The Bloggers Guide to Using Google+ Effectively - Publisher

Hey there, I'm Chef Dennis and I'm here with my co-host Jean Layton and we are here with the Blogger's Guide to Using Google+ Effectively. And it's part of our ongoing mission to teach everyone as much as we can about Google+ so you enjoy being here, enjoy using it, and drink the Kool-Aid just like we have about Google and have a good time. So today we're going to talk about Publisher and if we have time we'll take some other questions as well. But as usual, put your questions in the comment. And we will do our best to get to them. So I'm going to turn it over to Jean. Hey, Jean.

Hey everybody, good morning. It's, you know, this is one of those topics that people keep wondering, do I need it? Do I not need it? I've set up authorship, but am I a publisher too? And as I did the research for this particular tag, it's really kind of interesting. There's a lot of misunderstanding about rel=publisher. I can completely understand the confusion because to most people the word publisher means I write and I put it out there and it's tangible. To Google, I don't think that's what it means. I think to Google what it means is it's the information on your site that is not personally contributing. It's not the post that you write in your voice. That you're talking about the latest and greatest cake you've made. It's the information like archives and your overall brand. So your PR page, your press page, your other aspects of your site if you're a blogger. If you are a brand, an outright brand, then it's the talk about your products. Talk about your sourcing, your ingredients, your mission, your vision, your values. All of the things that you talk about as entities that are not an individual idea post. So that sounds a little nebulous and I understand that, but that's the difference between the two things that I've come to. And what I've discovered is that we all need to be set up with both the rel="publisher" and the rel="author" tags. So if you haven't set up your authorship, go back in our series. We did authorship, I think it was week 2, and you can find all of those posts on the wingwomanproductions.com website. And the videos are actually embedded, but that way you get both what we were looking at and the video. But for today, I am going to screen share out to the post and it's going to show you— if it will— there we go. I'm going to screen share the post and it will show you the tags that are being used. It's just this highlighted the a href your long Google+ business page number. And here's the big difference between your personal authorship and your business page. Your personal authorship, this number here would be your profile number. But for a business page to be able to claim publisher, you have to have a business page on Google. So that means you need to come on over, do the dropdown from Home down to Pages, and either set up a new page if you don't already have one, or start from a page you have. And it's Monday, and it's Martin Luther King Day, and I think my daughters are on my internet, so it's taking a little longer to click in. Although I told them no internet while mom's online. Okay, so this is— these are my pages and I'm just going to click on Manage the Wingwoman Productions to show you the actual interplay. You have to do a circle of connectivity just like you do on your authorship. You have to tell Google you write this your business writes this business page. And so what you do is you come down and see notifications— sorry, whoops— under this More tab for your site, and you'll see you can grab these website plugins. And that's the fastest way to put the rel="publisher" information because it tells Google when you put these buttons onto your site that there's a connectivity between the two. So pick your badge, pick your budget, your plugin, whichever it is, your snippet. It'll all allow you to put that into your site. And then Go up to Settings. Who can hang out with you, all of that. Where you can get your information, your circles. Sorry. Let me get back to Overview. You have to put the connectivity to your site. So you've put the badge or the button on your site.

We have heard that sometimes those badges will slow us down a bit, so keep that in mind.

Yeah, there's actually— I'm gonna flip back to the post— there's actually this line of code being put into the head of your site is far more effective and won't slow your site at all. If you're on Blogger, The badge is the easiest because they literally can just dump it into your sidebar. And then you need to put your website into your page just like you connected your— you had as a contributor. I'm trying hard to find it and for some reason I think it may have switched over the evening.

They've done that recently. They've made some switches.

