Google+ Business Pages are now live; here’s how to get started

November 9, 2011 — Leave a comment

Google has finally launched their business pages feature, and it’s open for everyone to sign up.  You can read more about it on the Google Blog, or watch the video below for a quick overview of how it works.

Business pages work very similarly to personal profiles, with a few notes:

  • You cannot create an account for a business page; you create it via your personal profile (similar to Facebook).
  • You can create multiple pages from a single profile.
  • Each business page can only be managed by the profile that created it, so choose carefully the right person in your organization to create the page.  Support for multiple admins is “coming soon”.
  • Pages cannot add users to a circle unless the user adds them first.  This is an awesome anti-spam move by Google.
  • There aren’t any vanity URLs yet (like plus.google.com/pepsi), but those are presumably coming in the future.

Direct Connect

Tied to this release is a new feature called “Direct Connect”.  If you begin your Google search with a +, it’ll show brand pages that match the query in the auto-complete results, as shown here:

Over time, it’s possible that this could become a trendy thing to promote.  I can image someone like Pepsi having something like “Google +Pepsi” for more at the end of a TV ad.  If it does take off, it’ll be important to get your page listed there.  But how?

Badges

Today, Google released “badges” for business pages.  These allow you to add nifty widgets to your page, and people can add your brand to their circles directly from your website!  It’s pretty slick.

Even more important is the snippet of code that they have you put in the <head> section of your site.  This is there to prove that the page in question is really yours and will qualify you to show up as a Direct Connect option.  No word on how soon those will start appearing, but it’d be wise to get yours connected so you can show up in Direct Connect as soon as possible.  You can learn more about badges from this Google blog post.

Have you built a page yet?

Have you built a page for your company yet?  Leave a  link to it in the comments and show us your work!

In Companies, Google+, Marketing, Social Media , , ,
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Simple video can be amazingly effective

November 4, 2011 — Leave a comment

I encourage many of my clients to use video to help show their customers what they have to offer.  Quick, simple videos can be quite helpful and aren’t very difficult to make.  Some examples:

  • Car Dealer: Give me a two-minute tour of the latest greatest car on your lot.
  • Realtor: Take me on a quick tour of the home and show me why I want to buy it.
  • Photographer: Show me around your studio and explain why you chose the equipment you have.

Well-produced videos certainly have their place, but they tend to be slow and expensive to create.  With a Flip camera (or even a decent cell phone) you can grab a quick video and have it on YouTube in a matter of minutes.

What inspired me to write this post was a short video I saw today from Tim Terpening.  He works for Domain Homes in Tampa, FL, and there’s going to be an airshow in town this weekend.  As it happens, one of their neighborhoods is right next to MacDill Air Force Base and has a great view of the action, so they’re encouraging people to come hang out in their neighborhood by offering free parking and free food.  His video is a perfect example of what I’m talking about:

It’s under two minutes, he shows some of the planes doing some practice runs the day before, and then explains the deal they’re offering. Perfect.

If you want to build the killer well-produced video from time to time, go for it, but simply grabbing a camera and talking to your customers can be an amazing way to connect with them.

In Companies, Videos , ,
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Your competition isn’t always right

August 26, 2011 — 6 Comments

No matter what line of business you’re in, you can often get inspiration and ideas by checking out your competition.  You can see what kind of stuff they’re putting on their website, how they’re using social media, what new products they’re stocking, etc.  However, you ultimately need to trust yourself.  Here are a few examples.

Using music to set the tone

I was recently talking to a client about her site, and suggested we take the background music off.  After a brief discussion, she agreed.  When I asked why she put it up there in the first place, she said that a lot of her competition did that and she was trying to match them.  Being a brand-new business, emulating some of the established sites is certainly a great idea.  Now that she’s removed the music and they haven’t, she’s a step ahead!

