Use Google+ Communities to Promote Your Business

Unless you have an excellent marketing strategy in place, you won’t be able to bring visitors to your website despite writing great content. One of the tactics you can add to your marketing checklist is Google+. You can use Google+ in many ways one of them being the usage of Google+ communities.

1. Search

Start the process of using Google+ communities for your business by searching for relevant communities. Navigate to the communities tab and you’ll notice the search dedicated entirely to the communities. Also, you can just use the search bar on the top and then switch to the communities tab.

After performing a search related to you business, you can look for some important factors before joining a community like-
1. Total number of members
2. Type of posts shared
3. Engagement on the posts

A good community will definitely attract more followers, so prefer communities with higher numbers. Before joining a community, check the posts shared by the present members as well. If the posts shared are nothing but links, it’s better to not join. Also, such communities drive no engagement to the content shared. Notice the total number of +1s and shares on the post. After successfully finding the right communities and joining them, you are ready for the next step.

2. Introduction

After you have successfully searched for the right communities associated with your business niche, it’s time to introduce yourself (Remember you may have to wait for the approval of moderators to enter into some communities ). Introduction can be an optional step but I won’t recommend skipping it. Start you first post by sharing about what you do, what your interests are and how you can contribute to the community. You might discover someone looking for a person with the skills that you have. This could help you get a potential client or a good relationship and definitely a great start for your presence in the Google+ community.

3. Reputation

After the introductory phase, it’s time to build some solid reputation for yourself. Remember this rule for success in Google+ communities: Set your goal to adding value to the community and not to self promotion. You may get some traffic from just spamming links to your website but will eventually lead to no traffic, no interested people for your business, a bad image for yourself and getting banned from the community. Stay active in the community not only by sharing good content but also by interacting on other’s posts. Give a +1 to the great content shared by others. Help others by answering their queries and you will be regarded as a trustworthy contributor in that domain. This way when you will share a link to your own website, people are highly likely to trust it and visit your website.

4. Promotion

So we are finally here, after building a solid reputition as a knowledful person in the field, you are ready for the last step of SIRP: Promotion. At this stage, adding a link to your own website will not be treated as spam but rather a link to a website that offers something great to the community members. But wait, there’s more! Even if you have earned the right to successful publish your own website content, you might not share it properly losing potential clicks. Took a look at the right and wrong way of sharing content in the Google+ community (or anywhere else)-

Wrong way-

Right way-

In the first post, I have just posted the link to the article whereas in the second post I put in a lot of effort to make it look great. Firstly, I wrote a line about what they can expect inside the article. Secondly, I used a URL shortener to make the url short and clean. Lastly, I added an image that again describes what the content I am sharing is all about.

That’s it, the process of joining, introducing, building reputation and finally promoting your business using Google+ communities.

Unless you know the right way of using the communities on Google+, you are increasing your chances of getting banned before you even know what went wrong. Using Google+ communities for your business is a continuous process of sharing, interacting, answering and a lot more. I am going to break down the process into four steps called as SIRP (Search, Introduction, Reputation and Promotion). So, you need to follow a path before you can start promoting your own website. Also, you can implement these steps when using Facebook groups or any other forum on the Internet. Let’s start by discussing the first part of the SIRP: Search.