The Bloggers Guide to Using Google+ Effectively - Setting up Your Profile

Hey there, I'm Chef Dennis Littley, and today we're here with our new series that Jean Layton and I are starting, and it's called How to Use Google+ Effectively. It's more or less aimed at bloggers, but you know, if you're new on Google+ and this is something you'd like to learn, you know, we're gonna start at the very basics, we're gonna start at the bottom, and we're gonna work our way through it. And then as we get everybody pretty much acclimated and happy using Google+, we'll start bringing in guests and we'll have a little bit more in-depth conversation about how to use Google+. For now and for the first part of our series, probably the first 10 weeks or so, we're gonna keep it pretty basic. We're gonna let you learn in a half an hour segment and we're gonna let you ask questions. If you have questions, put them in the comment bar. You can always ask them ahead of time for next week's show. Once we set up the event, you can leave them in the comment bar for us and we will pick them out and answer them during the show. But for now, those of you that are here watching, thank you so much for being here. We're going to start the show and Jean, I want you to say hello to everyone.

Hi, I'm Jean Layton and Dennis and I have known each other for a while and we've been chatting about how people need to shift on over from Facebook. We figured some how-tos would get everybody feeling comfortable over here like we are. We're thrilled to have you. Please ask the questions you need to have answers to. Too. We'll do our best to answer them.

Very good. Yeah, now with Facebook shooting another couple of its toes off with their last thing about charging people for brands and stuff, we figured more and more people are going to finally see the value of Google+ as we have already. We've been on and enjoying it immensely. It's not going to work the same— first thing I want to tell you is it's not going to work the same as Facebook. There are some differences, but it's much more social than Facebook. Once you get over the fact that it is different, that it operates a little differently, you know, you'll see the value and you'll see how you can gain interaction and you'll see how you can gain so many new friends and really network. And it's all about networking, it's all about, you know, presenting yourself. So we're going to start, and we're going to start with a profile because the profile is really It's your calling card. It's your most important piece of information that you can share on Google+. It's going to tell people about you. It's going to tell people whether, first of all, whether you took the time to fill it out and whether you're going to be a good pluser or someone they should follow. Because if you go to someone's page and first of all they don't have a picture, that's like a dead end right there. But then if they haven't filled out the information, I'm not saying you have to go in depth in like a novel situation, but the more information you give people, the more they're going to know about you and be able to decide if they want to follow you. And these are people that don't know you. And, you know, and that's where the whole value of Google+ comes in. It's going after people that don't know you. It's not like on Facebook where you're connecting with all your friends that you already know or readers that already know you. This is a whole new frontier. And you're going after people that don't know you. And by showing them who you are and sharing a little bit about yourself, you're giving yourself a better opportunity to gain these people as readers and as viewers and people following the circle. So Jean, I think you're set up to—

for—

we're going to share your page and show people how to set up their profile.

I've got my— actually, you know what, I'm going to go backwards a little bit because I've I've already clicked through to the edit. So let me pop back. And for everybody, realize that while you're over here on Google+, you get to choose who you follow. So follow people who are interesting. It doesn't have to be your cousin that you've known since you were 3. This is the screen share for my profile. We're talking about attracting people's eyes. Your cover picture is important. An awful lot of you are food bloggers. Pick something gorgeous. But remember that what's behind your beautiful face and your name is a blurry close-up of what you've got in that larger picture. Colors matter. Don't choose something that really clashes with what you've got as a background in your profile picture. And then we're going to talk a little bit more about editing this. So obviously I've already put in a ton of information. If somebody goes to my profile, you know I've been here a little bit because I've at least got some pictures and I've got some story and I've got some work information.