Yeah, I'm not seeing the spot for the— I'm going to go back to my profile, and that's, I think, where— I've now just realized I've signed in as my page, so I have my page logo here, over here. Okay, so now in my profile of the page. I now am looking in my About and this is where the links— there's my Google URL and there's my website. And see that little checkmark? That tells me that it's been verified. So that's the connectivity between Google and the website and the page. So there's the circle of confirmation. So once you do that, of course, the next thing to do is you go to the Rich Snippet tool and double-check that it works. So you pull that up, you type in Your Wing Woman Productions, or for me, Wing Woman Productions, just cut and paste. Slap it in there. And let's see if it previews. And there we go. Here's the preview. It's saying authorship's not working. That's not true. I know it's working. Oh, I know what I grabbed the whole about and I stopped it. I should stop it early, but that's the circuit. So you double-check it and there's my age card. There have been— and I'm gonna go out of screen share— there have been times where The publisher's connectivity seems to have more problems than authorship. So double-check and double-check and double-check that it's actually linked, and that will let you know that the meshing of the two— three— has all happened. So let's see if we've got any questions.

Okay, I don't see any so far. Uh, Deepita Suri was asking about links, but I don't know what links she was talking about.

Do you mean on the page?

Well, it says, "Where are the links? I was away in a remote part of the world." Okay, so I'll put it up. Maybe she doesn't tell us what links she was talking about. Links to the show? I don't know. So try and be specific a little bit when you ask questions so we know what you're talking about. Otherwise we're just guessing here.

We're guessing at what you're asking. Since we don't have any other questions, right? Everything else is— hi everybody, glad you're here. One thing about the publisher is there's something called Direct Connect, and I'm gonna screen share that page. It's the most important reason to want to have the Google connection happening. Direct Connect allows you to have people add your business page right away, one click, when you have it set up. So if you have a brand entity and people are seeing it in the stream, it allows them to connect to you in a way that you don't get if you haven't done the circuits. It's important but it's one of those little technical details that for an awful lot of people is just kind of overwhelming. What I'd encourage you to do, put the piece of code in your head, make sure you've got your business page number in the head, put the badge on your site, make them all connect and then check that the connections are all there. And then move forward. For people who run multi-author blogs, this is incredibly important because someplace like the Huffington Post has thousands of different writers within their structure. But there's also the Huffington Post brand and the Huffington Post vision. If you don't have rel="publisher" that structure, that framework is not highlighted anywhere on the web. And you really do want— because you're that compiler of information, that curator of information, you want your structure to be highlighted as well as all of the individual authors. Individual authors get the rel="author" tag, but your page structure has to have that rel="publisher." We do have some questions now, so let me pop them up.

Nick Stokes, how did you get the Rich Snippet tool, Jeanne?

Oh, it's a URL. Hang on one sec, I will highlight it. It's www.google.com/webmasters/rich-snippets. Google.com/tools/rich-snippets. That allows you to check your snippets, your data testing, and your data markup if you use the other side of it. You can check it by URL. You can check it by HTML. It's contained within the Webmaster Tools, an important place for everybody who handles the website, even if you don't consider yourself a webmaster. Webmaster. If you're running your own site and you are your IT, you need to learn Webmaster. It's not hard. It's another one of those you just need some time and some energy to be there. But it's, you know, geek out a little bit and enjoy it. It allows you to talk about your site and be in your site.

Here we got the question from Deepthi. Sorry, and it was the previous session she was talking about, so you said— mentioned Wingwoman Productions, you have them all embedded there.

Or go look at Chef Dennis Littley's YouTube page because he's— have you got it as a playlist on your page?

No, because they're interspersed with actually— I didn't know you could make a playlist, I'm such a newbie here.

Oh, okay, I'll help you after the show.

Okay.

We can get that together.

They're interspersed with Good Day Google+ on mine, so either way.

Which is all good as well. So go and look at Chef Dennis' YouTube. What I've done is I've taken the— they're all housed on his YouTube site, and I've embedded the YouTube onto the posts on Wingwoman Productions. So they still go back to the original source, so it's a good thing.

Okay, here's one from Doug. Maybe I came in late, but is publisher for pages and contributor for profiles?

