I would have liked to see Google Plus Business Pages first, but I can see why they are doing this.  Games are more likely to create a sticky Google Plus audience, and if they can show a great audience they will be more attractive to businesses to build Google Plus Business Pages.  My theory is that they will actually charge for Google Plus Business because it would cut down on spam and be totally worth it if the cost was low and it created a higher value network.

We all know how successful game apps and FaceBook games have been, so a lot of people will start building Google Plus Games very quickly.  However, it seems like they are going to limit what can be on the site initially.

Critical to the success of the network is to have a way to filter out requests and information from other people’s games.  Right now there are a lot of techie trend setters in Google Plus and if they start getting requests to go to a virtual farm and slop the pigs, people are going to bail.  In fact, I think the Farmville, Mafia Wars and Vampire Slaying on FaceBook is the #1 biggest reason I never became a power user there.  I do not waste much of my own time on games and I do not want to see things from other people’s time wasting.

So if you are going to start doing Google Plus Game Development, please do not ruin Google Plus.  Make it fun for people that care and invisible for people that have better things to do.

1) Recording and Transcribing

This is a very common technique for people that do not want to record.  You can write out a good outline and record yourself talking about the various points and then have it transcribed and edited into a book.  Literally within a few weeks your book can be ready to go.  And this does not have to be expensive.  Audacity is free recording software and transcription is usually about 50 cents per minute.  You can then edit it yourself or hire someone to do it for you.

2) Ghost Writing

Much like recording your voice, you can hire a ghost writer to get you a decent rough draft often for a few hundred dollars.  If you go with a cheap ghost writer you may not be able to publish it as is, but you can use it as a starting point and make it your own.

3) Aggregate Your Content

If you have been writing blogs or articles for a while, you can easily find some nice articles that go together on a particular topic and string them together into a book.  You may want to tweak them and create better transitions, or you can just sell the book as your best posts of 2011 or something.

4) PLR Articles (Private Label Rights)

You can buy packages of articles that other people have written and use these as the basis for a book.  I will warn you there are a lot of bad PLR articles out there and you may really have to dig and rewrite to get a good book, but it is one popular method for book writing.

5) Hiring Chapters

You can also use a writing service like textbroker.com and probably pay around $20 per chapter for writers to write on topics.  I use this service for articles that I do not want to write, but you can easily use it for segments in a book. There are more methods of writing without writing.  I do not believe you will get a perfect book from any of these methods, but you will get a nice rough draft for under $500 (maybe under $200) and then you can either edit it yourself or pay someone to edit it and make it nice.

You can make money, but you are not going to have as much luck as you would with automating other social networks.

Here are some tips to make money with Google Plus.

1) Do not start spamming products and using affiliate links right away. No one will circle you. You must build an audience first.

2) Do not use an automated Google plus script. Engagement is higher and you will simply not get results.

3) When Google Plus business pages are released, do not use them like FaceBook fan pages right away. Learn what makes them different.

4) Develop your expertise on Google Plus and it may lead to new consulting and speaking opportunities.

Probably the best way I have seen to make money with Google plus is to write a really good article or blog post that the Google Plus audience would like and have an affiliate link or sign up on the page. Then use Google plus to post about the page and get people talking about the topic. That will drive traffic, and you can monetize the traffic on your webpage without needing to post affiliate links in Google Plus.

Right now you cannot set up a business page on Google Plus.  If you do, they will take it down.  Google is also being very strict about the quality of profiles.  If you are not a real person and list a real name they are deactivating your access.

Money! © by yomanimus

When you consider the commitment to a high quality network and the delay in Business pages, I see an opportunity I would consider if I was Google.

1.  I would continue to put big resources into building a legitimate and high quality network, even though the raw numbers would be lower.

2.  I would come out with the coolest set of Google plus business tools that blow away other networks, like FaceBook and LinkedIn.  I would let businesses build email opt other things that make sense for a business but are restricted in those networks.