Facebook “welcome tabs”

I have a lot of clients asking for “welcome tabs” on their Facebook Page.  While it’s certainly appropriate in a few situations, it seems that most people are doing it simply because everyone else is doing it, and no one is really thinking it through.  Most users come to your Facebook page for the content — information, specials, etc.  Why put an extra page in their way?

It feels a lot to me like the “splash pages” everyone had in the late 90′s — simply an unnecessary step between your user and the content they want.  We all eventually realized how stupid those were, so how are Facebook welcome tabs any different? (Honestly — leave a comment and convince me how they’re a good thing for everyone.  I’m certainly open to changing my mind if someone can supply a solid argument.)

Copying the church down the road

One church I worked at was obsessed with the other big church just down the road.  We’d often spend thousands of dollars copying activities that they did, even if we didn’t need them.  It was quite sad.  There were essentially two ways that our leadership viewed things:

  • If they’re doing x, and we’re not, we need to start.
  • If we’re doing x, and they’re not, we need to stop wasting time on it.

This was especially problematic during the rise of social media, because the “other church” was slow to adopt it.  Therefore, it was tough for us to convince our church leadership that it was worthwhile.  The “other church” is a wonderful place, but they have made some very poor technological choices over the past few years; very dumb things with their website, very little social media, etc.  Copying them in those areas would have been a foolish mistake.

Stylish restaurant websites

Have you ever tried to pull up a restaurant website on your phone?  It’s almost always brutal.  Slate recently had an article about this, and I agree completely.  Not only are they often unusable on a phone (especially an Apple device, with no hope of loading their cute Flash menus), but they’re equally frustrating from a normal browser.

My thought is that it’s the restaurant owners and their desire for a particular ambience that cause most of the issues.  While you certainly want the actual restaurant to have that feel, putting cheesy background music being a painfully “creative” navigation bar isn’t the way to do it on the website.

The University website

(via xkcd.  awesome site)

Part of this comes back to the problem of the University website.  Universities think that we want to read about the school’s philosophy and press releases, and that idea is validated by other universities posting the same junk on their home page.  This is very similar to churches that post a big link to their denomination’s website, rather than providing decent driving directions.

Check them out, but be smart

I’m certainly not saying you shouldn’t see what your competition is doing.  As I said at the beginning, you can often get some good ideas from them.  Just be smart, and always view things through the eyes of your customers.  Ask yourself, “if I was a customer, why would I visit the site and what would I be looking for?”  If the answer is “cheesy music and a mission statement”, find someone to help you think through it a bit further. :)

In Church, Companies, Facebook, Marketing, Mobile, Site Content, Social Media , , , , , , ,
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Our YMCA has one of the worst good-looking sites ever made

August 19, 2011 — 5 Comments

We love our local YMCA.  Both of my girls play soccer there, we’ve done various swim lessons, and my wife and I work out there as often as we’re able.  Further, everyone we’ve met there has been very kind, knowledgeable and friendly.  However, someone up high on the Atlanta YMCA food chain made some poor decisions, because their (fairly new) website is shockingly bad.  Really bad.  Really, really bad.

So let’s say I need to find some information about my local Y.  I go to ymcaatlanta.org, choose “locations” and there it is — McCleskey-East Cobb Family YMCA.  So far, so good.  It’s a nice-looking site, but now things get bad.

The main tabs

There are four main tabs on the site:

  • Photos: Ok, having photos is always a good thing.  Not sure I would have lead with that, but it’s acceptable.
  • 360 Tour: The home page is not the place for that, but maybe it’s really cool.  I don’t know, because I couldn’t get it to work at all and I tried in two different browsers.
  • Programs: Are you expecting a list of programs?  Me too.  Instead, it’s a YouTube video showing you how to use the search box at the top of the page.  really?
  • Calendar: That wouldn’t be a bad thing to include, but it’s wildly incomplete.  Apparently, all they have on Monday is knitting.  Yikes!