Doug, I'm not sure what you're referencing when you say contributor for profiles. The two phrases are publisher and author. So authorship is for profiles, publisher is for pages. And if you are a solopreneur, if you're writing your own blog and you have Google profile as your personal name and you have a Google page as your business name, you want to be using both sets of tags in order to claim both the structure of your blog and your actual individual posts. And remember, on authorship, your individual posts are yours based on your byline. So even if you have an occasional guest post, you know, you're not half post where everything's a guest post. You're your blog and you have in a guest once a month or once a week. Their byline takes the authorship and gives them the authorship, but your publisher gives you the content container of your page. I'm trying to figure out multiple ways to say it so that people can understand.

Here's one from Three Fly Three. Hi, thank you for hosting a great Hangout. I'm using a WordPress site. Not self-hosted. Do you know how I can verify my authorship? I understand it needs to be added to the DNS settings, but WordPress support are telling me they can't add it into my header.

So, oh, and there are many ways to do it. Probably the simplest, if you're looking for assistance to get the connectivity together, is to use a plugin. Because you can put a plugin into a self-hosted WordPress blog that you then put your profile number into the plugin and they finish the connectivity for you. And if you're looking for that kind of support, I would encourage a plugin. By all means, there are at least 4 that I know of. Some of them are way slower on the load for your site, so I would Do a Google search under fastest loading or something along those lines, those search terms.

Okay, in fact, Gretchen Louise just said she herself hosts a WordPress, the Yoast SEO plugin works great for verifying authorship and adding publisher. And then Edward is saying that's what he uses, but the web designer he's using later this year isn't a fan and is probably going to switch me over to Genesis. Specific tools. I know I switched over to Genesis and it's working really well.

Doesn't Yoast work with Genesis?

Yes, it does, but I think Genesis has something besides just the Yoast.

Ah, okay. If you're working with your web designer, this is definitely a place for them to get involved because they'll know the intricacies of what's interplaying with what on your blog and is very specific to your This is— I have to admit, you know, our Blogger's Guide to Using Google Effectively, we're trying to give the broad overview, and if you're working with a designer on your specific, by all means get them involved.

Absolutely. Here's one from Kim Boltman. On a previous Hangout, someone mentioned Google Publisher posted their posts to private. Any hints about changing those settings to public?

Oh.

I think she's talking about setting them up in advance and posting them, that they weren't being posted. Is that what you were talking about, Kim? They were being posted to private and not to public. I'm not sure. If you can specify that a little bit more, tell us what you're trying to say.

In all probability, if they are being set up in advance, it's the tool that's doing the holding that's got to be adjusted. So for some people it's Buffer, for some people it's DoShare, for other people it's other tools. Each of those tools has a way to tweak it so that they go public versus private. I don't use— I use DoShare occasionally, and I use Friends and Me, but that's to push out live time. I don't I don't attempt to set up posts in advance. I find it to be, for me, inauthentic. It's not where I'm at in a particular moment. I find that I can tell the difference between somebody who's pushing out content based on a schedule versus pushing out content in response to someone or in organic manner. And since Google is all about real relationships with real people and making those connections happen, when it feels inauthentic to me, I know I'm going the wrong direction.

Absolutely. And I think you can see that a lot on Twitter where so many posts are scheduled, because I mean, I don't go on there very often, but I'll see somebody and I'll comment to them, and they're not really on, their post was just scheduled. So they don't talk back, there's no engagement. So if there's no engagement, you've gained absolutely nothing by doing it that way.

Alright, and the only thing I schedule is a photo. There you go.

And Doug, thank you for that correction, he had his names mixed up, that answers it.

Glad I can help.

3fly3 says, sorry, the site isn't self-hosted, WordPress hosts the site, which they prefer right now. So you get what you get then on those situations.

I think I would go with putting in a badge and see if that does it for you then.

The badge should work.

The badge should work. It'll slow it down slightly. But if you're on WordPress and you really want to be working in a free location, you may want to consider coming back to Blogger. If Google+ is your focus, if that's where you want your work to be coming from, for all the benefits of being in the biggest search engine in the world and being indexed immediately and connectivity to Google+, you may want to consider coming back to Blogger. It's a free platform as well.

