Dec

Google Friend Connect on Blogger - Blogger Followers is Google Friend Connect

Filed Under (Blogging, Google and Web Traffic, Relationship Marketing, Social Marketing, Viral Traffic) by Traffic Guru on 14-12-2009

Over the weekend Google fully upgraded and updated the previously termed “followers” widget on the blogger blogspot.com domain into Google Friend Connect. Many of the Google services and accounts are being integrated and tied together in ways you can’t even imagine…but the path is becoming clearer by the day.

Check it out live:

September 16, 2008 you can see I wrote about this prediction. Now it’s here and you get the full story of Google Friend Connect Tactics. But it was being called the followers widget and didn’t have all the functionality of the full featured friend connect. It now does.

In typical Google fashion they rolled out this cool feature over the weekend and under the radar with no fanfare.

Last I checked there were over 10 million blogs on blogspot.com and I’d say the 80/20 rule applies so let’s say 2 million of those are active blogs. This means a whole new world of opportunity has just opened for you to connect with them. And them to connect with you!

Google’s friend connect widget makes this dead simple easy and hugely powerful.

One of the things noone is talking about right now is the fact that when it all ties together (fingers crossed) when you choose to join someone’s blog community through friend connect it will automatically subscribe you to their rss feed directly into your Google reader account.

What isn’t talked about is the links inside of Reader are hard coded html links which are fully followed. Also, the more you engage your readers and they like your stuff Google will see your blog as increasingly valuable and rank you higher.

In case you’ve been in the dark Google does look at user data. It’s what their entire business was built upon.

I’ve been reading this book “What Would Google Do?” and he talks about how they only make decisions based on user data. Anytime a change to one of their services is proposed the boss asks “How much user data is your theory based on?”.

If it’s too little they don’t move forward. So knowing this you can bet they’re building into their algorithm the ability to see how users are interacting with your content and your website.

Bottom line, if you have 10,000 rss subscribers and only 10 of them regularly read your blog posts you’re in trouble. Your competitor who has 1,000 rss subsribers and 373 of them who actually read all his stuff is going to be ranked higher than you. Because with big G it’s all about the user experience.

So keep this in mind. Gmail is the glue which holds everything together and how your friends lists will be managed. You can now video chat and post videos directly into Gchat. My buddy did this the other day and I was able to play the YouTube video (though a miniaturized screen version) right in my Gchat window. Very cool.

Also, I haven’t even discussed the ability to share items within your Google Reader account which creates even more backlinks and readers. Make sure you send it to friends who are interested in the story’s topic. Again it’s all about user data, them actually clicking on the link and taking a few minutes to read the story.

Google can track users behavior inside Reader so they know how much time a reader spends looking at your story and whether or not they click through for more info to your website.

Get over there now because exciting things are happening with Google Friend Connect on Blogger and you want to have the front line early adopter advantage because it’s the wave of the future…the new platform which will dominate in 2-3 years.

Leave any questions or comments because this is going to be big.

Originally posted 2009-03-02 14:40:14. Republished by Old Post Promoter

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