have to put the review on your page. I usually don't. I usually just let the review stay, reside with the restaurant. I don't have them come up on my page, but you can put them on your page if you like. Lisa, you're welcome. Okay, when adding people to circles, can you add them to both follow and friends? Yes. Dennis Littley. It doesn't make a difference. You can have a person in more than one circle if you like. All it's going to do is if all your circles are visible to the public is it will increase the number of followers that you are following. Okay, so other than that it makes no difference. You could put the same person in 5 circles if you want. It's however you want to set your circles up. It's best to set them up, especially in the beginning before your numbers get too large, to set them up in a way that makes sense for you. That's why I was advising, like I have two different sets of food bloggers. One are ones that are more active and one are other ones that I know are friends but they're not active on Google+ and I figure they'll come back sooner or later so I keep them in there. But if you had a set of, like if you were on FoodBuzz. And you had these 15 people that you always talk to all the time, you could set them in a smaller circle so you could really keep tabs on them. But it is pretty easy to use. Get in the habit of using Google. I know it is new to everyone. One more time to the screen share for you. And what I do when I come— and this is something that in about 10 minutes, twice a day, you can really make a difference in your, you know, who you talk to. And just go down and just, you know, if you don't have time to read everything, that's fine, but just go down, leave some pluses for things that interest you, you know, leave a comment. Just go right down your circle of friends here, and then, you know, share it. You can share something pretty quickly right here. You can leave a comment pretty quickly. If you spend 10 minutes twice a day, 20 minutes or half an hour if you can spare it, you'll find yourself getting a lot more results. People will start coming to you more, you'll start getting more comments, you'll start getting more pluses. It's a matter, it's kind of like the comment game that we used to play on blogs where you leave comments, people leave comments for you. This is the same kind of thing here. You want to do it until you really start getting yourself built up enough where you don't have to worry about that. You get enough followers, you get enough people around, because the more you comment for people, the more they're going to comment for you, the more they're going to share for you. And one good thing about the share thing too is every time you share something or you comment on something, you know, you're bringing it back to the top of the stream. So even if you just leave a comment for somebody, what that does is that drives their post right to the top of the stream again, so it gets visibility all over again. Because otherwise the stream just rolls down. So if you leave a comment, it puts it back to the top. More people are going to see it. So that's a good thing to do too. Okay. Kim is typing something. Let's see. Thanks, Ty. I'm glad you liked it. Evelyn, did you have any questions or anything? You missed most of it, but you can watch it on tape. Kim is saying she checked her restaurants and— well, you can read it too. It's on your sidebar as well.. Also regarding commenting and sharing, tend to comment more than you share. You know, you don't want to overshare. You don't want to get crazy. Share things that are interest to you. So, you know, it's not like something you have to do. If you see something that looks good, you know, and I tend to share the bigger pictures more than I do the smaller ones, to be honest with you too. So that's another reason I push using, you know, to post an image and then post the link with it. You know, you'll get a lot more shares that way. Okay, well, thanks a lot for coming, and we're gonna sign off. And like I said, if you have any other questions, or if you have time, watch one of the other two that we did, and maybe something was covered that you might have missed or you might have had a question on. Alright, and we'll start having more of these community events different times during the week and try and pull this blogging community together. If you have any friends that aren't on Google+ that are bloggers, drag them over. Alright, if they come over, have them contact me too. I'll make sure I follow them and we can help promote them a little bit to get them some followers. Anybody need some help getting promoted, just let me know and I'll do what I can for you too. Alright. Have a good night, everyone, and I'll see y'all real soon. Alright. Bye-bye.