You business needs a Google+ brand page. You know it, your boss knows it, your fans know it. The big questions are 1)How do I create a Google+ brand page, and b)How do I make it awesome?
Setting up your Google+ brand page initially is easy. Just follow these simple steps:
Local Business or Place – Suitable for hotels, restaurants, places, stores, services… This category works for pretty much any local business with a storefront, and requires a phone number so the business can be located on Google Places.
Product or Brand – Apparel, cars, electronics, financial services.
Company, Institution or Organization – Companies, organizations, institutions, non-profits…
Arts, Entertainment or Sports – Movies, TV, music, books, sports, shows…
Other – Use if your page doesn’t fit in another category.
3. Next, enter your page name, website URL, category, and other information.
4. Fill out your massive ten world profile (yes, you get ten whole words), and upload your logo.
5. Next, if you want, tell all your Google+ friends about your new brand page.
You’re done! Your new Google+ brand page is finished, go have a beer! Wait, it looks like hell, and you want to do more. Well, since you asked…
Google+ Direct Connect
It’d been nice to connect your website right to your Google+ brand page, right? From your brand page, click on “Get started” in the left column, then “Connect your website”.
Create a Kick-Ass Profile Banner
Want the cool five-image banner like all the cool kids? You can do five separate images like TIME Magazine, or a single image spliced into five bits like BMW. The choice is yours. To create a single spliced image like BMW, either do it yourself or use this Google+ banner cutter tool. Then click on the banner area of your brand page and upload the images.
Beef Up Your Profile
Often ignored, the About section of the Google+ brand page is important. Not only does it help users figure out who you are and what you are all about, but the links on the page are followed. Also, don’t forget to add links to all your social communities in the “Recommended links” sidebar. More followed links!
Those are the basics. Now all you have to do is interact with fans, post unique content as often as you can, and just have some fun.
I occasionally get asked (online and in real life) what my favorite or recommended web host is, and the answer is easy for me – DreamHost.
It’s almost silly how good DreamHost is. Unlimited bandwidth, unlimited disk space, unlimited number of hosted domains, unlimited email addresses, unlimited databases, plus full shell access. Seriously, it’s not fair. I currently use about 5 different hosts for different projects, and I wish they were all like DreamHost. Oh, and you get all this stuff for $8.95/month. On a side note, my favorite thing about DreamHost is their one-click installed. Want WordPress? One click. Want Joomla? One click. And so on. As an affiliate marketer, I’ve got things to do that don’t include server maintenance, hassling with software installations, and the like. DreamHost makes making money easy.
Anyway, those are my 2 cents on hosting. is awesome. If you have any questions or comments, fire away!
What I like best about it is that it’s from Google – it tells you just what you need to know to be better in their eyes, and those are the eyes that are most important.
Just a quick shout out to my new favorite site: daFont.com. I used to HATE searching for fonts to use for logos and whatnot, but these dudes have compiled hundreds of free fonts and categorized them by style, size, etc. Plus you can enter a text string and it’ll automagically show you how the text looks with your font. It’s a huge, huge time saver for me.
I have no connection to daFont other than I now love the site. Check them out!
Featuritis is a term used to describe software which over-emphasizes new features to the detriment of other design goals, such as simplicity, compactness, stability, or bug reduction.
Featuritis is often accompanied by the mistaken belief that “one small feature” will add zero incremental cost to a project, where cost can be money, time, effort, or energy.
I’ve got a huge problem with Featuritis. “If I’m already building feature ‘x’, I’ll add in feature ‘y’ and feature ‘z’, too!” Pretty soon I’m trying to maintain a bloated application with so many features no one likes to use it. Or a project gets so big and complicated I never even build it. I’ll revisit it months later and wonder why the hell I didn’t build it!
In my opinion, one of the most valuable commodities we have is time. As a solo entrepreneur, time is what limits me, so anything I can do to save time (and not waste time) is a huge boon to my business. Striking back at feature creep is something that I have gotten better at, but I always need to be wary of it.
A favicon is a small icon associated with a website or webpage. See the monkey head in the address bar next to http://www.monkeyknifefight.com? That’s a favicon. If you bookmark this website, then the monkey head will show up in your bookmarks list (at least in most modern browsers). The favicon also shows up on the tabs for each website if you’re using a tabbed browser. And you are, right?
Favicon How To:
Making a favicon is easy, really. There are two ways to do it. The first way is to take any jpg, gif or png and run it through a Favicon generator. Here’s the best one I’ve found:
It’s totally free and works great. Save the favicon.ico that is generated, and put it in the root of your website. You’ll be able to see your favicon if you type in http://www.YOURURL.com/favicon.ico. Replace “YOURURL” with your url!
Once it’s uploaded to the root folder of your site, it will automatically get picked up by web browsers. If you want to be sure you can put a reference to the favicon in the HEAD of your webpages, like so:
HTML Favicon Reference:
*
XHTML Favicon Reference:
*
That’s it!
Favicon How To Questions
Why can’t I just use a jpg, gif or png without converting it? You can, but Internet Explorer only recognizes the ico file extension, so you might as well go through the easy step of converting it to a favicon.ico.
How can I make my favicon look better? If you want the background of your favicon to be transparent, you have to use a gif, then convert that to an ico. Animation is also allowed, but IE doesn’t recognized animated gifs, so it won’t work on those browsers. They still degrade nicely for Firefox, so you can still go that route if you want.
That’s really it. It’s quite easy to do, and even if you have a crappy favicon I’d bet that it helps get people to visit your website, bookmark your website, and it gets you more page views. It’s silly to have a site and not create one.
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