But hey, one thing too, while you go back there, uh, Go back to your top of your profile. What you'll notice in Jean is she's got a great picture of herself too. Well, she's into the other page now. That's okay, that's okay, that's fine. She had a great profile picture and it's important to give yourself a good profile picture because of a few things, but right now when you have your profile picture up here, this is what's going to be shown on authorship. And when your picture shows up next to your recipes and your posts that you're making, so you see she's looking forward, you can see both eyes, and she looks happy. Now, if you don't want to look happy, you don't have to, but it's important to show a good full face shot, both eyes. You know, don't be eclectic or too interesting and have yourself looking off up into the sky or showing half your face or cartoon character, because it's not really going to benefit you having that because Google is looking and it's about trust. Part of it's about trust with them and another part of it is facial recognition. And it may come to the point where that is really a very, very important part of this facial recognition. So you want to have a good frontal shot of your face. And then you'll notice also she's got works@glutenfreedoctor.com. Now you can put your blog name right now, works@— it doesn't have to be Works at Walmart or something, it can be wherever you work. Attends Changing Lives. Okay, you don't have to put your school there. You can put attends, like I had mine is the Google Food Bloggers Community, and then lives in, and she has Bellingham, Washington. Simply now I have the Orlando area. So that's when you want to set it up. Now this is giving people a picture of who you are. Now we come down to it, now she's going to click on the About When she does the About, we'll go through. I'll let her go through.

Okay, so now I'm on the About page and you can see Story. I've kept it really short and there's a reason why you don't want to go into mass novels. This pops up in places throughout the web and you only get, just like Twitter, a certain number of characters to explain. So this is your tagline and your introduction is brief. Work history, I use my URL for my main blog as my site of work because that's what will pop up in this part. And it's important to be able to say, okay, I want my profile to have my URL in it. So that's why I've done that. Education, Remember that education either says attends or attended, so figure out a line that works with attends, current, attended, past tense, and put that in there because unless you've just graduated from college, who cares where you went to school. Basic information, that's, you know, the general— what gender, are you trying to get married, are you just trying to have friends, Your birthday, you don't have to put the year out there, whether or not you're married, and other names so that people can find you. Locations, where the heck you've lived in your life is places. It could also be where you've gone to school. For some people, that's incredibly important. Contact information, we all are hoping that people will reach out to us. You can put as much or as little in this contact information as you would like. For me, I'm very comfortable giving out my office address. My home address is not seen, and that phone number for me is a Google phone number, you know, one of those Google Voice, so it's not even interrupting my office work.

Right now, for those of you who don't know that, the Google Voice number, it's very simple to get, and you can pick actually where you want that number to be from. So if you wanted it to be from another state, you know, or another area, you can get that, that number with the area code for that. But what that is, is that will go to whatever phone you send it to. So you can have it sent to your cell phone, you can have it sent to your home phone, whatever you want. And that way it's a good way to give people a phone number to contact you if you choose to, and without giving them your home phone.

Okay, I just want to interrupt for a second because there's some people in the stream of content contacts asking how to join the call. The only people who will be in this call today are Dennis Littley and I, and we'll be videotaping so you can watch either live now or on YouTube later. But right now, the only people in the call are Dennis Littley and I. So back to where we were, and then in the left-hand column, we're still in Apps with Google+ Sign In. This is who I've given permission to access my account, and I let that be seen because to me, having people know where I've given that trust seems important. A lot of people ask me what apps do I use, how do I keep track of different things. That's what this list is. These are the places and people that I've allowed to connect to my Google+ sign-in. And then on the right-hand column, links. This is like having your media kit all in one place. So Google+ URL, YouTube, all of my other social media profiles and pages. You can have it all. And then contributor to is where do I write —where have I written? You can have current or past. Where am I active? You're seeing communities on Google+ where I'm active, sites that I've written for or are writing for currently. This gets important when we have authorship set up. We'll be doing authorship next week for our half hour. Down at the bottom is links. I have to be honest, I haven't put a a single thing in there. That will become for me where I'll be tying to people who are important to my world here on Google+. But right now I just haven't had the time.

And one thing I will tell you is important about your Contributor To is showing— well, first of all, we're going to tie them into Google Authorship. Okay, so that's very important to have that. And you want to have your blog on there, where you're writing to, if you're contributing to other blogs, or if you're contributing to other places, you want to have that on there too so people can find it. But it's very important to let people know who you are. A lot of people will put it in the Works At and then they never mention, they never give any links. Well, this is how people are going to find you through Google+. They're going to click on your links. So, you know, put your links in here as a contributor to, or just in the top part of it, you know, in the other, with all your different social medias that you have. And don't be afraid, put your Pinterest, put your Instagram, put your Facebook Facebook in there, put everything else that you can find that you may have someplace on the internet, put it in there because you're not only giving it to those that are searching for you or looking for you here, you're telling Google+ or telling Google where else you are. This is also giving them information so they know where else they can find you. It all kind of ties together, so be, be complete. Put in all that information, take some time, put it in. Okay.