3.  To limit sloppy “businesses” and scams, I would charge a monthly fee to have a Google plus business profile page – or at least I would charge for extended services.  This would greatly decrease the low quality businesses even if it is only a few dollars per month.  And Google could justify the cost because of the quality networks, which costs a lot to maintain.

Of course, clubs and other types of organizations would want to have a Google Plus business page but those could be limited and could include ads.

I do not know if this is what is going to happen, but I would consider it if I was them.  As much as we all love free, charging the small amount for Google plus business pages will increase quality and cut the clutter of all those worthless sites.

Please, Google, make us pay for it and keep getting rid of fake people.

Google Plus has a huge advantage because it is Google.  I love a made up name that is simple and when I named my lead generation product Buzzoodle, it was with the similar idea in mind.

Of course, I also had to buy domains for all the ways people would misspell it, such as buzzdoodle and buzznoodle.

Google Plus is suffering a bit from some confusion.  Google seems to prefer Google+, but the search engine itself sees the + as “and” and not as part of the name.  That means for search, calling Google+ Google+ is less effective than calling it Google Plus.

I wonder if they had a meeting where this was discussed – seems a big deal, since they are Google and it is not well named for Google search.  Did someone finally yell, “Damn the torpedoes and full steam ahead”?  Probably.

I am not suggesting it is a bad name.  The fall out of how it will be referred to is interesting.  Many people shorten it to G+ when chatting.  If you are writing for search, you will write Google Plus and if you are formally writing about it in an article for a serious publication, you will have to refer to it as Google+.

Will this ambiguity hurt it?

Well, it took forever for me to find the Google+ app in iTunes because it did not appear in their search.  If you searched on Google Huddle supposedly it showed up.  Now that is intuitive.  And this is only one example of what will probably be a lot of problems.

The good news for Google is that the combination of Brand and Buzz will probably overcome these obstacles, but if you are a less well known company, do not try a + for yourself.

It would certainly be a good idea, because Google Plus is the hottest new product of the year and many people are saying Google Plus could really hurt the big networks like LinkedIn, FaceBook and Twitter.

If you want to get a Google Plus speaker you need to find someone that has been a social media speaker on other topics and has really gotten familiar with Google Plus fast.

Your Google Plus speaker should not only be able to cover topics such as features and building a Google Plus following, but also how to use Google Plus for business.

Right now is the hottest time to get involved because the early adopters of Google Plus tend to be a very educated, techie and artistic crowd that can greatly influence others and are more likely to try new products.  A year from now it will be much harder to build a great following of influential, educated people with greater buying power.

Ron McDaniel can be your Google Plus Speaker and can cover a diverse number of topics, including features, how to make money with Google Plus, how to get PR with Google Plus, how to grow your influence on Google Plus (and why it is different from every other network) and more.

Ron’s speaking rates vary based on time and location but are reasonable.  And Google Plus is the kind of topic that is going to increase attendance at your next event because many people are wondering how Google Plus works and whether they should get involved.

Contact Ron today if you are interested in discussing him being your Google Plus speaker for your next event.

There were a lot of rumors about Apple intentionally delaying the app because Google is a competitor.  Shady if true, but it is out now.

Also, here is the huge issue I ran into.  I could not find the Google Plus iPhone App when searching for the app on my iPhone.  I finally located it by looking at the top 25 free iphone apps because I heard that it had made the list.

If this is something Google did, it is just plain dumb.  If it is Apple, then very shady again by making it hard to find Google Plus app but easier to find 3rd party apps with bad reviews.

Initially the App itself got bad reviews also, but do not let that stop you from trying it.  Initially a test version of the software was uploaded and Apple released this older version of the software first, which was not stable.

Next, when you do install the iPhone App for Google Plus be sure to think carefully before allowing it to push notify you.  I selected yes and it is annoying me now because I am a very popular Google plus user and I get messaged constantly.  I have not figured out how to deactivate the iPhone Google Plus push notification yet.

