Google Places has a great great feature that very few Local Small Business Owners Know About. They call it "Place Page Posts". It can be used for a variety of reasons and you can even include links directly to your website or where ever you'd like. Christopher Jones and I recorded a brief video a while back about this very useful new feature and how to use it for yourself.

Transcript of the video:

Chris: Hi everyone, this is Chris Jones.

Allen: And Allen Crawley, creators of the Google Places business blueprint.

Chris: We just wanted to take some time and share with you a great new feature that Google has just added to the Google Places page. Actually to be fair, it’s not really a new feature, one of our current members that’s in the UK had actually pointed this out to us on his Google Places page. However, we did some research and at the time it was not available to us. However, Google has just updated this and made this new feature available in the US and what they called it is the Place page posts. And as you can read here, this is from the actual Google Places tour.

Basically it’s a place where business owners can now place updates into your Google Places page, and here, this is my Google Places page and you can see I’ve just placed a quick post that says “Google Places has changed again”. You now have this nice update section where you can let everyone know what’s going on. Again, this is pretty much like a Facebook status update or almost like a Twitter feed onto your Google Places page so it’s a great feature and now I’m going to turn it over to Allen.

Allen: Okay so what we’d like to do is go ahead and show you how to do this in 3 simple easy steps.

Step one, log into the Gmail account that actually owns the Google Places page and in order to do that, go to Google.com/places and there you’ll see the red arrow on the lower part of the screenshot, it’s pointing to a button that says ‘Get started’ so just click the ‘Get started’ button and it’ll take you to this login screen. Here is where you’ll want to log into the account that actually owns the Google Places listing.

Step two, Then what you’ll need to do is click on the name of the listing that you want to add. We’re going to take a look at a screenshot here. If you see the red arrow on the left hand side of the screenshot, it’s pointing to Old Inc, that’s the listing that we’re going to work with here. So the name of the business is actually a link. You don’t want to click on the edit, you see the edit in the lower left hand area of that listing. Don’t click on that, click on the actual name of the business that you’re going to work on and then all you got to do is type in your post. It’s very simple.

Step three, You see where the red box is on this next screenshot here, that red box and the arrow is pointing to the place where you can actually include your updated post. You’ll see on here at the top part of this red box it says November 23, that is the current page post that’s listed on this Google Places listing and you’ll see an open box now with grayed out text, that’s where you can include your new updated post, and one of the things we want to point out here, expires in 30 days, you can update your post as often as you like.

Like Chris mentioned, you can treat it as a Twitter status update or even a Facebook status update. If you want to change it multiple times per day you can do that. If you wanted to change it to highlight specials that you’re currently running to draw attention to those you can do that. But it does expire after 30 days so if you do nothing but leave it up, it will come down after 30 days, and the right arrow you see 160, that references how many characters you have to place your update into that post. Like on Twitter you only have 140 characters, here you actually have 160 characters. Anyway, we wanted to point out where you can actually find that and the fact that each listing or each posting will expire within 30 days but you can change it as often as you like and you do have 160 characters to make your statement.

Back to Chris.

Chris: Anyway, we wanted to share this with you because again, we’re the creators of the Google Places business blueprint and as such, we do try to stay on top of everything Google Places related and so if you want to find out more about setting up Google Places for your own business, setting up Google Places for a client, how to start your own Google Places business and how to use Google Places as a lead generator, you can go to our site and join our membership program then we’ll walk you through all of these in depth, and you can find this at www.googleplacesbusinessblueprint.com and we’d love to see you there and hopefully we’ll see you on the inside.