#and it would be a great opportunity for an all plus size lineup that also has different body types within the spectrum of fatness

[evilmagician430]

tinky winky signature design for teletubbies out on the town, a doll line i made up in my head

"stock images" and more below the cut

[louisisalarrie]

Why isn't Louis playing Reading/Leeds, the most famous indie music festival in the world and one in his home country? These Euro festivals aren't raising his profile much.

Helloooooo anon! This wasn’t gonna be a welcome to the show, but alas, I got ahead of myself and time to burn before the next band bumps in. So, welcome to the show!

I would love to see him play Reading/Leeds, and think that he would fit really well into the 2024 lineup in terms of genre and level of fame. I think he’d love to play them too. It is definitely a shame. However, he is playing at Victorious Festival in Portsmouth, UK, at the same time as Reading/Leeds, which has a very cool lineup (IDLES, Snow Patrol, Fatboy Slim, Pixies etc.) too that he fits well in. So we should be excited for that too!

Sometimes it’s easy to get carried away with the names of festivals, also. While Victorious definitely is smaller, it’s not far off the capacity of Reading/Leeds.

Expected capacity for 2024 is:

- Reading/Leeds = over 200,000 over the whole weekend

- Victorious Festival = roughly 170,000 over the whole weekend

Honourable mentions of 2024:

- Coachella = 250,000, only sold around 200,000, down by roughly 14%-17% since 2023

- Glastonbury = 210,000 capacity, over 200,000 sold (with complaints and major issues with overcrowding this year)

So, while it’s smaller than the bigger names, the lineup is still fantastic and at a reasonable size.

You’ve also gotta remember that before the current festival even goes ahead, the organisers are already locking in tentative headliners and smaller artists for the next year. Festivals particularly are booked ridiculously in advance, much like stadium tours, to really gauge ticket sales, expected gross, capacity, and delivered fees for the artists and what they can offer them. So, even if louis’ managers pitched him for Reading/Leeds/Glasto last year, and the festival organisers maybe wanted to put a hold on him but not confirm due to current negotiations with other artists and their desired curated lineup, there is very little point for Louis’ team to just sit and hold out hope they’ll confirm him and miss out on other opportunities. Hell, he’s probably turned down a bunch of smaller festivals in hopes of the bigger ones, but getting an official offer from Victorious, he’s not gonna decline that to wait and see what happens with the bigger festivals. It’s a silly business mistake.

Plus, these offers all have expiry dates. If his manager/booking agent is pushing for an answer from Leeds/Glasto/Reading and still not getting one, because the offer from Victorious is about to expire with an already desirable delivered fee, well, he’s gonna take it. And idk, maybe he got declined from the bigger festivals for whatever reason too (I don’t see why), but shit happens.

Anyway, in terms of euro festivals, he’s been confirmed to play Zurich Openair in Switzerland on the 24th, which is still the same time as Reading/Leeds is on (and Victorious, but he’s only playing the Friday obviously). So he’s nabbed two festivals, with Zurich Openair also having high profile artists (Macklemore, Armin Van Buuren, Milky Chance etc.), in 2 different countries, with different demographics and genre diversity. Which is sick!

So, I mean, hopefully he gets nabbed for next year (even if he takes time off, I doubt he’ll turn down those festivals), and for now, he’s proving himself and securing his footing in the festival industry. Hell, there are a heap of artists that, while they do tour, stick to festivals and get picked for festivals due to proving their pull at said festivals, exclusivity arrangements, etc., and so this will, in the long term, be great for him.

It’s easy to fall down certain rabbit holes of “he deserves the big shows, he’s not getting enough attention” etc. and comparing him to Harry/other artists, but his career progression, in my opinion and from what I’ve seen by others, is going well and smoothly and safely. Which, ya know, his team aren’t taking huge risks, and I think they could sometimes be more ambitious, but he is getting more opportunities and even just over FITFWT, he has grown heaaaaps. I’d like to trust that his team is pitching him for the bigger festivals/lineups, im sure they are, but it’s just… is what it is.

Taking these Euro festival opportunities is all about securing a tighter, smaller growth, as opposed to shoving him onto big stages and hoping for the best. He’s just not there yet. But his fan to artist relationship relies on a close knit bond and loyalty, which is very unique these days, and will continue to build slowly but with a hell of a lot of strength behind him. It’s just different fan dynamics to many other artists.

So, I dunno, I hope this helps and clears things up a bit! I think these euro festivals are gonna do wonders for him. Faith in the Future, baby.