Lastly, I do like the app.  I am sure it will get better over time and I know there is a lot of complaints about Google Plus iPhone app features, but Google Plus itself is still in beta so you cannot expect the iPhone app to be perfect yet.  Enjoy it and watch for updates, I am sure they are coming.

Here are the different categories of lead generation software and how I think of it.

Lead Collection Software

Software that goes out to the web based on categories and search terms and mines the Internet for contact information is a lead collection category of software.  While this software is very good at generation lists of contact information for you to work, it is not very good at getting warm leads unless you are very creative with your search terms.

Inbound Marketing Software

Lead Generation Software that attracts leads to a site and captures them usually combine strategies with FaceBook, Twitter, Google Plus and Search Engine Optimization.  This strategy may not produce huge numbers of leads, but the quality of the leads is very high because people are coming to you and they have a need for what you have to offer.  Buzzoodle.com is a system that falls into this lead generation software category as it uses blogging and search engine optimization techniques to attract leads to a site.

Website Traffic Software

This is the broadest category of lead generation software.  The website traffic software category has thousands of different tools.  This includes any software tool that helps you generate traffic back to a website.  Of course, you need to have a website capable of capturing leads if you are going to go to all the trouble of increasing your traffic.

Lead Capture Software

Lead capture software will put forms on the site to actually collect the lead information.  Sometimes you can use multiple lead capture tools to combine the actual form generation with how the form appears on the website.  Tools like Salesforce.com and aWeber can capture the leads, and I have used WordPress plugins and different scripts to do more creative things with displaying the lead capture form.

Lead Generation Business Management Software

At a more pricy end, there is the lead generation as a business software packages.  These do not generate the leads, but they have the capture and management of leads built into the system.  This usually includes the selling of leads at a price to people that want to buy leads.  You may not want to spend the thousands of dollars on these kinds of systems until you have proven you can generate significant levels of leads.

These are the broad lead generation software categories I tend to place all tools in.

First, I do not expect it to stay this good.  Great Internet traffic is fickle and as soon as the Google Plus system becomes more open and more spammy, the results will decrease.

However, right now in July of 2011, I can tell you that Google Plus is driving web traffic terrifically.  I did a comparison of my much bitter twitter and Facebook followings compared to a much smaller group I am involved with on Google Plus and Google Plus drove 10 x the traffic on a much smaller following.

Not only that, but the quality of engagement is incredible.  I am meeting people, talking to people on the phone, chatting via Google Hangouts and more all towards building my brand and generation Website traffic with Google plus.

So the #1 best way to get Internet traffic with Google plus is to get involved as soon as possible.  The longer you wait, the harder it will be to build a quality network.  Also, you want to join Google Plus and then start adding people to circles fairly fast.  Weed out the ones you do not want later.  If you have a lot of people circle you back after you circle them, then you will have a group that will see your post and check out what you have to say if it is intersting.

I do think that Google Plus web traffic will be more quality oriented then other networks.  The people on there now are very savvy creative and technical folk and they are not going to click on everything in their stream.  In fact, they are more likely to uncircle you than other networks.

So you can produce huge Google Plus Website Traffic if you sign up, develop a group that circles you and put out quality, interesting stuff.  Spammy stuff, not so much.

You cannot help but hear about it.  It is in the new and is all the buzz online.

It is also still in Beta at this point and you have to have a Google Plus Invitation to get in, although that is much easier than it was a week ago.

Google Plus is a social network created by Google that sits someplace between Twitter and FaceBook in complexity.

One of the advantages of Google Plus is that it integrates with other Google tools, such as Google Docs, GMail, Google Calendar and more.  This alone makes it very interesting because it is like having your Office suite integrated with your community.

Google Plus also has many new features that you will not find in other social media services.  Hangouts are video chats that are very interesting.

Managing people you want to get information from in circles also gives you more control and most people citing their favorite feature are saying this is it.

There are many benefits.  You get a social media do over – meaning rebuilding with more intention and control will probably give you the best network you have ever had.