• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

The goal of your work on an outpost (like Google+) is to build a relationship and nurture your prospects and community. The goal of your work on your home base is to convert people to an action, be that a sale, a membership, or something else.

One last point about this: This means that the goal of a home base is far more static and specific, whereas the efforts of being on an outpost (which is what I’m calling Google+) are far more nuanced and require a lot more effort and interaction. This is how it’s meant to be. My goal in explaining this in detail before talking about posting is so that you understand where this fits into your larger business efforts and strategies. Hopefully, we’re in agreement.

Posting on Google+

To post on Google+ from the web, click the Home link (which is the little House tab with the three dots and lines below it). This displays a Stream view, and a box that displays the text Share What’s New in light gray (see Figure 6-1). Click anywhere in the box, and you see what is shown in Figure 6-2.

Figure 6-1 The Google+ Stream view.

Figure 6-2 The Share What’s New box.

Following are the elements you see:

• A place to type in text.

• Four icons that enable you to choose between posting a photo, a video, a link, or location data. Note: you can share location data and post a photo, video, and obviously text.

• Sharing options, which are listed under the main post box.

• The Share button, which is how you execute your post.

In Google+, you have the option to type in text, select one of those four icons, and then determine with whom you’d like to share your posts. After you post something, you have a few more options, including the following:

• Editing your post

• Deleting your post

• Linking to your post

• Reporting or removing specific comments, which is helpful if people spam your comments section

• Disabling comments

• Disabling reshare

It’s a little odd that Disable Comments and Lock This Post aren’t visible until after you post. If you post something to the stream, you must then rush and click either or both of those options quickly before someone decides to do either. Perhaps this will be fixed in future versions, because it seems a bit awkward in practice, but you’ll get the hang of it, if either of those functions is important to you.

We’ll get back to how we use those later, but I wanted to bring them up because they’re part of the posting mechanism that doesn’t show up until after you click Share.

The Sharing Options Under the Main Post Area

Below the area where you put your post information is the sharing options for each post. You have several options to how you choose to share this information. The first of these, the kind of wide-open option, is to share with Public. This means that anyone can see this post. (Most of what I share is to the Public group.)

You can choose to share with Your Circles, which means that anyone you put into a circle can see the post. You can also add Extended Circles, which means that you’ve not only shared that information with people in your circles, but also made it visible to other people who have those people in their circles. (If that’s a bit confusing, it’s okay—it makes sense after checking things out).

You can share with one specific individual by typing @username or +username and then making sure you haven’t added any other sharing options. This is as close as Google+ comes to a private message.

Similar to this last option, if you mention someone in a post with the + or @ method (such that their name shows up in blue with a + before it), then that person will receive access to that post, whether or not they’re in the circle (or circles) you’ve chosen to share that information with.

For example, assume you have a circle called Chris Brogan Haters, and you use it to share all kinds of mean and nasty information about me (hey, people might!). If you type into your box a bunch