Fortunately, the “programs” tab also opens up some links on the side.  I was on there recently looking for information on swim lessons for my daughter, and there is “Swim Lessons and More” in the sidebar.  Perfect!  Except I can’t click on it.  Why not?

Search

They seem to be aware that the search engine is the only way to go, so I dive in and search for “swim lessons”.  It comes back with a ton of results, and a note to “include branch name in search”.  That seems dumb.  Don’t they know I was on the McCleskey page when I searched?  Ok, so I search for “McCleskey swim lessons” and the results are a little better.

Results 1-3: PDFs
Result 4: Link back to the McCleskey home page
Result 5:  A link to some other “programs” page.  It says to “browse programs by branch”, so I choose McCleskey.  It just takes me back to the McCleskey home page again. Aargh!
Result 6: Search for a Class.  Ok, seems like my only choice.

Search For Classes

So I guess I’ll search for a swim class.  The problem now is too much info — they want to know which branch (again), class, month, age, days of the week, keyword and a class id.  Fortunately, most fields are optional.

While my daughter is now in Kindergarten, she still can’t swim very well.  So which class does she need?

  • Preschool Advanced
  • Preschool Advanced Beginner
  • Preschool Advanced Intermediate
  • Youth Beginner
  • Youth Intermediate

It apparently doesn’t matter, because none of those return any results for a 5 year old, so I just choose “all classes” to see what comes up.  Now I get five results, but four are unavailable because they’re almost over and the other one is an “Adventure Guide”.  Not sure what that is, but it’s probably not what I’m after.  Does the YMCA really not have any swim classes for a five year old?  I sure doubt it, but that’s how it looks:

Soccer

Ok, let’s move on to soccer.  As I’ve mentioned, I’m coaching the soccer teams for both girls (“U6″ and “U10″).  I know that the U6 girls practice on field “B2″, so I need to figure out where that is.  I know that field 1 is in front of the Y and 2 & 3 are behind, but was hoping to find some kind of facility map on the site.  Nothing.

So, I went out to “Field 2″ on practice day and it turns out I was in the wrong place.  Back there was indeed field “2B”, but “B2″ is actually on “Field 1″.  I found out later that if it starts with a letter, there is a silent “1″ in front of it.  Wow!  A map of some kind certainly would have helped.  So “2B” is in the back, but “B2″ is actually “1B2″ and is in the front.  Got it?

Facility Map?

This is the strangest thing to me.  It seems that a big facility map would be awesome for a site like this and it wouldn’t be that hard to create.  Do something like the image below, but with each item clickable for details:


(no idea if those field numbers are accurate…)

When I click on “Fitness”, then show me photos of stationary bicycles and explain how great they are.  I could click on the pool and find info about open swim times, lessons, etc.  This isn’t rocket science.

Think about your audience

The bottom line is that you always need to remember who your audience is.  Similar to my “Don’t be like a University Website” post from last year, the people behind the new YMCA site got it all wrong.  They added things like 360 tours and photo galleries, when they should have been providing better program information and facility maps.

It’s not all bad, news — a lot of folks will visit the site looking for address, phone and hours of operation, which are thankfully right on the home page.  Now if they can get the rest of it fixed up, things will be all set!

In Uncategorized
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A week of Google+

July 11, 2011 — 5 Comments

It’s been a little over a week since I joined Google+, so I thought I’d share some of my thoughts about it.

Addictive – for now

Thus far, I’ve found it quite addictive.  The fact that 90% of the people I follow on Twitter are already over there means that my Twitter usage has dropped quite a lot.  However, only about 15% of my Facebook friends are on it, so it’s got some work to do in that regard.

That being said, I won’t be giving up Facebook or Twitter anytime soon…

Privacy is top notch

Google has had issues with privacy in the past, but they’ve certainly learned from their mistakes. The privacy settings in Google+ are easy to use, quite powerful, and default to “don’t share much”.  Kind of the opposite of Facebook.

