4 Steps To Being Awesome At Google Plus In 15 Minutes A Day

New to Google Plus? Not quite sure you ‘get it’ yet? Use other networks like Twitter or Facebook? Make a commitment to spend 15 minutes that you would normally spend on those sites, here on Gplus for 2 weeks. In those 15 minutes do these following 4 steps. Anyone who actually does these things will love it here. Try it. I Dare you.

1. Create Yourself – Fully Complete your Profile. Do not skip this step. Post a photo of yourself, people like talking to other people. Decide which interests you would like to focus on, on G+. Pick some Hobbies, Work, General Categories etc. Think things like Photography, Geek, Tech, Android Fan, Tv shows you like, Your Career (Real estate agent, Tech Support, Business Owner), Art, Gaming, Wine Lover, Cat person Or the City You Live In.  Write all those down in your about section. People can quickly scan and determine that you might have some stuff in common and then easily circle you back. Spend a few moments on this. Seriously.

2. Join Some Communities  and Post Often – Those interests you picked in Step 1? Do a Search in the bar up at the top and select “communities” from the drop down box. There are communities here from Body Painting, To Zombies To Space. Join a few and visit them often.  Find interesting articles to share, you tube videos, pictures and make posts about these interests into these communities. Add some of your own thoughts to the post instead of simply sharing a link.   Use pictures. Google Images is a good source. G+ likes pictures.   When not posting into a community make Public posts on your profile. Make sure the post is “public” and not “your circles”. Public is like twitter, Everyone can read them.

3. Follow Others – Find other people who have similar interest as you and circle them first.  Add people whose posts you like from the communities you joined. If you are not finding enough people in them, Go up to the search bar and type in those interests you picked in step 1. Game of thrones, Web development, wine, zombies, Michael Jackson. People here are fans and they are talking about it. Circle up at least 500 People. 1000 is still golden. Look for some circle shares to add groups of people easily.  These people you are circling will likely all be strangers. Get over that. You do NOT need to know people in real life to talk about Android or Cooking, but you can have a great conversation. Perhaps even better than with local ‘real life friends’. Try it.

4. Engage others – Go up and down your stream right now and Reshare neat things, comment, click the link, read the story, comment on other peoples comments or mention others who might like that post. +1s generally mean you read it and agree. Do that too.. but most prefer to you to comment on their post in some way. Try and make comments better than “lol” but engage other people in some way.  This is the most important step in my opinion  You need to be engaging and social to others 5X more than you are posting your own content. I still do this almost every day.  Remember to mute the post if the conversation is not interesting to you anymore with the drop down arrow at the top right of every post.

Rinse and Repeat steps 2, 3, 4 daily for best results. This will take some time to get started, but its fun.Do it regularly with those 15 minutes and You can make connections that will completely change your life. Do not be shocked when you notice you are investing more and more time here. I haven’t even talked about Hangouts yet!

Google Plus is a truly amazing website if you follow these steps, but feel free to tweak as necessary or add in your best advice for connecting below.  Make Google Plus yours.

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*The people who tend to not ‘get’ Google Plus*
1) Don’t have a completed public profile
2) Post once every 2 weeks (what would your Twitter look like if you tweeted once every 2 weeks?) You don’t need to stop using the other sites you use, but you DO need to spend some time here, regularly.
3) Broadcast only – Never talk to anyone else here, do nothing but post links to their blog and expect people to be clicking their stories and commenting on their stuff when there is a HUGE stream of information going by. It will not happen here.

Gplus is VERY give and take.. .a true SOCIAL website. Spend a few moments developing relationships with the above steps and you WILL have people visiting your blog without you asking/self promoting. Promise.

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Please feel free to  share with your circles and new friends on G+. I have been writing and rewriting this guide to Google Plus since October, 2011.  http://bit.ly/130eB1p  Enjoy.

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