Food Bloogers Hangout 101

We were talking about authorship. Where do they go to do the authorship thing?

If you type authorship into Google, it's the first result that pops up. But it's also at plus.google.com/authorship.

/authorship.

If anyone has any questions for Katie, too, while she's here, I'm sure she'd be happy to answer. She's one of our Google reps in Philadelphia. I was telling them to check their cities wherever they are to see if they had Google offices and how much support you offer.

Definitely. And if you're having trouble getting in touch with someone, you can always reach out to me, and I can connect you with a Google rep in your city for sure.

They're a pretty quiet bunch today.

Well, I will leave a speech.

For someone who might want to pop in. And if you have any other questions, just feel free to plus me or shoot me a message, and I'll pop back in if I can.

Awesome. All right, we'll talk to you later. Bye.

Yeah, they've been a great help here in Philadelphia, another couple people. And also, while we're talking about them, I'm remembering bits and pieces as we go. ZigApp is owned by Google Web. So they're looking for people.

If you look in the corner of your page, you'll see a local column.

If you click on that local column, restaurants in your area will come up. And if you do go out and dine, they're looking for people to do reviews of restaurants from professionals like ourselves. They consider us professionals. Reviews of area restaurants or businesses from professionals are good. And that's another way to get yourself, again, more exposure on the search engines. Get your names coming up. The more your name comes up, the more exposure you're going to get.

OK? Well, I wanted to try and start doing them once a week and try and get some different topics going.

I don't have to be the discussion leader. If someone's got something they want to talk about, I know on Facebook we have a pretty nice group going of food bloggers that post stuff for discussions now. But it's not live, and you can't interact as well with it. So I thought this might be a good forum for us to do that and talk about other problems that we have. People who are taking our work over, just anything else. If they're using WordPress and they have an issue with WordPress, or if they have an issue with a host or something. That we can share with each other, help each other through. So I thought it would be a good idea to start getting the community together. Because I'm not sure where FoodBuzz was going to. And I thought, we're losing that. We're losing another avenue for discussion. This might be a good way to help start supplementing it.

Together again.

Now that I know that I hit that live broadcast thing, it'll be even better. It's going to be a short YouTube video. I also had to verify, if you do do these, they'll ask you to verify your YouTube account if it's going to be longer than 15 minutes. And that was really easy. They just sent a text message to my cell phone, and I typed in the code that they wanted. That's something else Geneanalogio will have to do.

Okay?

Anything else there?

Questions about the question on Dylan?

Any other topics?

OK. Everybody hear that?

No.

No.

All right.

I don't know. Jen, could you repeat that? I don't know. They said they had a hard time hearing that.

I was saying, would be good to discuss how to interact on Google+ and how to gain more followers and gain Trust of people who want to search.

Okay. How to gain more followers. I guess the best way to gain more followers would be to post publicly, which I covered, and to try and find people in different areas to follow and to plus them. They may not recognize you right away or realize that you are there, so you are going to have to be persistent. It may take a few times before they finally start following you or start noticing you. So if it is someone big and you can get into something they are sharing, or get someone big to share something that you have done, that is one of the easiest ways to get them. I'm not always sure how I get some of the people I get, but I seem to be getting about 100 followers a day right now.

Yeah, I think just some main complaints that people have when they first join Google+, they say there's no one here. How do I find people to follow? So I think that's a really interesting thing to try.

How do you reach out, say, who's not a food blogger?

How do I even find— —interesting communities to try to start to join and participate?

They do have the people to follow now. It's not always there, but they do have it up from time to time on the home page. It's funny that it isn't always there. I haven't quite figured that out yet. Yep, it's not on the page today. But it will have their people to follow. They did at one time have a section on the sidebar with interesting people to follow. So every now and then those are up on the side. And if you click on those, it will list like it has I think 24 people in the food section. It has tech people. Fun people. Now you may not get much from following them, but you may see some interesting people that they are talking with or interacting with. So that's a place. It's just going to be some time involved in finding those to try and get them to come back to follow you. I think one of the biggest things is just consistency in posting. Try and post different times of the day. Like I don't stay on here a whole lot, but I'll come on first thing in the morning. And I'll check my stream and then I go to the food bloggers and you try and leave comments. If you leave a comment for someone that's not in food, you probably will get a response or they will come to you because people are always looking for food bloggers. And also sharing circles is a good way too. If you have a circle of food bloggers, share it sometimes and try— and when you see that, when other people do that, reshare it. And try and get that out. See, get it to the stream more and you have a better chance of getting more followers too that way.

