Lots of people continue to ask us about +Blogger and Google+, questions ranging from "will Google sunset Blogger in favor of Google+" to "how can I use Google+ to get more activity to my blog". Throw in that some people shout from the stratosphere that you should be on a Google+ only blogging diet, and it's easy to see why there is such content strategy confusion for bloggers.
- Complete brand control and design
- Support for data outside linear date posts (static pages, label categories)
- External gadgets and JQuery support
- Custom top level domain support
- Paid advertising
- Anonymous commenting
- Content with a longer lifespan (Google+ content has a lifespan) and is indexed by non-Google search engines
- Better handling of long-form content and highly-formatted content
Some recent research experiments, especially this one by +Dustin W. Stout gave us yet another compelling reason, and brilliant way of sharing our long-form content into Google+ to gain maximum traction.
In this Google+ post by +David Kutcher a blog post is referenced in the post with its link being the only link included. An album of compelling images (the images from that same blog post) is attached to the post, along with formatted actionable content.
This Google+ post received 48 +1s to the original post, 17 shares, and 28 comments (at the time of this posting). In addition, the shares by community also received +1s and re-shares.
All of the +1s on the original post, shares, and re-shares translated into +1s on the blog post linked in the Google+ post.
The images in the album, each of which linked to the website and our company received over 27,000 views in 1 day.
The post was featured on "What's Hot" receiving even more eyeballs for not just the post, but the linked blog post.
In this way this one Google+ post was able to convey a lot of traffic, as well as short and long-term value to the linked blog post. But unlike Google+, we're able to reference that linked blog post again in the future, that blog post will continue to gain eyeballs as it's found via search engines, and perhaps that blog post will get re-shared by other audiences in the future, far removed from this one post. It might also get shared to Pinterest, Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, etc.
If we had limited our content to Google+ only this one post would eventually get buried, both in our own Profile/Feed, but also in the Google+ search. Our content would be transient. And rather than being transient, we want our content to have long-term value, content that continues to produce results for us as long as it is still relevant.
Using Blogger and Google+ enables us to create long-term value content while making it have huge value in the "here and now" conversation channel that is Google+.