Alright, so that's the general image, but how do you get all this information in here? We're going to hit edit on any of the boxes, and this is what will pop up. And Dennis, do you want to go through it or do you want me to?

You go ahead.

You got it. So the first box that comes up is people, and you can have a choice between showing the people in all your circles or granularly picking a circle. Yes, I have tons of circles. I use circles as a filing system.

So that's a very good thing to point out. We will cover that in depth a little bit more, but setting up your circles, especially when you are new at this, is a very important thing, a very good way to file people, and one of the great aspects of using Google+. And you can have people in as many circles as you want, and it doesn't keep adding them into your followers, so it's not going going to multiply. It's just going to give you easier access to them.

Go ahead. Yeah, it's easier to be able to send out information to a smaller group that's very targeted by having that group in a circle all by itself. So I have both geographic interest topics and keywords. I use keywords. So there's that. Who can see it? You get to choose whether you want everybody in the world to see it or just people who you have in your circles. In other words, people that you are following. Obviously my choice is I only want people who are following me to have access to this kind of information. And then people who have you in circles, you can show people who have added you. So there's that. Now the miracle of Google is you do not have to hit save now. You can just hit the next button and it automatically saves it. So I would encourage you, don't hit the save button because it boots you back out. Here's where you get to put in your tagline, your introduction. You can hyperlink and do all those other fun things. Bragging rights— when I first started, I was listening to some fairly well-known people like Guy Kawasaki. He said, don't put anything here that you're really trying to be overt about. This is not the place for your Nobel Prize unless Well, that's what you want to be known for.

I think if you've actually got the Nobel Prize, it would be a good place.

Maybe it would be okay. For me, it was a flippy kind of line. It tells people who I am and what I do. What I'm realizing is for me, the introduction, I really need to put a link in. I don't recall seeing this link, but here's where I'm tagging in my My blog and move on from there. Haven't done that.

You can put your— if you run a community, you can also add it in there as well.

There's a lot you can put in there, but it gets hard to have it show up when you're going around Google+. Shorter is better, so be pithy. Occupation is pretty obvious, skills pretty obvious, and whether or not you want them public, into your extended circles. I'm on an app, so this would be as if I'm in a company and you only want it within the company shareable. Your circles, only you, and custom, and you can pick certain people who can see that information.

Now, unlike on Facebook, where you may want to be more guarded, this is not the time to be more guarded. I mean, maybe there's some information you don't want to share, but For the most part, things about yourself, you want to keep them public because you want people that aren't already in your circles to qualify you as someone of interest and to follow you.

Yeah, and people have wide varieties of interests, and on Google+, all those interests become a part of you as an entity. You can have a circle of people who knit or a circle of people who raise chickens. They'll also be seeing what you post even though my focus is gluten-free most of the time. I still own chickens and I still knit. Employment, glutenfreedoctor.com, this is what is showing up underneath my profile. I actually am going to switch this. I thought it was public and for some reason it was saying my circles. Obviously enough, throw in everything. Whatever you hit as current will show on your profile. Everything else just becomes part of the file. So whatever you consider your most important aspect is what you want there and what you want current. Okay, move on to education. By all means, tell people where you went to school, but whatever is current is what you can put in your profile, and it's the one that says attends current, attended if you don't have it. And then description of courses doesn't show up on your profile, so it's one of those, hmm. I think for people who are showing skills like computer programming and stuff, that description of courses becomes more important, but nobody really needs to have every detail. So, places. Nice. There we go. Where you are now, where you've been, where you're going.. And who can see it? I went into extended circles, uh, just arbitrarily, I think. Maybe public would make more sense.

Yeah, I don't think this would hurt. I mean, a lot of times if you're afraid that people are gonna come knocking on your door, you know, people search hard enough, they're gonna find out where you are. And it— but if you don't want to know a specific city, like I'm actually in Kissimmee, but I thought Orlando area as for networking would give me more of a broader scope, just like when I lived in Oakland, New Jersey, I had Philadelphia area because it gave me a broader scope. So if you're in a big enough city, you know, you can use it. If not, you can always go— if you don't want to be as specific, you can actually write whatever you want in there. And where Jeanne has all the different places she's lived, sometimes you might just want to be a little funny too. And I have— I forget the old name for Camelot down on mine in England. It's a place I've lived so you can always get creative too. Or a place you might want to live like Paris. Tintin Galle, that's what I have, or I did.