“Hangouts” are amazing

Hangouts are the group video chat feature, for up to 10 people at once.  They work amazingly well, and I’ve met some really cool people through them.  In the future, I think they will be a great venue for business meetings, Bible studies, small groups, book clubs, etc.  Really, anything that typically has 5-10 people meeting in person could be done quite well via a Hangout.

“Circles” are simple, but potentially confusing

The idea of putting your friends into Circles is quite simple, and works very well.  Drag Steve in “friends”, drag Heather into “family”, etc.  The problem is that the content from circles come from people, not topics.  For example, I might add 20 Google Earth geeks to a “Google Earth” circle, but then I’ll see virtually all of their posts; relatively few of which are likely to be about Google Earth.

“Sparks” are weak

The idea behind Sparks is pretty cool — a quick way to follow a topic you love and share relevant news with your friends.  However, the items shown are kind of random and can be somewhat dated and spammy.  I expect to see some good updates from Google in here soon.

Google Chrome Plugins

If you use Google Chrome as your browser, there are a lot of great plug-ins to help make Google+ even better.  Here is a full list of them, but two of my favorites are:

  • Replies and more: lots of great tweaks, including a quick “reply” button while you’re in comments.
  • Comment Toggle: Hides all comments in the stream, but you can toggle them open/closed with one click.

Businesses

Right now, there is very little business use for it.  As a freelancer I can make some use of it, but no “non-human entities” are allowed on there yet.  No websites, no car dealers, nothing.  It’s kind of nice, but it’ll be changing soon.  Google has promised some great stuff when those features finally come out, so I hope they’re right.

It’ll be hard to avoid

Google has said that many of the Google+ features (Circles, etc) will be making their way into virtually every Google product.  This will make use of those sites more enjoyable for g+ users (quickly share a YouTube video to a specific circle), and it’ll make it harder to avoid the service for everyone else.

Plus, that silly notification icon already has me jumping to click it every time it lights up, and it’s on the top of almost every Google product.  I feel like Dug from “Up” every time it I see a number in that red box.

I hope for some customization to that in the near future (I don’t need a notification for every “+1″ on a post of mine), but it’s still quite handy.  Better yet, it creates a drop-down menu from wherever you are, so you can deal with it right there (answer the comment, etc) without ever having to visit the Google+ site.  That’s gold.

So…how’s it gonna do?

This is the big question, and I really don’t know.  I love it so far, but it’s early.  I think it’ll be a player in the social game, but it won’t be replacing Twitter or Facebook for at least a few years.  Given Google’s huge audience, vast integration with other Google products, and their willingness to spend money to make it right, Google+ isn’t going anywhere.

If you own a business, or otherwise need social media to help succeed, dive in now.  At some point, you’ll likely want to get your business involved with Google+, so get started today and start learning the ropes. Contact me if you need an invite, then connect with me on g+.

If you’re a social media butterfly, but have no real need for it, give it a shot.  It’s likely to keep growing, so now’s a good time to jump in, start making connections, organize your Circles, etc.

If you’re just a casual social media user, it’s up to you.  If you already use Google products like Gmail and Android, you’ll be amazed at how well it blends into your lifestyle.  If not, then just keep enjoying life on Facebook and keep your ears out for more on Google+.

What do you think?

Have you tried Google+ yet?  Think it has a chance to succeed?

In Google+, Social Media, Technology , ,
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Google’s not-too-secret social network finally launches: Google+

June 28, 2011 — 2 Comments

It’s been rumored for more than a year, and now it’s here — sort of.  You probably can’t get into it yet, but it’s out there for the world to see and they’ll be adding users to it very quickly.

So what is it?

