Surprise, surprise! On 11^th April Google+ made a new announcement. Google+ now has more than 170 million users!

This is not the only reason why you should consider using Google+ for your freelancing business. Another very important reason is that Google+ profiles and pages can make an impact on the SEO of your website, at least in the personalized search results of Google.

The announcement also declared that Google+ will now run on a whole new interface that is a more “functional and flexible version of Google+.” The most striking feature of this new interface is that all the apps have been cornered down into the left margin, which can be moved up and down as per the requirements of the user. This means that the apps are no longer static as before.

But this is just the beginning.

The senior vice president of Google, Vic Gundotra wrote on Google’s official blog that:

We’ve also built the ribbon with the future in mind, giving us an obvious (and clutter-free) space for The Next Big Feature, and The Feature After That. So stay tuned.

Google+ is surely onto something big. Only time will tell, what? In this article we’ll discuss some of the new features of Google+. Understanding the big changes to Google+ will allow you to take advantage of them to promote your freelance business.

The Banner Image

Google Plus’s home page now hosts a large banner image. Its dimensions are 940 by 180 pixels.

Compare this to the new Facebook Timeline banner that is 851 by 315 pixels. Since Facebook rolled out its Timeline first, it suggests that Google Plus’s banner is inspired from Facebook’s. Continue Reading

If you are not familiar with Google+ consider reading my previous article –
8 Reasons that Make Google+ Better than Facebook and Twitter – for an introduction.

This article is about the differences between Google+ pages and Google+ profiles. This way you can use each of them to represent and market your freelance business properly.

Broadly speaking a page usually represents an organization, while a profile can represent only a person. For example Darren Rowse is using his name, not his blog’s name as the title of his Google+ id and therefore he is using a Google+ profile. On the other hand, FreelanceSwitch is using its blog’s name as the title of its Google+ id and therefore it is using a Google+ page.

You can follow the FreelanceSwitch Google+ Page for updates on new content we release, as well as to freelance related news from across the web.

In the image above, the small square icon represents the logo of a page. Profiles don’t have this symbol. This is a quick way to recognize whether the id that you are viewing is a page or a profile. To quote Google+ Help Center:

Pages are extremely similar to profiles, but they have some key differences.” – Google Support

We will look at those differences in detail here. Although the Google+ Help Center lists ten differences in the above link, we’ll focus on those that have the greatest impact on freelancers. Continue Reading

Numbers can tell a story. As of December 2011, Facebook had 845 million monthly active users. As of September 2011, Twitter had 100 million active users. As of January 2012, Google+ had more than 90 million users.

Facebook and Twitter reached those numbers in years. Google+ reached the 90 million mark in less than 7 months despite accepting only invited members when it launched. These statistics give you a feel for how quickly Google+ has become a force in the social media sphere.

There are reasons that set Google+ apart from Facebook and Twitter. We’ll look at 8 of them in this article.

I’ve picked up on only those points that seemed most important to me, your list may differ. Please leave a comment if there is a Google+ feature that excites you. Continue Reading

Want to boost your profile? Add additional income streams to your freelancing business? Release your own self published book? It’s time to have a chat with author and freelance marketer Danny Iny.

He quit school at the age of fifteen to start his first freelance web design business. The only problem with it was that it didn’t work. He then tried several other businesses, continually pushing himself. A lot of hard work and devotion paid off.

Soon he saw himself guest lecturing at the John Molson School of Business at Concordia University, making a good income from his blog Firepole Marketing, doing more than 80 guest posts on all the A class websites and co-authoring the book Engagement from Scratch! with well known people like Guy Kawasaki and Brian Clark.

Recently I had the opportunity to pick Danny’s brain. Read on to learn more about self publishing, tips for promoting your freelance business, and boosting your name recognition. Continue Reading