I think if you're not going to self-host, Blogger is definitely the choice because you really don't gain anything with the WordPress at that point. Here's one from Swathi, and she says, do you think posting a blog post on a personal page or blog page is good, and how to verify blog page in Google+.

Okay, do I think posting a blog post in a personal page or blog page is good? Okay, I'm going to change your language just a teeny bit to make sure we're talking the same apples and apples. I don't have a personal page, I have a personal profile and I have a blog page. So do I think that posting a blog post on my personal profile is good or is the blog page good. I post both. I send it out as— sometimes I send it out under my profile first and then later post to my page. Other times I send it out as the page first and then post it to my profile, swirl it from there to my profile. For me, that decision is made by when do I want it to hit Facebook and Twitter? Because my personal profile is where I have friends in me, and till something hits my personal profile, it doesn't go out to Facebook and Twitter. That's how I have my swirl set up. I don't think it matters which way you post it first. It depends on where you want it to go Next. Here in Google, people want to talk to people. So unless somebody knows who's behind your page, I think you're going to find your interaction is going to be minimal. And you're going to not have as many people inter— engage, interact, +1, share unless they know it's you behind the page. But If you put it out as a page first and then you put it out through your personal profile, you'll have a direction to push people back towards your page. It's totally up to how you want to set up your social media structure. I've got more and more to, no, just talk to me as a person. I have the pages. More as places to curate the content of what I'm doing.

You never know when Google might change something, which they do often, so it's always good to set the pages up because you never know when you're going to need them. It certainly isn't going to hurt you to have them. I just would not use them and ever advise using them as much. Here's a question somewhat to that. I know I need to read or watch previous sessions, but I'm a yoga teacher, cooking guide, and soon I will have a line of products for yogis.— I'm hoping you're talking about Yogi Masters and not Yogi Bear. I have a website, a blog, a few Facebook groups. Can we combine them all or should I be keeping them together or not? So can I combine URL of all 3 to 4 together?

I would say combine them and put them under your name.

Under your personal name.

Personal name. If you don't have the URL of your personal name. Go get it now. I think everybody, which is going to make it really interesting as people have the same names, but go get your URL and make that the place you live because your name, unless you change it with marriage, is yours forever. And by having and housing all of your information under that one entity, it will make the many facets of you come through authentically. And Google is looking for that authenticity. They're looking for that expert knowledge. For Deutra, it's going to be about being a yogi, but she's also got other aspects. She writes blogs. I'm assuming it's a her. Yes. So if you're talking about all of this and you're writing about being a yoga teacher and you're writing about products that you use to teach yoga and you're bringing it all together, get your own personal URL, set up your personal profile, set up a business page under a business name for the yogi. Having more than one business page is absolutely possible. You saw when I brought mine up, I think I have 4. Or is it 5? I manage another couple for smaller businesses that need a social manager who understands this. But by having that personal profile, that's where I'm building my expertise and that's where I'm building my expert status in Google. That's what I encourage people to do. Be the authentic expert you are and have the businesses as peripherals, but I would not make them your focus.

Sounds good. Here's from Kim Baltman again. No, I don't schedule my posts. I think the previous question pertained to that. Now that you mention it, I've been hesitant to activate the Connect to Google Publisher prompt showing up on my WordPress freebie blog for that reason, just trying to avoid trouble ahead of time.

Um, okay, so Kim, you're on WordPress. Hosted blog. I haven't been on one of those. Yeah, me either. I was on one for about 4 months and then realized it would not fit my needs. I'm not certain. It would be the kind of thing that I'd say activate it and see what happens for you personally and double-check all of the settings because at some place it's got to ask, do you want to Do you want to share it privately or do you want to share it publicly? The only benefit I could see to sharing it privately first is that if you're like me and you edit and edit after you go live, when you get to your 3rd edit and it's perfect, then you share it publicly. But that's just my workflow. I frequently get stuff out just to make sure that it's out there., and then I'll sneak back in and put in a couple of better pictures, or I'll change the labels around, or I'll put in a hashtag somewhere in the meta description so it'll pop up on a Google search. Then I want it to be public. I wouldn't necessarily want it public then.