You can also, I don't know if people use HootSuite, but you can also check to see like where your traffic comes from and also like when your posts are most effective. Like I found that mine are like most effective, I usually post on like Monday night. So like mine are most effective at like 10 in the morning on Tuesday. And then again at like 2:00 PM, so I don't know if it's like people have kind of answered their emails and then get bored. Or if they— and then in the afternoon it's like after lunch and they're looking for something to kind of like pick them back up again. But it's definitely worth looking at your stats and seeing when people click on your blog, or when people visit your blog, and then kind of scheduling scheduling your posts then, or scheduling for Google+ and things like that. And I think you can also now incorporate Google+ into HootSuite which is really nice.

People use that.

You want to remember too though, that one good thing about Google+, and I think the big difference that I found from Facebook is you are global. You are not— and Jen, you are a perfect example of that. Here you are sitting over on the other side of the pond intending this. And I think I have more global followers than I do followers in the United States on Google. And that seems to broaden, really broaden who you are reaching. So that's a good thing. So remember that it's always going to be a different time somewhere else. I had a class the other day and I had a student from Malaysia and a student from the Canary Islands in it at the same time. And I was just really freaky because I'm like, what time is it? What time is it? I kept checking back and forth. There's always somebody up somewhere in the world. So it depends on where the market is that's really going to be following you or where you can get some more followers from. Maybe different times of the day would be better to post. Oh, that's a good point. Yeah. I mean we want people from our own country to follow us too. We want to pick up followers. But there's always going to be other people out there. We have to be aware of that and see when the stream is the heaviest. I haven't really looked for a place to see if there are stats on when people are on more. I'm sure there are. Like you said, with HootSuite they may tell you. And Google Analytics as well is good. They tell you when people are on?

They don't tell you when people are on, but they'll tell you your stats for your blog and tell you when people are more likely to click on your blog and things like that, and how effective your posts are and whatever.

Okay.

I do use analytics but not very well. And I was recently just told too that the analytics to recheck your stats from your host because the Google Analytics don't always report your stats correctly, that your host will have an accurate because you are paying them to keep track of your hits where Google is paying you if you have their ads off their hits. So they may not feel it necessary to accurately report them. I don't know. But anyway, it was something I hadn't thought of, so it's food for thought. I actually couldn't find them on my host yet, so I have to keep looking.

Google Analytics, just really quick also, because I just discovered this last night, is that they have a Conversion University. So it will actually walk you through— the only thing I really know how to do is look and find out what browser people are using, and that information, and how many page views. How many unique visitors there are. But in terms of the more advanced things, they actually have really nice things set up where for each segment of the metrics, they will sit and show you a 4-minute video to explain what the feature is and how to use it. So if anyone is on Google Analytics, it's kind of a good tool to use.

That's pretty cool.

Now just finding some time to watch those 4-minute videos. It just never seems to be time to do the things we need to do. I know that. Okay, well good. I think we got through a few things today. Anything else about Google? Anyone has any questions? I'm trying to think if there were any other topics. But again, like I said, post public. Post regularly. Don't think of it as Twitter where you are reposting. I know, because then that— if you post, if you are going to repost, do it at different times of the day. Like if you are going to do it, do it at 8 in the morning and then come back and do it again at 6 at night. Or try and grab different markets, but don't do it at the same time every day and just post, repost them. I don't think you will get the response that you want from that. And go back into your archive and dig out the old stuff and start putting that up too. It's more material, people see you more, they are more apt to find you. Post your images in groups. Make up albums and repost your images, and that will also draw people in. Follow people that aren't food bloggers. As much as we love our food blogger friends, we want other people to start following us. So start looking in those different streams for things. That should help get you some more followers. I think it's like anything else too. Once you get them, they just start to multiply. And the more you have, they multiply even more. It's just a matter of math at one point. But getting to a certain point where they start to grow more is always the fun part.

Okay. All right.

Well, thank you all for coming. If no one else has anything to say or any other questions, uh, We'll cut this off now. And if you have any suggestions for the next one or topics you'd like to cover, I'll schedule another one. And you can put them in the comments. And maybe we can get some kind of an agenda too. And we'll have more to talk about next time we get together.

Sound good? Sounds good. Sounds great. Thank you.

Have a good day, everyone. Thanks a lot for stopping by. Bye-bye. Bye-bye.