It’s a lot of things all in one.  Google+ is named because it’s not intended to be a new social network; just lots of small social tools built on top of the Google infrastructure.  It has features that remind me of FriendFeed, and some that remind me of Google Wave, so they’ve got some cool stuff in there. Here is an overview video of how it works:

Circles

Think of Facebook Groups, and you’re off to a good start.  You can drag and drop your contacts (from Gmail or Google Contacts) into Circles in a very intuitive fashion, and it’s very easy to share content with the Circle thanks to the new (black) Google toolbar.

Here’s a quick video showing our Circles work:

Sparks

They’re calling Sparks their “sharing engine”, and it looks quite cool.  You tell it an interest that you have, and Google will find elements on the web related to that.  Find something you like, and you can quickly add it to your interest list (kind of like a bookmark).

Here’s a quick video that shows how Sparks works:

Huddle

This is a group messaging app that works across Android, iPhone and SMS to keep groups in touch with each other.  It’s similar to Beluga and other recent group messaging apps, but could become quite popular as part of the Google+ ecosystem.

Here’s a quick video showing how the mobile apps will work:

Hangouts

This is the part that reminds me of FriendFeed.  You can put up to 10 people in a “hangout” and do stuff together in real-time.  It looks like a really cool way to chat (video or text), and you can even share a piece of content (like a YouTube video) and everyone in the hangout can watch it together.  Perhaps it’ll be cheesy, but it has the potential to be pretty cool.

Here’s a video showing how Hangouts work:

Too much?

Of course, this is a lot to take in all at once.  Google’s plan is to unify it all with the new Google toolbar at the top of the screen, which apparently works quite well.  The level of tie-in to Android/iPhone will be quite important, too, so we’ll see how that works out.

When?

It’s rolling out today in very limited numbers.  As of right now, even people that have invitations to it can’t get in, so the rest of us could be waiting.  Google is intentionally rolling it out very slowly, so it could be a while.  In the meantime, head over the Google+ site and put your name on the list, and let me know if you get access to it.

In Social Media , , , , ,
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How to make it all come together

June 25, 2011 — 1 Comment

Over the years, I’ve discussed a lot of ideas to help your business flourish online and today I’m going to show you what it looks like when it all comes together.

The East Cobber is a free local magazine in Marietta, GA that was created back in 1993, and they’ve had an online presence for nearly a decade.  However, with the ongoing shift from print to digital, they realized the the site could do so much more.  Last year they enlisted the help of Green Mellen Media, and the results have been amazing.  Here is a chart showing their growth since the new site launched last fall.

The beginning of that chart is October, 2010, when they had 1,509 visitors.  Last month they had a total of 16,498.  For a year over year comparison, they had 1,691 visitors in May 2010, and then the 16,498 in May 2011 — an increase of 875% in a single year!  Even better, this wasn’t from a brand new site; this was a very well-established site from a popular magazine.  So what made the difference?  There were quite a few things, but here are some of the big ones.

WordPress

We moved the entire site over to WordPress, which helped with quite a few things.  It not only made it easier for them to publish articles, but WordPress has excellent Search Engine Optimization by design.  Using a StudioPress-powered theme helped even more, as they add some additional SEO tweaks to the mix.  Here is their incoming traffic from search engines over the past eight months:

Content

This is the big key.  Rather than posting a few articles each month when the new issue came out, they’re posting multiple stories every day to keep the community informed of local news and events.  They’ve published over 2,900 entries since the new site went live, making them a true hub in the community.

Social

I recently pointed out how you can’t fake your way to social media success, and they’re an example of social media done right.  Their Facebook page auto-posts some new items from the site, but they’re quick to respond to comments and often run contents to give away prizes from area businesses.  They’ve gone from just a few hundred likes on the page to well over 1,000 and it continues to grow quickly.

The key here is that they work hard at it.  People are always looking for shortcuts, but the East Cobber folks simply got to work and are engaging with the community daily.  We’ve given them some tools to help make it easier, but there is no substitute for actually diving in and connecting with people.