Gretchen Louise said she uses the REL tag and link author bios on WordPress.com.

Yes, that's where it would be.

Okay, so they should be able to put that in there as well. Mm-hmm. Alright, Laura Williams, I do schedule some posts but I also check my notifications often so that I can respond. Scheduling just helps me stay organized, but you're right, if you're pushing out content but not engaging, you're wasting your time.

Yep. Yeah, I know I have friends that schedule their posts so it drops into the stream at what they consider an ideal time, perhaps in a different time zone. I get that. You want it to launch at 6 AM on the East Coast and quite honestly I'm not up at 3 AM. Yeah, I've done that with my blog. I don't try to do it with Google+ though. Because when something drops into the stream in Google+, people expect you to be awake to be able to respond to it. It's that rapid. I have followers in countries where if I dropped it into the stream at 3 AM, it's not 3 AM there and they're asking questions back or they're inviting me to hang out to chat about it. You know, whatever. So for me, my blog goes out on a scheduled post occasionally, but I don't let it share out to Google+. I change my connectivity that way. And since I tend to dump everything into Google+, I've actually delayed my blog posts going out. I haven't seen that affect my numbers very much, but that's my personal experience and not what everybody's going to have happen.

All I know is I have not blogged regularly in over 3 months with maybe just 3 posts and my numbers keep going up because of my involvement on Google+. That's the only reason they're going up is because I engage here. By engaging here, all my old posts get a lot more play. Engagement does help and engagement is the key to really getting to becoming more of an expert in the eyes of Google because the more people that click on you, the more people that plus you, the more people people that comment on you, they're giving a vote of approval. And the more of those you get, the more times you'll show up in search. So it's kind of like a catch-22. When you show up in search, more people are going to tend to click on you, which is also going to improve your authority. So it's like one complete circle is happening, and it's all through your engagement and your involvement on Google+ and by using it.

Yeah, there's— and this is a new tool. So if you feel like you want to explore the edges, by all means do and then tell us all what happened. Because that's how we learned about these edges. Somebody went there and found out that a particular tool only posts private. Well, that's an edge most people wouldn't have known about if somebody didn't talk about it. So that's where the interaction happens. That's where just Dennis Littley's tool The bloggers group, the community talks about things like that. It's like, "Oh, did you notice that this does this?" It's like, "Oh, no, I didn't." So we chat.

You want to join a community that talks and answers questions and there's a lot of great ones out there. If you need help with Google+, they have communities just about that and there's so many knowledgeable people in there that if you ask a question about the Plus, you'll get a bunch of answers right away even if you're not engaging there even if you're not really participating all the time. People will answer, they're helpful. So the Google+ Help Community, the Google Expertise Community, there's a Hangout community that Ronnie Binzer runs and there's also his Mastery Group if you want to join that. It's a paid community but there's a lot of places you can go for help with questions and don't be afraid to ask those questions. These people all are there to help you and some of them, that's really what they do and they really enjoy it so they thrive on that kind of interaction too. Is helping others. So go in and ask them. You know, if you go into communities, it's got to be to help you, you know, and help you engage. If you link drop, again, you're wasting your time because you're not engaging. And that's all part of this publisher thing. We don't want you to think we're telling you, you know, to just drop links and just to tie in the publisher. It's got to be for a reason to help you, and doing that isn't going to help you.