It's okay to be funny on Google+. People really love the humor. Go ahead and express yourself.

You'll be amazed how many people will reach out to you because you're in their area and it's a good networking tool.

And I have Bellingham, Washington in part because I do have a brick-and-mortar business. I have my medical clinic here. So for people who are looking for a naturopath in Bellingham, it's good for them to know that. My husband's clinic is also here in town and he uses Google Local and because of Google Local he actually gets traffic from the internet.

There's a whole different philosophy if you have a brick-and-mortar as opposed to just having, like if you're just a food a food blogger, not just, but if you're a food blogger and don't really have that brick-and-mortar facility, the rules change just a little bit.

Basic information, this is all of the stuff that you would put. I think Facebook asks for it all. You can decide whether or not to show your birthday year and quite honestly I don't care one way or the other but I don't think I have it showing. Then other names, whatever other way people might know you is all in there. Especially if you get married while you're in Google+, it's kind of handy to have that maiden name. Then contact information, this is where I put only my business. You can have everything else but everything in my business is going to my circles. Quite honestly, I don't need anybody else to be finding me too easily, and the telephone number is— I've got locked down to me. But like I said, that's my Google Voice number, so— Yeah, I don't really—

I don't have a phone number down. I figure as long as I give them a couple emails, a way to go. And also, I've seen people that had like 12 emails. That's just too many. Pick one or two and that's more than enough. Jeanne's got a brick-and-mortar business, so having her address in there is a little more important. I don't have my street address down.

Yeah, and actually I realize I have it under home, but I live there too. Okay, so this is the links section. This is the one that will take the longest to to put together, but it's also the most important for your authorship throughout the web. So I've actually claimed my Google+ URL of my name, and that's something that will be granted to you, I guess is the way to put it. You have to have 30 followers and Google just shoots it out to you, I think, at this point. When we first got here, Dennis, we were stuck with those long numbers.

Yeah, I I know, I was very fortunate because I was on one of the test groups and they gave me mine right away. But yeah, yeah, that's what—

but if you have that 12 or 14-digit number, write it down somewhere because there are some sources out in the web that need the number, need the underlying number and not the 301 redirect. So that's my 301 redirect. And then other profiles, this is everything, every everywhere. You just go and grab the URLs and you put in— you could edit. Let's see if I can edit one. You type in what you want on the top and then URL at the bottom. Just leave everything open, it's fine. You can add as many as you want. There's no limit. Google will come and look for public pages that you can add. I decided these weren't all that important. I quite honestly do not understand why GingerLemonGirl shows up in mine. I did do a guest post and I have her down here somewhere on guest posting. Or I did. Yeah, there it is. Past contributor. But for some reason Google seems to think it's mine. You can claim things that are kind of vaguely yours, I guess. And then contributor to. This is what I write and where I write and where I'm current and where I'm in the past. And the thing about these is over on this side, you can shift them. So I had— I was doing some editing. I had past at the bottom and current up top. I think that's a great way to do it. You can sort it whatever way you want.

Thanks for that tip because I didn't know that. You didn't know you could sort it? I didn't know that.

Oh yeah, and you can see these ones with the G+, those are communities within Google and for some of these I'm the moderator and some of them I'm just incredibly accurate or active in them. Or I really respect the person and so I wanted to do that. And then this is the custom link area. This is put in whatever you want. Obviously I haven't found that to be an incredibly important part, but I think I'll probably be doing a lot of connecting out to people who have helped me because I think that's where people will look. And then the last one is the list of apps with Google+ Sign-In. And I don't know if this will be in most people's profile yet because till you have one, I don't think it shows up. That's very possible. Then you just hit save and all of what you've edited has been live while you go on.

There is one other thing I'd like you to show. If you can go up to your name and we always have bloggers and this will answer one of the questions about using your personal, your or your profile, and you can change the picture. Just saw she hovered over it. But here it has Edit Your Name, and here she's got her name in. And if you click on More Options, you can add a nickname in, and this is where you would put your blog name. Okay, and then if you put your blog name in, it'll— you can decide how you want it shown as well, and it'll give you some choices on what you want shown. But this is where you put it in. It'll come in parentheses. I'm sure you've all seen them that have the blog next to it.