The Little Things

Little things can add up too:

  • We didn’t put our name in their footer in order to help them rank as well as possible in Google.  The results above speak for themselves.
  • They post a new photo of the day on their home page every day to keep things fresh.
  • They trusted us and we trusted them.  When we assured them that a feature or idea wouldn’t work, they believed us.  When they told us that their readers were interested in certain topics, we believed them.
  • We used most of my favorite WordPress plug-ins, plus a few others to help add additional functionality to the site.
  • We use Google Analytics (which generated the charts above) see what content people read the most, what needs to be improved, etc.

The magic solution

People are often looking for the magic solution to put their online business on autopilot, but things just don’t work that way.  A properly configured site, using a solid platform, with lots of hard work put into building content and the community, can lead to a very successful site.

Traffic is continuing to grow for them, and I expect it will for some time.  Congratulations to Cynthia and her team for such great success over the past year!

In Analytics, Marketing, SEO, Site Content, Social Media, WordPress , , , ,
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You can’t fake it on social media

June 21, 2011 — 3 Comments

While talking over a potential site redesign with a client, the subject turned to blogging.  We both agreed that they should have a blog for their site, as it would make perfect sense for their market and they have tons of great content to write about.  However, they are convinced they don’t have time for it and wouldn’t be able to be active enough on it.  I agreed that having no blog is better than having a dead blog, and I’m glad we made that decision.

However, I’m finding more and more companies that (apparently) don’t have time for social media so they decide to fake it instead.  A prime example would be the 18 car dealers that aren’t listening on Twitter.  Despite not listening and not actually doing much on Twitter, I’m sure they’re proud of how “hip” there are to be on there.

Fake Followers

Another local company that I’ve worked with in the past has nearly 10,000 followers on Twitter, but they were all purchased through shady means (buying Twitter followers isn’t difficult).  It’s rather amusing when they pose a question to their 10,000 “followers” and get zero responses.  It’s worthless.  Much better to have 100 real followers than 10,000 fake ones.

Fake Foursquare Deals

All of that said, what inspired this post was a “deal” that Great Clips offers on Foursquare.  Some restaurants offer fun specials on Foursquare (like free chips & salsa every time you check-in at Chili’s), though most businesses don’t.  Great Clips decided to try for the best of both worlds by posting a “special” that doesn’t require them to actually give anything away.  What is their special?  Every time you check-in, you unlock the following special:

Visit greatclips.com/foursquare and register to win FREE haircuts for a year! (link)

What?  That’s awful!  Every other deal I’ve seen has been legit — free chips, free drink, etc.  This doesn’t have anything to do with you visiting their location; they just want the orange button next to their listings. This seems to have been a corporate decision, because every Great Clips on Foursquare is running the same “deal”.  When questioned about it, the very personal “Customer Service” gave me a very carefully crafted generic response:

Thank you for your feedback. We will foward your comments on to the approrpiate people. Customer feedback is important to Great Clips as we diligently work to keep our promise of serving our customers with the highest level of quality. We apologize for any inconvenience that you were caused.

Sincerely,
Customer Service

Sincerely?

One last funny bit was the closing of their email.  First they say “sincerely” (meaning genuine, earnest, real) and then don’t even put their name.  At least write “Sincerely, Jill” or “Sincerely, Bob”.  At no point in the various interactions I had with them did they do anything to try to seem human.  Such a shame.

Social means social

Never forget the “social” in social media.  If you’re trying to fake it, or figure out a way to automate it like you did your radio commercials for years, you’re in the wrong game.  Be human, get to know your customers, and it’ll take you a long way.

In Marketing, Social Media ,
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Don’t run your fan club like Tim McGraw

June 13, 2011 — 10 Comments

My wife and I are fans of Tim McGraw; we’ve seen him in concert a few times, and we’ll likely see him again in the future.  However, his “fan club” is such a disaster that I had to share this here.