Thanks for the chats!

[plus-size-reader]

The Babysitter

Rodrick Heffley x Plus size!reader

Word Count: 1156 words

Warnings: none 

Summary: Susan hires the girl that Rodrick likes to babysit Greg, and he has no game where she’s concerned. 

——————————————————————————————————

You and Rodrick had never really spent any time together.

In fact, he wasn’t even sure if you would know who he was if you had to pick him out of a lineup but that didn’t change the fact that he knew who you were.

Honesty, he knew a lot about you.

So when you showed up at his front door with that expectant smile on your face, he nearly dropped his jaw to the floor. He couldn’t believe that you were here.

Not that he was complaining.

“Can I help you?” he asked, doing his best to be as calm and cool as he could, though he could hardly focus on anything more than your beautiful face.

Rodrick knew that you were beautiful but he had no idea that you were this incredible. He had never been this close to you as far as he knew.

The closest you two were was in chemistry class and even then, you had never spoken to one another in that class.

“This is the Heffley house isn’t it? I’m here to babysit Greg for the night” you explained, knowing for a fact this was the address Susan had texted you.

You had checked it a few times over before finally knocking on the door, besides, you knew that Rodrick wouldn’t be here unless it was.

Still, you felt the need to check.

There would be nothing worse than making a fool out of yourself when you were just trying to do your job.

Susan Heffley went to church with your parents, and you had spoken to her a few times, the last time being when she asked you to watch Greg when she and Frank were going on date night.

She explained to you that she didn’t trust him to be home alone by himself quite yet and she didn’t feel comfortable leaving him alone with just Rodrick after what had happened last time.

...Speaking of that, you didn’t know what that was.

She hadn’t told you what it was that happened but whatever it was, it was bad enough that she was willing to pay you to watch her teenager.

It was a little odd, you had to admit, but you had no problem watching him. Greg seemed like an okay kid and it shouldn’t have been too difficult.

Besides, you didn’t mind helping her out if she needed someone to keep an eye on him.

“Absolutely, you’re in the right place” he assured, leaning in the doorframe casually, though it couldn’t have looked any more awkward.

You had just told him what you were here for and yet, he was fully content with just standing here admiring you. Granted, you knew that Rodrick was sort of odd so you didn’t really question it.

Him acting strangely wasn’t really going to make a difference to you. You were getting paid nonetheless and there was nothing he could really do to bother you.

If nothing else, it could be a good opportunity to get to know him in a much more casual setting.

“Okay, great. Can I come in?” you wondered, a small smile on your face as you gestured past him in the doorway, completely as if he wasn’t blocking the entire entryway.

After all, you weren’t here to spend time with him. You had a job to do and you were actually planning on doing it.

“Sure thing, right this way”

Everything he did was overly dramatic, putting on a show for you but you did your best not to pay him too much mind. It confused you, but maybe this was just the way he was.

You wouldn’t really know either way. This was the first time you’d really gotten to spend time with Rodrick one-on-one and he was quite the character.

If nothing else, you knew that tonight was going to be anything but boring.

“Do you have any plans for tonight or were you just going to hang out here?” you wondered, setting your bag down on the living room couch, watching the long male take a seat there as casually as possibly.

He practically plopped down on the cushion, clearly not caring at all about the structural integrity of the furniture, not that you expected him too.

Of all the things he could have been thinking about, you should have known better than to think it was the couch.

Your question was a good one.

Rodrick hadn’t been expecting any of this to happen in the first place so he hadn’t thought that far ahead, though now that you’d brought it up, it was a good point.

He didn’t want to waste the opportunity to have you in his house, on his couch, at night with no parents at home but he also didn’t want to make a fool of himself.

For all he knew, you thought he was a complete freak and that wasn’t going to end well for him. He wanted you to think he was cool.

“I don’t know. My brother is kind of a loser so I don’t know how much fun we could have with him here” he commented, not even bothering to cover up the double meaning of his words.

It was only half a joke, but you did your best to continue to ignore it, a smile on your face. “I’m sure we could find something to do. We could watch a movie or something if you wanted to hang out” you tried this time, almost finding yourself wanting him to stay.

It confused you but you did your best not to think about it.

Rodrick was clearly a good looking guy and you weren’t blind so it could have just been that but you weren’t sure. There was just something so strangely magnetic about him and you couldn’t ignore that.

