Marketing podcast with Chris Brogan (Click to play or right click and “Save As” to download – Subscribe now via iTunes or subscribe via other RSS device (Google Listen)
For this week’s episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast I grabbed a few minutes with Chris Brogan. Chris is the founder of Human Business Works, writes and speaks on all things related to social media and is a documented Google Plus fanboy.
Chris and I talk about what Google Plus is, what it means, its strong points and weak points and why he has moved a great deal of his own personal networking activity to Google Plus. Have a listen.
Below are a couple tips that I’ve been using to enhance my own Google Plus experience – connect with me on Google Plus if you like.
1) Add the Google Plus Profile card to your blog – Grab the Google Plus Card WordPress plugin puts your Google Plus profile in your blog sidebar just like you see over there to the left – this will help spread the word about your presence there.
2) Add photos like a slideshow – Create a new Album and upload a series of slides as images (all the same size) in the order you would like them to show and Google Plus creates a viewer that can be clicked through much like a slideshow.
3) Send Google Plus items to Evernote – simply create a circle and add your Evernote email address as the lone user. Then share anything on Google Plus with that circle and it will automatically be sent to your Evernote account.
4) Search Google Plus – Google Plus doesn’t really have any good way to find people you might want to connect by occupation or interest yet. You can, however, use Google search to do the job – to search by topic, add this to a Google search – your topic site:plus.google.com ie: “small business marketing” site:plus.google.com
5) Publish your Google Plus public feed to your WordPress blog – I’m sure badges and widgets are coming for G+ but until they do here’s how I published a mini G+ feed on my blog
First – find you profile # – mine is 103952215474318614668 – then simply use this tool from plusfeed to create an RSS URL with your # – http://plusfeed.appspot.com/yourprofilenumber here, this is an RSS feed for my G+ public feed only (you can actually do this for any public feed if you wanted to publish other people’s feed)
Next take the RSS feed above and burned it at Feedburner (I know, another Google property.) Feedburner has a feature called BuzzBoost that makes it pretty easy to republish an RSS and produces the code you need for your widget. Take that code and create a text widget in WordPress, place it in your theme (you might also add a link back to your profile) and that’s it.
Bonus: Don’t forget to add the Google +1 button to your blog and Website pages. This is one way that people point out content on your site and share it with their Google Plus followers. I show you how to do that here: Adding the Google +1 Button