We joined his fan club earlier this year because we knew he was coming to Atlanta and we know that fan clubs get early access to tickets.  I kept an eye on my inbox, and got all kinds of stuff from them — “tickets now available in Nashville!”, and Seattle, and Miami, etc.  I thought it was silly that they were sending me that junk, since they know where I live, but it’s not a big deal.

Later, my wife happened to hear on the radio that the station was having a pre-sale starting the next day.  What about the fan club presale?  Yeah, it started a few days prior.  Of all of the emails I got, that wasn’t one of them…

Waste of Time

So the fan club was a waste of time.  Perhaps the email got lost, marked as spam, etc, but I still wanted to leave the club.  No need for it anymore.  This proved to be interesting.

Contact form?

First I tried their contact form.  You can fill it out, but it doesn’t actually submit properly.  It just takes you to a blank page.

Twitter?

The link on their home page to their Twitter account doesn’t work.  Fortunately, their MySpace account is still humming along…

E-mail?

I tried replying to one of their newsletters, but I never heard back.

Unsubscribe

Ok, since I obviously can’t contact, I figured I’d just use the unsubscribe using the link at the bottom of the email.  Ok.  Click the link, enter my email address in the box, get an “unsubscribe verification” in my email.  I clicked the link in there to verify my unsubscription and got a 404 error.  Wow!

This isn’t new

All of this happened back in early March — more than three months ago — and it’s all still broken.  The contact form is still broken, Twitter link is still broken and I just tried to unsubscribe again and got the same issue.

Tim is a great performer, but his fan club is such a huge mess.

Pay Attention

Always remember to pay close attention to your site.  None of these issues were intentional (except for failing to respond to my email), and they simply became issues over time.  Since the management of the site isn’t likely to be using the contact form or trying to unsubscribe from the emails, they don’t know the problems exist.

I’ve been guilty of this in the past as well; a feature on a site of mine will go down, and I’ll be unaware of it for a  few days until a member lets me know about it.  Now I try to spend more time going through things and making sure everything is running smoothly.

Have you ever been “trapped” by a site like this, with no good way to contact them or unsubscribe?

In Companies, Marketing, Twitter , , , ,
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How to add a Google +1 (Plus One) button to your site

June 3, 2011 — 15 Comments

A few months ago, Google introduced the +1 button to the world.  It’s essentially a simple way for you to approve of a page, and your friends will see that you “+1′d” it in the search results, meaning it’s likely a good site for them to visit as well.  Here’s Google’s official video explaining it:

Now Google has finally gone a step further and created a button that you can add to your own website.  If you’re reading this on my site (and not via Google Reader, etc), look at the bottom of the post and you’ll see the new button.  This is quite important, because Google has said that +1 can affect how well your site ranks in the search results, meaning it’s quite important for site owners to add this button to their sites!

Here’s the quick version; just add this code to your page and the button will appear:

<script type=”text/javascript” src=”http://apis.google.com/js/plusone.js”></script><g:plusone></g:plusone>

However, it can be tweaked quite a bit by using this webmaster +1 page.  You can choose various sizes, make it vertical, and even give it a specific URL to +1 (by default, it uses the page you’re on).

Update: If you’re using WordPress, there are a lot of great plug-ins to choose from.  I’m currently using this one, which seems to work quite well.

URL to +1?

For example, look at the front page of Google Earth Blog.  Each post on the page has a +1 button at the bottom, but they’re each set to show +1′s from their respective posts; you wouldn’t want all of those buttons to simply add a +1 for “gearthblog.com” — you want them to +1 the post that they’re under.

In most cases, you don’t need to worry about that.  Just add the simple code snippet from above and you’re good to go!

Is it worth my time?

The big question is whether or not +1 will take off.  The fact that it will affect search results, even a little bit, means that most sites will be adding the button.  If most sites add the button, it’ll probably be seen as a successful move for Google.  Time will tell, but things seem to be in their favor.

How about you? Have you added it to your site yet?

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