“We could do that, or I could show you how to play the drums?” he suggested, sure that would convince you that he was the coolest, hottest guy you’d ever seen.

After all, chicks dug bad boys and you were no exception. He was sure that you would be weak in the knees at the sight of him playing jams on his drum set.

Not that you were quite ready for that after just getting here. Rodrick seemed to have forgotten that you weren’t here to spend time with him.

“Maybe later. I have to watch Greg, remember?” you laughed, confused at how comfortable you found yourself in his company, even with the little you two had in common.

You had hardly spoken before today but that didn’t matter. Rodrick already knew that he wanted to spend time with you and it wouldn’t be long at all before you got there too.

He just had to wait it out.

You were here for his brother, sure, but Rodrick was sure that by the end of the night, you would keep coming back for him.

[axiomsofice]

Leafs: New Additions

Welcome back to another year in Leaf Land, as always at a most critical nexus. There’s a lot of negativity, and as usual some of its well earned, and some of its too far. Within all that, it’s important to acknowledge the progress that this group has made, free from the fervid luster of hope offered early in the Matthews era.

The novelty of the Canadian Division, and the 4 separate leagues that took part in the 2021 season did cap the amount this team could change our minds, but having a strong and consistent regular season and finishing top 10 in goals against, was a huge development, and continuing those results to a full 82 game schedule is still an important step. In general, this fan base took the first sign of positivity and grew championship expectations, to the point where the past 2 or 3 seasons many have been saying “there’s nothing to prove until the playoffs”, and even to this point that simply isn’t true. 

Mrazek

After spending a large part of the past 2 seasons desperately searching for depth and stability in the sport’s most important position, acquiring Mrazek is certainly the most important move of the offseason. He’s probably in a cluster of mid tier starters, sometimes called a tandem starter or 1B, similar to Frederick Andersen, the fact that he’s younger and cheaper than Andersen is also a plus. He’s coming off some strong seasons behind a very good Carolina team, meaning he’s been a focal point for a successful team already, although he was not the starter in each of the Hurricanes’ past 2 postseason runs. He’s started 40 games in a season twice, meaning he’ll get at most 120 games in over the course of his 3 year deal. He’s had up and down seasons, but has shown flashes of strong play. He has a flare for the dramatic, some style to his play, and entering his age 29 season should be able to deliver a strong segment of his career. The best case scenario, or perhaps a reasonable comp would be similar to what Halak has been able to bring in his 30’s, which is starter level of play over 35-45 games a season, which does fit well with the expectations on Jack Campbell to play in 40-50 games. Ultimately the hope is that Jack can really run with the starter role, but Mrazek will be keeping the level of play in net high.

Menell

Menell takes the mantle as this year’s KHL import on the blueline, a staple that’s seen Zaitsev, Ozighanov, and Lethonen pass through to varying degrees of success in recent years. Menell, unlike the others, offers a stronger resume on the smaller ice surface, putting in several strong AHL seasons with the Iowa Wild before his most recent all-star season in Russia. Similar to Lethonen, he is a strong offensive player and could figure into a role on the power play. At this point he’s done everything he can besides earn some playing time at the top level, and provides an interesting depth option to the blueline.

Dahlstrom

It can be difficult for low-scoring defensive players to stand out, and that might be the case for Dahlstrom. The 26 year old Swede has 2 years experience in the SHL, followed by 4 increasingly strong stints in the AHL, with a 35+ game run on the porous 18-19 Chicago team and 10+ games with the Jets the following year. He did eventually earn an Assistant Captain role on Chicago’s AHL affiliate. Despite all that, he’s only played 35 games or so the last 2 years, as he probably got squeezed as a fringe player throughout the first covid season. He certainly is qualified to fill in a depth role, although surely in a different style than Menell. Together they represent good reinforcements with potential upside should injuries occur. He’s big, skates well enough for his size, has some passing abilities.

Kase

Another player who hasn’t played all that much recently, Kase has fought a lot of tough injuries over the recent years. Kase is still only 25, but it was all the way back in 17-18 that he scored 29 goals as a member of the Ducks. He has posted really strong possession and shot metrics throughout his career, and plays a very rambunctious and tenacious style. Hopefully he can stay healthy and at least have a chance to continue his strong play, but with concussions we can only know so much. A one year deal means there isn’t any long term risk, and best case Kase provides some of the “all terrain” capabilities that Barclay Goodrow brought to the Lighting the past couple seasons.

