Using Google+ to grow your Blogger blog audience

If your blog is hosted on the Blogger platform you have a Google account, because without a Google account you are not able to open a blog on Blogger. I bet you knew that. But did you know that you can expand your Google account with a Google+ profile and use it to grow your blog's audience? Well, in the very beginning of my blogging journey I didn't and I am happy I know now!

I had heard about Google+ being some sort of social platform like Facebook and Twitter and since social media in general was pretty overwhelming for me it took a while before I really sat down and took a good look at the platform. After checking it out I decided to create a Google+ profile and see what it could do for my blog and business. And it hasn't been disappointing since!

HOW TO CREATE A GOOGLE+ PROFILE

If you don't have a Google account yet you will have to create that first. Once that is created you can find the Google+ option on your Google account dashboard. Click on the little icon in the upper left right side (the one that shows nine little squares), here you will find the Google+ option.

Follow the instructions for creating your Google+ profile and add as much info as you like to share with your future followers. It might also be a good idea to upload some images on your profile. This gives a more professional and welcoming look than leaving it blank.

When your profile is created you can share news, images, blog posts etc. in the 'Posts' area, just like you would do on a platform like Facebook. So if you have created a blog post on your Blogger blog you can share a link to it here.

HOW TO GET FOLLOWERS ON GOOGLE+

Like other social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram and Twitter, Google+ is designed to share stuff with followers. But how do you get a bunch of followers when starting out with Google+? That wasn't so hard as I thought it would be. Google accounts are connected to a Gmail email address and we probably all know a few people with such an email address. Google+ gives you the option to search for these people and then you can start following them and invite them to follow you back. So that's the first step: reaching out to people you know.

But growing an audience is all about getting to know new people to share your content with. So how do you find new contacts on this platform? That's where public post sharing comes in handy!

Every time you post something on Google+ you will have the option to post is privately (your followers) or publicly (for everyone to see). The latter option might be a bit scary at first. Sending your content out into cyber space for every Google+ user to see. But this is exactly the option that will help grow your audience. You can add keywords to your posts and people searching for these keywords will be able to see your public posts. This is the way I gathered the majority of my followers on Google+. They probably read one of my posts, thought it was interesting and decided to keep following me.

SHARING YOUR BLOGGER POSTS AUTOMATICALLY ON GOOGLE+

When you publish content on a Blogger blog, you can of course manually post a link to a newly published post on Google+ to notify your followers that a new article has been published. But this is of course extra work and when busy you might totally forget about sharing your post on Google+.

Fortunately there is a really easy solution for this. Blogger itself offers the option of automatically sharing your blog posts on your Google+ Profile! All you have to do is go to your Blogger Dashboard and select the 'Google+' option on the left side of the screen. Now you will be presented the option of automatically sharing your post after posting. Check off the box and you're done!

Every time you publish a new post, Blogger will automatically share the post publicly on your Google+ profile. This saves you time and gives you an easy option to reach a wide audience. Your blog posts will show up like this on your profile page:

So if you haven't already, create that Google+ Profile and connect your blog to it!

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