Isabel Markov, I have to be honest, I cannot answer your question. I don't know enough, just so you have an answer of some sort. But you need to go ask YouTube or somebody else because I don't have an answer. Here, I'm going to bring up Deepiti Suri again. Thanks so much. Really good advice. As I was listening to you, I logged into my personal email and claimed my name. It was still available. Yay! I'm going to watch all the previous sessions and work on it. I know we as yogis keep a low profile, but lately I see it hurts you in the business of yoga. I will blow my trumpet when I come out of my constant yogi life. Deepit, because you have a visual business, Yoga is such a visual business. I'd see if you can manage to get yourself set up and doing Hangouts as soon as you can manage. As far as I know, there isn't anybody doing a live yoga class. If you decided you wanted to do short 15-minute yoga breaks, even if it was just some of the positions and mudras for people who are working at a desk, you know, what can you do to take the tension out of your shoulders, that kind of thing. I can pretty much guarantee you will be busy. So my husband's a yoga teacher, so—

Excellent idea.

So go for it and let us know when you do it so we can talk about it.

Yeah, and even try it because I know this old body could certainly use some yoga. Here's another one from her as well, and it's, I have two emails on Google, one personal and one business. How do I get them together? Anyway, merge them on Google+?

Yeah, yeah, you— oh gosh. Yes, you can merge two emails. It's complicated. You have to export the data on one and import the data on the other. I did it. It's not simple. You may want to think about it further because if you have two emails and they are both applicable to you as your business entity, then you're going to have to merge your contact book, you're going to have to merge your calendars, that kind of thing. But if in reality you've kept one personal, like, you know, mom and dad can talk to you on that one, and the other one is all your business contacts, then use your business ones here on Google+ and be able to set it up under that business this name. The only problem is when you go to claim your vanity URL, your vanity URL may not allow you to capture your name because most people's business emails are not their name. You know, it would be the kind of thing, pop over to Google+ and ask them. There's a Google+ Help Group. You may want to ask them directly.

Okay, all right. Mereya, Merit, easy question for you. I shared something and someone else shared it. Where do I plus his share?

Okay, so you got notification that he shared it. Go to that notification and down at the bottom you can say thanks so much for sharing. There isn't really a way to plus his share unless you go to where he shared and then plus it. I'm not sure if that made it clear or not.

An easy way to find that too is if you go to the ripples. Ripples will tell you where someone shared or who shared. Sometimes shares are not public and it doesn't tell you that until you go to ripples. I had, I think it was 42 shares on something the other day and only 17 of them were actually public shares. Sometimes people will share something to their own private page or just to themselves so they don't lose it and they have a place. It's kind of like keeping it.

Doug is bringing in a good point. I agree with me, thanks. It's hard to engage using pages. Best reason to use them is if you need multiple managers. Multiple managers are typically honest-to-gosh brick-and-mortar businesses or tangible product businesses. That want to be able to use a social media manager for their pages. And when you do that, yeah, you want to be able to be under business page because your social media manager may change but your business message won't. So if you have a situation where you're hiring somebody to handle your social media, then you should be going through your page. You don't want to hand over the keys to the kingdom of your profile to a social media manager, no matter how much you trust them.

Here's something from Nick, and it's news to me. How did you get on the recommended people to have in circles in the food and drink group when you sign up to G+? I didn't know I was on it. You can't see yourself, and I've looked a couple times and I didn't see myself on it. Lots of times you're not on everybody's list. It's there's a group that is on everybody's list, but a lot of them are specific to the person coming up. And I'm on more lists that way because I engage with a lot of people. And when Google sees that you're engaging with a lot of people and different people, they recommend you to people they think fall in the same category. Okay, from Kirsten.

Yeah, I have to admit, I don't chase them. Google will find you and will happily show that you are an interactor and an engager. So don't chase them. Kirsten had this wonderful question. I need something along the lines of a day in the life of G+ to learn how folks spend time on the Plus. I know how to do it on Facebook, but I still haven't figured out how to spend my time on G+. Where to go, what to do. Have you guys done something like that, Jeanne, Chef Dennis Littley. We haven't done that. I think it's a great topic for a show.

We can do an 8-hour show now.

Yeah.

A day in the life. I'd be afraid. I would be so afraid.