And we'll see if it—

yeah, you get around that. You don't even have to change it. I think you can just— it may just give you choices to show it first.

I'm going to back out because I have it as works at.

Anyway, that's how you would do it. If you're worried, one of the questions we had here was, is it better to use your personal or as a page? That was sent in by Aaron Fairchild, or no, personal account, Doris Tan, I'm sorry. I've always been of the assumption of using— I guess, are we done here, Jeanne?

I think so. The only other thing I was going to show is that you can change the COVID at any point.

Oh good, go ahead while we're here.

Just because it reflects out to a gallery, uploads all your own uploads, your own albums. So if you're uploading your photos to Google+ as a backup and you can. You can then change your cover as often as you want. If that means once a week, great. If not, go for it. Just realize that because it— and I have a ton of photos so it's going to take forever to open up if I do that. But if you want to change your cover photo, yeah, see this is the pie. This is the pie that I have up there. You just click on it and then it tells you, you can resize what you're showing. I had mine at one point with all copyrights in it and I wanted to crop the copyright out. So you just shift it around. It's just super, super simple. But whatever you choose is going to pop in full size. On your profile.

And while we're not covering it right now, it's also going to show up on your hover card. Okay, and a lot of people only see the hover card when they're looking for you. I know a lot of people have put up multiple shots and it looks really pretty on your header. It'll show like all these different types of food that you might make, but then when it comes to the hover card, sometimes they're so small you can't really see them. So it's only when they actually come to your homepage that they will see that Also, it's a good place— someone had just mentioned when I talked about using the nickname that it's— what's the sense of having a page then? Well, we're going to get to that at another point, but that's a good place to put the banner for your blog if you want. Okay, say, you know, I want— my blog is very important to me, my brand is very important to me, so I want to put that out there. It's a good place to put it, and it does not have to change if you don't want it to change. I like to throw up different pictures of food depending on the season, or I just found I found this really neat tool to write sayings on, so I have one of those on my banner now. But it can change as often as you want. And I think we're gonna, Jean, if it's alright, maybe we should get to some questions or start— I think so too.

And since you were talking about covers, I'm gonna bring this one up. Oops, where are we? When talking about covers, should the COVID be more Is it personal oriented or can it be about business or blogging aspects? I would say on your profile, keep it personal. We're not talking about pages right now, but when you have your page set up, that's where all your business is. This personal one, you're talking as you, as the human being you are. And I know there was a person on Facebook who asked about, well, what if I'm an anonymous an anonymous blogger. If you're an anonymous blogger, you want to set up a page as your anonymous heading and your personal is still going to be you, but you don't have to use a full name, I've discovered lately. You're allowed to put an initial and a last name or a first name and an initial.

The only time that's going to come into, uh, that you may not be happy about that is in authorship. And again, if you're blogging anonymously and you don't have ads on there and you don't really care if you're not found, it's not going to be as big of a deal. So, you know, again, it's up to you. And someone had asked about the personal versus brand page, and again, that's a personal choice. We'll get into that more another time, but you won't find— there is not as much engagement on a brand page. As you're gonna have on a personal page. And again, it comes down to having your picture. It's, it's trust, and Google is getting big time into trust. Trust is gonna be one of the reasons that you're, you're getting more hits on, on your page, because you're becoming a person that people can trust more. That's what they see it as. Here's a question from Susan: Is there a way to combine my pages, my personal, my blog pages? When people post +1s on my blog post, it goes to my personal page. And no, there is not a way to combine the two on Google+. It's either your personal or your brand page. And this is one of the reasons why we say, you know, it's really more important to be a person. Google is seeing that right now. It's more important to be a person, so they're stressing your personal page more. Unless you're a huge brand or you're a brick-and-mortar brand, being a personal page is really the way you want to go. Jeanne, you have the same one up? Okay. Yeah, I have the same one up.

