Google Plus Tips of the Week

I realize the image above isn’t the most “Easter-ish”, but my early Easter present on Thursday was waking up to my NewRayCom site being hacked.

This is why you’re reading this on my Blogger site. (Which I hadn’t used in four years).

I reached out to my online and offline friends and have a few looking into possible solutions.

One of those friends is William Rock, a fellow Google+ “geek” and internet marketing and SEO specialist who agreed to be our special guest on this week’s #GPlusLunchBunch show.

There are lessons to be learned from every mishap.

I thought I was on top of my website security, backups etc., but….

Well you’ll have to see the show to find out what happened.

Your Google Plus Tips of the Week

1. +Posts Ads - Social Advertising?

2. A Couple Chrome Tricks

3. Comment Tracker

Google+ +Post Ads: Bringing Engagement to Advertising

The big news this week was the general release of +Posts. This is huge news both for brands and for Google+.

Mark Traphagen wrote a great post on LinkedIn about it that spoke to how is was a real game changer for advertising.

What are +Posts?

Basically, they’re Google ads made up of Google+ posts from your Page, Profile or even a Community.

They’re pushed out to targeted audiences in Google’s Adwords Display Advertising Network on millions of websites worldwide.

Google refers to them as “engagement” ads with good reason.  Visitors can, “+1” you, share, circle and leave comments.

As Mark points out, Facebook has promoted posts, Twitter, promoted tweets.

The difference here is:

“...that Google is enabling social content ads that aren't on the social platform. Instead of littering Google+ with ads ... +Post ads are places where people expect to see ads: on websites that already have Google Display ads.”

I agree wholeheartedly with Mark that this is a game changer for brands on Google+. 

Brands who’ve had a hard time building a network on Google+ can now do so by sharing their best posts where they normally would place their ads.

If your clients don’t come to Google+ take Google+ to your clients.

Martin Shervington has written a great step by step guide for creating a +Post ad.

And Ben Fisher of Steady Demand has tools that allow you to measure level of engagement.

Chrome Tricks:

Do you have Chrome extensions on your toolbar?

If you’re anything like me, they probably populate at least half of that real estate.

I came across this post that shows you how to slide them out of the way to make more room for the address bar or to hide them when you do screen share.

Added tip:

You can shuffle your Google apps around.

This came out a couple weeks ago but I just noticed it was active on my computer this week.

I love this because there are a couple apps I use all the time.

So now I have them at the top of the nine that are visible.- Gmail, Drive and Calendar.

What apps do you place on top?

Comment Tracker for Google+ Hangouts

If you watch many HOA’s (Hangouts On Air) you’ll probably run across a few that pull up comments from the audience on to the screen

They can do that by using the Hangout tool: Comment Tracker.

When you download and install this app inside your HOA, you’re able to see comments from the event page, pages where the event has been shared and even on Twitter,using a hashtag.

It’s not the most intuitive app to set up, but once you get the hang of capturing the right urls, it makes your HOA’s so much more interactive.

Heres a few key points from the Comment Tracker site, followed by a helpful post from Michael Daniels: Using Comment Tracker with the SHOAE (Scheduled Hangout On Air Event)

And here’s the Hangout Helper, Ronnie Bincer showing us how to set up a Twitter Hashtag widget so we can track the twitter stream.

Thank you very much for taking the time to read this.
I hope the new look didn’t throw you off thinking you had opened the wrong email. 

Resilience and the power to renew is the not so secret to success. 


Have a wonderful weekend.