3 Google+ tips for Bloggers

I have heard quite a few other bloggers talk about how they don't even bother to share their content on Google+ because it's just a waste of time. I have had a very different experience when using Google+ to promote my blog posts. I'll share 3 tips with you how I effectively use Google+ to bring additional readers here to my blog.

If you do a search for how to promote your blog using Google+, you come up with articles that pretty much give the same information:

• set your blog to share automatically each time you post
• set up your profile with a link to your blog
• add other bloggers in your niche to your circles so you can share your post with them

While these three items are useful to implement, you want to make sure that you are making your content available to your target audience - the people that are interested in your unique content. So, how do you get your content in front of the people that would be most interested in your articles, help them notice your update in their feed, and help them to know you appreciate them as a follower?

I have three tips I will share to increase the number of blog visit that are referred from your Google+ updates.

1. Utilize Communities
2. Photos
3. Quality Interaction

Communities

In my opinion, joining communities that relate to your niche is the best way to make sure that people that could be interested in your articles will have the opportunity to see them. There are communities for many different topics. You can do a search and join a community. Give it a try for a week or two and see how you like it. You can always leave the community if the quality of articles shared aren't interesting or if you don't see visits from that group.

Here are the communities that I belong to on Google+.

As you can see, I belong to two general crafting & DIY communities, a landscape photography community, a local blogging community, Doctor Who (just for my own fun, not blogging), and a specialty crafting community for Art Journaling.

When I started blogging and shared my posts to just the public, I would only have one or two people comment on, + my post, or share it with the people in their circles. I was frustrated until I found the landscape photography community page. Not only was I able to see some wonderful photographs of amazing places around the world, I was able to share my photography directly with 771,073 members that have a deep interest in landscape photography. Each time I share in that community I have an increase to the number of people that + my update.

The page views received for the blog posts shared in the different communities I have joined are always higher than the same posts that I just share to the public. I decided to do an experiment for the past 4 months. Instead of sharing my new blog posts to Google+ communities the day I publish, I shared publicly then waited 3 days to share to community groups. The first days I would receive a handful of visits. After sharing in the community group my visits from Google were tripled.

Need ideas for what communities to join? Well, Google+ gives you suggestions on which communities you may be interested in depending on what posts you have interacted with in the past and who you have in your circles.

Photos

When people are scrolling through all of the updates on Google+, you want to make sure that the photo you use is appealing and eye catching so they take the time to stop to read your update and visit your site. How you share your update has a lot to do with how your image turns out.

If you have a social share button on your blog, there is generally an option to share on Google+ with a simple click of the button. Sounds easy, but it doesn't always work well. Google picks whichever photo from your post it wants and places it in your Google+ post. Sometimes it converts it to a small thumbnail photo that you can't see very well or it picks a photo that you wouldn't want to use.

What you should do instead is this: write your Google+ update and add the link to your blog. When you do that, it pulls up a photo for you automatically. You may not like the photo they intend to use, but you can easily change that.

Click the "x" above Remove and it will take away the picture that the program chose. Then you click the camera icon by photos so you can then choose a new photo to upload to your post.

You then have the option of uploading a photo from your computer or your Google pictures. You can then choose which picture that you want to add to your Google+ update.

Quality Interaction

Quality interaction between you and your readers/followers builds engagement. Someone can like an update and leave a comment, but if you don't interact back they tend to think that you don't care or appreciate their interaction with your page. When you take the time to respond to someone that comments on your Google+ update, the person feels that you have made an effort and they are more likely to want to interact with your page in the future, so they would then add you to their circles or visit your blog.

The same is true for quality interaction that you do on other bloggers pages. It's great to find someone in your niche that you can add to your circle so you see their updates and make genuine comments on their updates that you enjoy. As you continue to visit and interact with them, they can visit your profile and add you to their circle so they see your content and will possibly share an update that they think their followers will enjoy. I'm not saying that you should go and leave random comments on every blogger that is in your niche in the hopes that they will engage with your page. Find some bloggers that you truly like and go from there.

Those are my 3 tips for bloggers to effectively use Google+ to reach additional people and grow the readership of their blog. What Google+ strategy works for you?