The thing about the difference between profile and page, When I first came on, I came on and opened a profile and learned how to handle Google+ as a profile before I went in and set up my business page. Now I have my Google, my Gluten Free Doctor page and put out information under that page that's very targeted and very specific. It talks only about gluten-free. If you follow me as a profile, I'm talking about everything. I'm talking about the technical aspects of being in Google+, I'm talking about chickens occasionally, I'm talking about cooking in general and who I'm following comes up as my +1s. That's the more engaged and engaging person. The blog posts lists are not people and they're not as engaging. I mean, we all have fabulous content but it's a business place. We'll talk more about pages. We're going to be doing a setup on pages as well. Next week is authorship. First you want to claim your stuff.

Let's try and get through these last few questions because we're starting to run over time and we know we promised you it was only going to be half an hour so here's one. Oh Susan, no. Is the Google phone number free? Yes it is. Yes it is. And you get to pick, like I said, your area code or where you want it to be from.

If you're from a small community like Bellingham, there's none available. I got mine years ago and was grandfathered in so you may have to go a little a little bit geographically broader area. Susan has a question, does it make sense to just delete my blog page? Susan, if you're asking about your blog page on Google+, don't delete it. We'll be working with it and you can make it work.

Yes, and we're not telling you not to start a blog page because Google does change things and if you've been on here any amount of time Sometimes the rules change, sometimes how they do things change. We're just telling you right now it's not as important to use it. And the philosophy of digging— I was in karate for a long time and my instructor always said you never want to dig two holes, you'll never reach your goal. So again, stay with your personal page and keep at it until you're really— once you really gain a good foothold on Google+, then you can promote your brand page a lot more easily. And if it becomes a time when it is really important to have one, you've already got it set up. So I advise setting it up while you can, and you can always use it later. Okay, here's one from Kim Boltman: should I put my vanity profile under profiles or links or both? What do you think, Jeanne?

My vanity profile under profiles or links or both. I'm not sure what you're meaning by vanity. I'm guessing that might be your— the new name.

Yeah. I think maybe the new Google+ name. Yeah. It should go— it's all by itself.

That's an independent one. That's the first one. If you look in links, that link to your vanity is your first, it's your Google+ URL. Yep, so you shouldn't have to put it anywhere else. You shouldn't have to put it anywhere else at all. There was one here from Shannon.

Yeah, I had it and I lost it.

We had a couple people saying they'd be happy for it to go an hour. I know. Shannon Hernandez says, I love putting links to helpful blog posts in the links area, links to other blogs that have been helpful. Helpful hints. And especially in Google+, anything you do to raise all ships, in other words, anything you do to endorse somebody, share their content, tell people that they're somebody you're listening to because they've helped, it helps you. Google's a big karma wheel and putting it out there and taking it back is the only way it works. I think everybody, one thing that Google+ show runners do is we'll follow all the comments and answer as we can during the course of the day. So maybe we should just acknowledge that we've run over time and that we'll be answering those comments as we go. If you have questions about authorship as we set up next week's event, feel free to put in the questions early and maybe we'll be able to answer them even before we go on air.

Absolutely. That's a good point. Thanks, Jean. I tend to forget that sometimes. I get caught up on what I do and the show could end up being 2 hours. Just for people who always say they don't have enough time, we're going to try and stick to our time this time and we will sign off in a few minutes, but we'll answer your questions Keep leaving them. If you have more, come back and leave them again. I couldn't resist.

Kim was happy about using Circles. We're going to do an entire show on setting up Circles. Yes.

Don't worry about that. Yeah, there's a lot we're going to go over and we don't want to overwhelm you all on the first go-around. Thank you all for coming today. We had a great time doing this and we're still feeling our way around. Gina and I are enjoying the time with you. Reach out to us personally, reach out to us on Facebook, although I'm not on Facebook book very much, so don't expect a quick answer. And please—

it'd be a lot faster for this year.

And let me give you one clue: when you do ask us a question, plus our names so it's a link, because if you just ask us a question, half the time we won't see it. We get so many notifications, they just get lost in the shuffle. And even then it could get lost, so be patient, ask again, try and ping us for something, and we will We'll definitely be there to help you if we can.

Not trying to ignore you, but I know Dennis has got 38,000 followers, something like that. I've got 16,000. Lots of people asking us questions. Yeah, it gets nuts.

Thank you again for coming, Jeanne. Thanks for being here with me. It's a pleasure, and we'll see you all next week on how to use Google+ effectively. All right, have a great day everyone. Bye everybody.