Oh gosh, no, I wouldn't do it. Kirsten, I'm going to take that as an idea for a future show. We've got our topics scheduled out through, I want to say through March. Most of March, but I think we'll do that. Or if nothing else, we'll give little snippets. And it'll be different based on everything you do. I know for me, I've started to consolidate my hangout work to be just one day unless I'm a guest on somebody's show. So if I'm hosting things, I try to do one setup and just run one day of the setup, mainly because I work in a room that's not mine. I work in a room that's actually my twin daughters' hangout or their space. And so I'm borrowing their space because it's the quietest and most peaceful room in our house. And then how you handle your social media work in Google+ is very similar to how you do it in Facebook. You drop in what you want to drop in, you wait, you react, you respond, and then I go away and go do other work and come back. But I think Sheff might have a very different way of handling it because I think he spends more time here.

Yeah, I do. I spend— but then again, I'm not working anymore, and when I was working, you know, I found little blocks of time and I would dedicate those blocks of time, and I actually would try to find, you know, 10 minutes at least every 2 hours to jump on, respond to questions or respond to notifications, and plus a couple things, share something if it look good. But honestly, I try anymore, I try to share my stuff first thing in the morning if I can find it. And sometimes I just can't find things that I really want to share because an important thing about sharing is if it doesn't do the person you're sharing good and it doesn't do you good, it's not really worth sharing. So it's got to be a win-win situation for both people when you share something, unless you're trying to just capture something and save it for yourself too, or it's really just an important message you want to share. But I try to do that first thing in the morning because then I'll get more responses to it throughout the day. People will see it, people will comment on it, more people will see it, so it's going to get a lot of traction that way. But I do try to jump on, you know, I'm on a lot more because I use uses for meetings all day long, so I'm here. But if you have a real job and you can't do it, you know, if you have your smartphone and you can at least respond to some notifications here and there, I would try and get on just a few minutes every couple hours, even every 3 or 4 hours, whatever works for you.

Yeah, the timeframe of an interaction with posts here on Google is longer than on Facebook from what I've seen. Somebody posts something early in the morning, it gets picked up by the first ripple, hour later the second ripple, half an hour after. It stays active anywhere from 6 to 8 hours here. People are still responding to it, still plussing it, still sharing it.

I've had posts remain active for 36 hours really, depending on what kind of interaction it gets. You can really stretch a post on Google+. Google+ out.

The other thing is you can bring older posts that are still evergreen out. I know Stephen, Stephen Hovanyan brought out one right at New Year's where he was talking about changing the copyright date on the base of your blog. It was amazing. He'd written that post, I think it was 2 years ago, but he dropped it into the stream just when everybody was at that point where it was applicable again.. And he had, I don't know, last time I looked it was 45 shares or something and it was moving out all over again. So there's that to keep in mind too. You don't have to rewrite something every single time. We all have seen Patty's Day recipes. It's about time to start launching them.

And the great thing about that is if you share it again the following year, you're going to have a lot more new viewers followers by then, so it's still new again. So don't be afraid to reshare it. I just want to shout out to my friend Sonny. Don't be afraid to ask questions. I think I should try to take that advice. And absolutely, Sonny, and, you know, just keep asking questions. When somebody said, I know it's, it's crazy, but it's the only stupid question is the one you never ask. So ask away.

Kim saying, that's so true, finding stuff to share, Chef Dennis. There's been times when I didn't see anything that I wanted to share, so when in doubt, don't. There will always be incoming. Be patient. Absolutely. But the one thing I will say is I've learned to take Peg Fitzpatrick's ideas, and she says go look at the What's Hot list, because if you can be adding to the conversation on what's hot, you'll you'll be in the swing. You'll be in the flow of what people are looking for on Google+ at that point. The way you find the What's Hot is on your profile. You'll see a little box or you can just go into the search and type in What's Hot and you'll get the list to come up. That's easiest.

Here's a note from Laura real quick. I haven't seen you in a while, Laura. It's nice to see you here. Hi, Chef and Gina. "Thank you for having me. Just getting started with Google+ and some of this is a bit beyond me right now, but I'm still getting good info." Just bide your time, Laura. Look at some of our old posts and step by step, baby steps. Don't try and dive into it all headfirst once, it'll be overwhelming.