Ritchie

Ritchie is a big power forward, who can manage to shovel in 10-20 goals a year. Although his career high comes from his time in Anaheim, it’s reasonable to expect he could have a career season over the 2 years of his contract. He does bring certain qualities lacking from the forward group at this point and could fit well somewhere in the top 6. Even with Hyman in the lineup, when Simmonds missed time last year there was a noticeable lack of net front presence, which Ritchie should help satisfy. Personally, I’ve spent a lot of time being thankful the Leafs took Nylander instead of Ritchie in their draft year, but Ritchie is still young at 25 and is a quality add to the forward group. He might take an excessive amount of penalties, but that could also “even out” and earn the Leafs a few more calls as well.

Kampf

As we get to our 6th addition, a pattern is clear, young free agents (mid to late 20s) who should have more in the tank than the older additions of last season, and perhaps with their best seasons in front of them. That is certainly the case with Kampf, who has already proven to be an effective bottom 6 defensive centre in the NHL. He is in crazy good shape and is good at faceoffs. In his introductory presser Dubas mentioned he’s been on the Leafs’ radar for a while, and that they saw more offensive upside to his game. He certainly has a similar style of play to Danault, helping break cycles in the defensive zone and supporting transition well up ice, and could really help unlock stronger play from the 3rd or 4th line. In particular I think he would pair really well with a strong defensive winger who can carry the puck through the neutral zone, Ilya Mikheyev, and/or David Kase.

Bunting

Bunting “came out of nowhere” to score 10 goals in 20 games for the Coyotes last season, and we should not be expecting 40 goals next year. That being said, signing him to 2 years at only $950,000 is a great deal. For the brief time Jared McCaan was a Leafs I was excited about adding a complimentary top 6 player who could shoot well to pair with Marner and Matthews. Bunting definitely has the chance to live up to that. It’s obviously not at Matthews’ level, but Bunting can score from the high to mid slot. He’s speedy enough to pressure through the neutral zone and off the rush, and has some skill in making moves to beat defenders and goaltenders. He isn’t afraid to get to the dirty areas and had a few goals tipping in shots from the point. He is also feisty, gets under opponents’ skin and hustles like his job depends on it. He said in his introductory interview that he had spent long enough in the minors that when he finally got called up last season he played with nothing to lose, and compared his style of play to Marchand. Although that is a lot of lofty rhetoric, it’s easy to see how this could be a huge win for the franchise. If he proves to be 4th line contributor it’s a good deal, but there’s good reason to be excited beyond that. It might be a bit off topic to say I think that it’s important that Matthews and Marner’s liberate has a good enough shot to capitalize on the opportunity they will have as well as the tenacity Hyman brought so effectively, and Bunting has the tools to do it.

Gabriel

Gabriel is a fighter with social media presence, and especially for a pro hockey player, tries to be inclusive. I could see him being called up and deployed circumstantially. Although Simmonds and Ritchie have both thrown their share of fists, having a DH of sorts might be useful? Regardless, as a cultural focal point of both hockey and Canada the Leafs have the opportunity and responsibility to do their part in changing our culture for the better, and considering the league minimum cap hit this signing represents checks of few different boxes in terms of “intangibles”.

Semyonov

Semyonov has played parts of 5 seasons in the KHL, including a couple deep postseason runs as a middle 6 forward and eventually became an Assistant Captain. At 26, there doesn’t seem like a great chance he’ll be a factor at the NHL level, although he should get a fair shake at training camp. It is more likely he fits in as a veteran presence on a Marlies team that will feature a lot of Russian players, from Amirov, SDA, Gogolev and Abramov. The Marlies will look to be a lot stronger this year and those 5 forwards will look to be a big part of that. He gets to the net and most of his goals will be from rebounds and scrambles in front. He has some good puck skills, which will be shown off with some fancy passes. He’s big and fast enough to have some effect on the forecheck.

Way Too Early Lines

Bunting Matthews Marner Kerfoot Tavares Nylander Mikheyev Kampf Kase Ritchie Spezza Simmonds Engvall Brooks

Reilly Brodie Muzzin Holl Sandin Dermott Liljegren

Campbell Mrazek Hutchinson

Notes on fringe players

Mikheyev has been taking some heat recently. He clearly had trouble converting chances into goals and his wrist injury could have been a huge factor in losing confidence. He is good defensively, and is a strong enough skater that he’s able to transition through the neutral zone really well. Despite being a powerful skater he does seem to look a bit like an old man at times. It’s easy to see how he could be similar to former Leaf Michael Grabner, in that whether he is converting on breakaways or not could fluctuate his goal totals enough to drastically change opinions year to year (both are strong on the pk as well).

