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Previous chapters talk about leaving comments, which are the life’s blood of what builds business relationships on Google+. For sharing, you have an added benefit. Comments become the “liner notes” to what you’re interested in, and they give you another way to add some context for your readers and audience.

Commenting gives your audience a chance to interact with you around the campfire. It allows people to share their opinions, and it gives people a sense of how you’ll react when they bring their thoughts back to you. You need to comment back on as many posts as you can. The more you communicate in both directions with your audience, the better.

This one aspect of social networking and social media is the huge difference between business communications in the past and what can be accomplished today. Similarly, in the past, magazines had a static “letters” column, whereas you can now talk with the authors and the editors of most magazines online at your whim. I write for Entrepreneur magazine and many times have had conversations with people who read my articles. In both perspectives (business and publishing), this ability to communicate via comments is a powerful boost to how your audience can interact with you, and how you’re perceived. Take advantage of it.

What Does Your Magazine Look Like?

When asking people on Google+ what their show or magazine would look like, the answers were quite varied. One said his show would be like the Jon Stewart show (politics meets comedy). Another wants to be the “Gordon Ramsey of small business marketing.” One friend wants to do a show called Investing in Your Future Self, about how you can grow and prosper.

The thing is, you can do whatever show you want. The platform exists. On Google+, you can upload YouTube videos, host live Hangouts, and start conversations around a picture, a post, or a reshare. It is your show. It is your magazine. Make something that draws attention, that grows an audience, that builds potential relationships, and that can convert to a prospective audience. It simply takes thought, time, and effort.

Create a magazine that gives you a framework to think about what resembles what the experience might feel like. There’s a difference between the magazines you read and what you can create. Most magazines have more than one person putting them together. In this case, you’re a one-person show, and to that point, you need some help with tools to build out your magazine. Curating interesting content is a great concept, but how can you accomplish this goal?

Two Resources to Help with Your Sharing

Does it take a lot of time to find interesting items to share? Not if you have some kind of a system in place. You can use another Google product to help find interesting things to share: Google Reader.

If you go to http://google.com/reader, you can find a tool that enables you to read multiple blogs and online magazines in an orderly fashion. What’s great about Reader is that you can organize and share thousands of blogs and feeds based on your interests. If you use list mode, you see only headlines and a slender amount of detail from which you can decide to drill down and make even more sense of whichever articles catch your fancy.

Oh, but your reader starts out fairly empty. Where would you start looking for sites to add to it? Start at http://alltop.com, Guy Kawasaki’s “magazine rack for the Internet.” You can find hundreds and hundreds of topic categories, under which there are hundreds and hundreds of blogs. It’s a great way to start figuring out where to source material for your sharing needs. (Guy and I are friends, but I have no business interest in Alltop. It’s just the right tool for this job.)

Find a few dozen (or if you’re daring, a few hundred) blogs to skim through each day; read a few posts that you find interesting and that help you build up interesting content; then share that content into your Google+ by posting your thoughts and then a link to the original post. You’ll give people something of value to consider.