Yeah, for anybody who's here and is trying to start the conversation, try to think back to when you when you first started on Twitter or first started on Facebook. You started from your key goal. I talk about gluten-free food. I used the keyword gluten-free and that brought me to communities, it brought me to people, it brought me to pages, it brought me to blogs. That's where I started my conversation. Pick your topic. And do the same thing. Use the search bar, find the people that are talking about what you want to talk to, and then listen to them. Don't interact, I mean don't try to impress them. Just listen to what they're talking about. If you've got something to add to the conversation, by all means add to the conversation. But listening when you're first starting out is a great way to get a sense of how people chat here. It's honest and is genuine and open. It is not a distortion of any sort. It's, "I want to talk to you. I want to have a conversation. I want us both to come away from the interaction with something new or an idea to think about." It's not about, "I want to impress the hell out of you. Here's my business card. Bye, I'm off to the next person." That's not Google.

You wouldn't do that in real life and be successful. So think about this as real life more than Twitter or more than Facebook where it was just really artificially created. Google is just a really great place to interact and you engage with people here and the more you engage with them, the more you want to really meet them in person. Those connections become so solid because of Google+ because you can interact in this way with people. I mean, I talk to people all the time and then I finally just say, look, if you're in the area, we gotta meet. We gotta go out to lunch, let's meet face-to-face. When that's possible, it's a wonderful thing. We are at 48 minutes, Jeanne.

We are running over. That's okay. I'm just going to put this one up because Kim's right. It's a great reminder, go beyond your circles. Yes, go beyond your circles. Go see what else people are talking about. If you want to really have a lot of fun, I know you have more interests than just your blog. So pick one of your interests, your personal interests, and find out who's talking about that. I raise chickens. So I went and I found who was talking about chickens. And you know the fun part is? There's always something about that that I can turn back into a post later on. But because I searched under chickens, I found it. Or knitting, pick all your strange weird hobbies. You've got to have them. I can't be the only one.

No, everybody's got them. And that brings an interesting question, what came first, the chicken or the egg since you raised them, Jeanne?

I think it has to be the egg first, but who cares?

As long as we have chickens and eggs.

As long as we have chickens and they're alive and they're beautiful. Dennis actually has to run off to another show.

Yep, I'm going to be on a show in just about 15 minutes, Hangout Pioneers. I hate to think of myself as a pioneer, it makes me feel like I should show up in a covered wagon.

You've got to have a cowboy hat somewhere.

You know, I've got one, I should go get it. Oh my God, you're right. They're from the UK so they'll probably love it.

They will, they will. So yeah, Dennis Littley, that show sounds amazing. There's another show at 11:30 today that Ronnie and Christine DeGraft are starting. So if you feel like we're talking in baby steps for you and you're ready to take the next leap, their show is absolutely the next leap. They'll be talking about the intricacies of marketing and they're brilliant, brilliant people. I would go listen to them. My next show is tonight at 7:00. I'm going to be on the Momovation lead-off to this boot camp. We're talking about using nutrition to detox. Come and join us at 7:00, and that's Pacific time.

I'm sure you'll enjoy that show. I can vouch for both of them. A lot of good information there.

It should be fun. So next week we're talking about communities and how to set up communities, how to be a participant in communities, why you want to be in communities, how you can create your own private communities. So it'll be a lot of information for next week. It'll be fun.

Absolutely. Alright everyone, so thank you for coming today. We're having fun here helping you along and teaching you. If you have questions, you can still leave them in the comment bar and we will do our best to answer them. Go back on some of the old shows if you missed them and check those out and bring your questions for another time. Google+ is a great place to be, so just get comfortable here and you'll see it every time you come on, it's going to get easier and more fun. Have a great day. Jeanne, it's great seeing you as always.

Good seeing you too.

We'll see you next time.