Engvall shows flashes of brilliance in a lot of ways. Speed and size to defend well, soft hands and really good passes, scoring touch, but somehow looks like he has trouble putting it all together. Dubas and Keefe have had him for a long time, and with one year left on his deal it might be his best chance at becoming an NHL regular.

Brooks will have to replicate his strong play from last year. He looked really strong alongside Spezza, where he was able to use his hockey sense and passing skills to his advantage. It is not a given that he’ll be able to, but he’s continued to show signs of growth so maybe he can continue to surpass expectations with more opportunities.

Liljegren has all the physical tools to be a good NHL defender, skates and passes well enough to beat forechecks, physical enough to play the body, but he’s looked a bit lost at times. I think with strength and experience we’ll see him settle into a regular role, and it’s not an indictment that he hasn’t got there yet, even if he spends most of his time in the AHL again this year. It might be a bit much to rely on a Sandin-Liljegren pairing when everyone is available, but I would love to see him get a chance alongside Muzzin at some point.

[thesportssoundoff]

Sometimes Good Enough Just Ain’t Good Enough: 10 Challenges For The Yankees Going Forward

Joey

October 21st

At the end of the year, 29 teams will head into the latter stages of the Fall simply saying they weren't good enough. On Saturday night, it was the Yankees turn to stand up, look in the mirror and say "Not good enough" as they bowed out of the ALCS in the deciding sixth game of the series. When you win 100 games, survive countless injuries, win with a sweep in the ALDS and lose on a walk off in game 6 of the ALCS it's normally a successful season but this is New York where expectations aren't the same as Milwaukee, Oakland, St. Louis or any of the teams who played into October before finally saying "Not good enough!" as they hung up their hats. The Yankees expect championships and it's sometimes mutant fanbase (of which I am firmly a member of) are now going on 10 years of no ticker tape parades. Still let's not lose ourselves to delirium and point out that this is a damn good team with a deep core and plenty of organizational depth to take the next step. The Yankees aren't falling off or in a rebuild; they have a team that guarantees every October, they'll be talking about the chase for 28 in earnest. With the season in the rear view mirror, let's chit chat about ten things the Yankees have to do or figure out as they continue that chase for 28.

1. Fire the training staff

Easy enough! Injuries can sometimes be fluky but good lord, the Yankees were besieged with them. All three starting outfielders (Judge, Stanton, Hicks) saw IL time, their back up OFs saw IL time, their starting catcher saw IL time, starting 1B saw IL time, pitchers both high on the totem pole and in the jabroni ranks went on the IL. Clean house!

2. The same ol' same ol' scramble for a lead starter

Since the end of 2016 when the rebuild was officially over, this team has been chasing  the #1 starter you normally need in the post season. At the end of the day, it's just easier to win in the playoffs when you have a game 1 starter you have endless confidence in. While Boston got away with it in 2018, they also had Chris Sale who maybe didn't pitch like an ace but was clearly one of the top 5 starters in the AL that year.  The big myth is that the Yankees don't have good starting pitching and that is for the most part a lie. The Yankees pitching after the All Star break was pretty solid and in the playoffs they got quality enough from guys like Severino, Paxton and Tanaka on an inconsistent basis. The Yankees pitching rotation is NOT awful and plenty of teams would kill for a 1-2-3 of a healthy Louis Severino, Masahiro Tanaka in big games and James Paxton after the All Star Break where he went 10-3 with a 3.59 ERA and an 11 K/9. In the playoffs, Paxton was more good than bad and Tanaka shoved in two of the three games he pitched in. That said those three have all battled injuries (Paxton admittedly pitched with a knee he never quite felt great about) and all three of them weren't good enough in the playoffs. Maybe that changes with Severino healthy, Paxton more comfortable and Tanaka staying his usual course but it would be difficult to return with the same rotation in tact and say you feel confident about your chances against the Astros. This has been a chase that has spanned three years now as the Yankees tried with James Paxton, Sonny Gray and J.A Happ, were outbit on the likes of Carlos Quintana, Yu Darvish and Gerritt Cole and allegedly never tried for the likes of Marcus Stroman, Patrick Corbin, Justin Verlander and countless others. 2019 will be yet another year where they'll enter Christmas hoping to have a starter locked up.

The two obvious names will play next week when Gerrit Cole and Stephen Strasburg take the bump for Houston and Washington respectively. In the Yankees of old, George Steinbrenner would hand Brian Cashman a blank check and tell him to pay for one IF not both. Time's have changed for better and/or worse with the Yankees. Brian Cashman is a man of due diligence and a man with the longest leash in sports. The Yankees didn't spend on Corbin, didn't try on Harper and made a modicum of effort for Manny Machado last year. In the free agent market, they're likely to not play heavily unless Hal Steinbrenner pretty much demands it.  Paying for Cole and Strasburg is the easier fix but it's an avenue they've shied away from recently plus there are teams who "need" those guys more. The Yankees probably aren't as desperate as, say, the Angels are to win in the Mike Trout era and they've got money to play with so why not? The solution may be the trade market where the Yankees can make some hay in their search for a #1. Brian Cashman has parlayed his farm system (which is still plenty deep) into the opportunity to trade for arms in the past which figures to once again be the case. Conversely in the trade market, the farm is thinner than it's been in recent years AND Cashman prides himself on not losing trades. Also there's not much TO trade out there. Obviously it's his job as a GM to go out and find a potential solution that maybe the public hasn't heard is available but right now who is the best starter knowing that the Mets and the Yankees won't trade? It's not a robust market.

So your solutions are to pull a rabbit out of your hat or pay or hope Severino becomes an ace again after an injury plagued season. I suppose the only potential opt out route would be to sign a Hyun Jin-Ryu or a Jake Odorizzi and hope you can just build a deep rotation of names and faces that will give you quantity (while not high end quality) at the end of it.

3. Figure out Luke Voit

Let's play a game.

Player A- .333/.405/.689 195 wRC+ 14 HR 26.4% K rate Player B- .280/.393/.509 140 wRC+ 19 HR 25.8% K rate Player C- .238/.348/.368 95 wRC+ 4 HR 32.3% K rate

Player A is Luke Voit during his 2018 run with the Yankees Player B is Luke Voit up until he got hurt in the London Series Player C is Luke Voit from July 12th to the end of the year

Voit will never be the guy who took over the MLB in 2018. The sample size was bound to even itself out over time and Voit was bound to cool off when pitchers got to know him better. Player B though is a borderline All Star level first basemen. A power hitter who could hit for average, got on base at a solid clip and play a somewhat manageable first base is an asset for any team but especially a Yankees squad that has been hungry for competent first base play since injuries robbed Mark Texeira of his ability. Then? Voit got hurt. Back issues limited down the stretch and as you can tell by the numbers, Player C was awful. He just looked timid and afraid like he had been sapped of his confidence entirely. Luke Voit got left off the ALCS roster and had to watch as the offense struggled without him. Imagine a confident and healthy Luke Voit at the DH spot instead of Edwin Encarnacion when he went ice cold in the ALCS and maybe the series is a bit different. The Yankees are saddled with determining which half of the Luke Voit story is the real one. The Yankees are a better team when DJ LeMahieu is freed up to play 2B where he's an insanely elite defender and Luke Voit could help in that regard. At the same time? The Yankees have been burnt in the past by gambling at 1B (like when they kept thinking Greg Bird would finally put it together) and options would help. Even if he ran out of gas, Edwin Encarnacion did some good work when he was healthy and few dudes hit dingers the way he does when he's locked in. There's also Greg Bird I guess? Which reminds me....

4. MAYBE chase better balance

I don't believe a team gets better by marrying itself to letters next to names ie: we have to have x amount of leties in our pen. I do think that the Yankees righty heavy lineup could use some better balance. The team was batting Gardner 3rd in the playoffs despite his inability to do much of anything for stretches because they felt like they needed someone to break up the righties at the top of the bill. With two lefties about to hit free agency, maybe the Yankees need to flirt a bit with shaking things up in their lineup. Getting back a healthy Hicks would help of course but in general, this team could benefit from having maybe one more competent lefty bat especially if Did is out of here. It's not the sexiest name alive but given Voit's struggles down the stretch and the fact that they could probably use a more competent 1B defensively, maybe Mitch Moreland (former Red Sox 1B) as a back up/defensive replacement could make sense. Coming off an injury plagued season where he was still pretty damn productive vs righties. Maybe this is even where Mike Ford (who caught on late) fits as a future part of the team.

5. Figure out your free agents

Dellin Betances- There's some serious rebound value in bringing Betances back at fair market value. The Yankees just never had a replacement for what Betances could do as a pseudo fireman; a guy with low contact rates who can K a side and come in the middle of an inning to calm things down. Betances at a multi year deal would be a fair and modest investment.

Brett Gardner- There's a group of mutant Yankee fans who hate Brett Gardner and I feel like people forget Gardner was supposed to be at the very most a part time 4th OF. Injuries forced Gardner to continually play and he answered the bell quite well every time. He'll likely take a step back next year BUT he'll also be asked to play less.

Edwin Encarnacion- Was absolutely brutal in the ALCS but hits for power and usually has composed at bats. Was always a hired gun who the Yankees were probably gonna buy out when the time was right.

Didi Gregorios- Ugh. Didi went from being one of Brian Cashman's biggest steals and a potential cornerstone to a guy who will probably be allowed to test the open market. Didi's strengths are his defense, his clubhouse presence and his better than advertised bat but the Yankees have been waiting on him to take a firm step into top 10 SS for about two years now and it's not coming. He deserves a lot of credit for battling back from injury but he was brutal outside of games vs the Twins. I also sort of feel like his approach is all wrong for the Yankees as its constructed. For a team that preaches patience at the place and commanding the strike zone, Didi's approach often gets worse the more pitches he takes so he often swings at the first pitch and often does so when it's the wrong time. Defensively it looked like he took a step back as well although that may have been due to injury. The Yankees are better with DJ at 2nd and Gleyber at short and a competent 1B manning that spot but they love Didi so much (and he's so valuable when he's right) that they kept forcing him into the spot.

Austin Romine- Catching across the league is bad and Romine, noodle arm aside, is a solid back up catcher. Those tend to get signed for decent coin and normally for multi year deals. As such the Yankees need to maybe consider their options at the BUC spot because they won't have Romine.

Cameron Maybin- I'm not entirely sure Maybin's got a real fit here now. If Stanton, Judge and Hicks are healthy then it's probably him vs Gardner because Mike Tauchman has a long term future here. I wish Cameron Maybin well, he was a breath of fresh of air in the locker room and he deserves to have a good spot on a team somewhere.

6. Figure your outfield situation out

We know Judge, Stanton and Hicks are going to be here. Mike Tauchman was a star and a half for a month and change before injuries finally sapped him of his super powers. Gardner is a free agent but I'm betting the Yankees will bring him back comfortably so. Beyond them you have Estevan Florial (a former Yankees top prospect on a slide), Clint Frazier (a borderline toxic fit for the Yankees) as well as pseudo OFs Tyler Wade and Thairo Estrada. The Yankees OF depth tends to get tested throughout the year but is Clint Frazier better suited to be a trade piece for some team in desperate need of an outfielder?

7. Settle the 'pen out a bit.

Yankees have four tremendous bullpen arms tied up with Britton, Ottavino, Green and Kahnle comfortably under wraps. Aroldis Chapman will probably opt out in a so-so closer's market and the Yankees will probably re-sign him (they took the PR smear after trading for him and then brought him back so clearly they value him). If not? Britton was an ace closer but in general the bullpen needs more arms. Remember the CLOSEST they got for a trade in July was for Bluejays closer Ken Giles so I'd imagine they'll poke around there too. If you can't find a starter of high quality and won't trade for one then you need one more big arm in the pen. It'd be pretty cool to both a) get a stud reliever and b) hurt your primary rivalries by signing either Joe Smith or Will Harris from under Houston.

8. Find a role for whatever J.A. Happ is.

The Yankees got ace level production of J.A. Happ when they had him in 2018 and even including his playoff bust vs Boston, bringing him back in some form or fashion seemed like a can't miss concept. Well it done missed. Pick whatever metric you want and Happ was genuinely bad for a Yankees team that desperately needed him to ONLY be a competent arm. He did improve as the season went along (imagine how awful he had to be that his last five starts with a 2.33 ERA that it managed to ONLY finish at a sub 5 ERA) and a lot of his game felt like it was just blitzed by the juiced ball and a lack of adapting to that. Happ is still under contract for 2020 and it's going to be hard to shake his deal so you're stuck with him. Figure out I guess if he's a long man, a 5th starter or a really overly expensive LOOGY type.

9. Battle royal the 5th spot

Keeping with that, the Yankees were roasted for their lack of SP depth and it showed up big last year. The fact that this team turned to an opener and wound up riding the likes of Chance Adams and Nestor Cortes as long men suggests they got got by the lack of options in the rotation. Turn the 5th spot into a battle royal position. Jordan Montgomery, J.A. Happ, Johnny Lasagna, a few retreads on other teams who are a tinkered arm angle away from being a competent 5th starter etc etc etc. Don't go into the year just figuring your minor league depth options are going to be enough because it probably won't be.

Unless you want to sign Zack Wheeler or Jake Odorizzi and be done with it.

10. Accept Gary Sanchez

I guess this is more for Yankees fans than anybody else. Gary Sanchez is a good catcher. Offensively when he's healthy, he's among the game's best and defensively? He's actually improving really well to be one of the better catches in the AL. He has a crazy throwing arm and while stolen bases are becoming less frequent, he's still got the ability to further mitigate that.  Sanchez is a good player who plays the most physically demanding position in baseball and does a good job at it. His playoff numbers were abysmal this year but I still have faith.

[dentalrecordsmusic]

Interview: Andie Aronow, co-founder of Women That Rock, on kickass women, equally kickass bands, and what both mean for the changing scenery of the music world.

Who run the world? GIRLS. No one else knows this factoid better than Andie Aronow, founder of the collective Women That Rock. Their mission? Spotlight and celebrate talented, badass female musicians. Women That Rock hosts daily artist/music features through its Instagram platform at @womenthatrock, plus monthly collaborative articles with women's lifestyle mag Harness Magazine, and their own website. Women That Rock is in the live event space - putting on showcases, concerts and other related music events. Behind Andie is a slew of knowledge -- knowledge about feminism, good loud music, and the badass women who create it. We got to sit down with Andie to talk about some of the intense highs and (sometimes) lows of working in the music sector and what it means for the greater good to feature women on the stage.

DRM: Who or what inspired you to create Women That Rock? Was there a particular moment when the idea came to you?

AA: Women That Rock came to life one night on my girlfriend's couch in Williamsburg! We're both in the music world - she's an amazing musical artist (check out her awesome band MONTE - @monte.music on Instagram!) and I've worked on the business side of the music industry since I was in college at NYU's Clive Davis Department of Recorded Music, in lots of areas & jobs - marketing and digital promotions, music event planning, A&R, executive production, management.  We were hanging out and casually talking about music and the business; specifically, we were talking about how challenging press & promotion can be for indie artists - how hard it is to get press outlets to pay attention and how difficult it can be in the current industry landscape for up-and-coming artists to cut through the clutter and get their names out there, especially for female artists who are often marginalized or stereotyped.

We were chatting about the many amazing women artists we know, and how much they needed a more dedicated platform to shine a light on them, celebrate them and help share their amazing talents. That's when the idea of Women That Rock was born. My girlfriend encouraged me to strike out and take a chance launching a project I was passionate about, and that's exactly what I did. I created the WTR Instagram account and started doing super DIY social media outreach. I simultaneously texted all my incredible female artist friends telling them about the concept and asking if they were okay with me featuring them, and their responses were SO enthusiastic - they immediately loved the idea and were super excited to be involved.

Within a few days of outreach I had an inbox of 25, then 50, then 100, then 500, then too many Instagram messages to count from female artists who wanted to be featured. The message was so clear - women wanted & needed a platform that celebrated and spotlighted on their creativity and talents, as well as the musical support network that Women That Rock could provide.

Women tend to be the biggest consumers of music (in any genre). Do you think the landscape of women consuming (and now, making) music is changing?

Absolutely! I think that day by day, women's voices are getting louder and clearer in the music space and in all spaces, which is awesome! A positive result of the current political landscape and recent spotlight on feminism & women's rights is that more women seem to be getting more of the respect, attention & support that they deserve. I absolutely think that is reflected in the landscape of women consuming & making music - and I feel the key point here is making sure that women support women, which traditionally can be difficult in certain industries, particularly in entertainment & media. The more women fans/consumers that support female artists (financially and otherwise), the more empowered female artists will be. Moreover, the more that female artists support one another (rather than seeing one another as competition), the more we'll all rise & succeed together and the more opportunities will come our way!

What is the process like when choosing the bands you feature at your showcases? What is it that gravitates you (and the audience) to them? Are there certain things you look for?

The process of choosing bands for Women That Rock's show bills is challenging - because there are SO MANY amazing artists! More than anything, we look for great performers & great onstage energy. We, of course, want all of our shows to be as fun and dynamic as possible, so that magical (and somewhat undefinable) artist energy is top of the list! Beyond that, we try to create lineups that are simultaneously cohesive & unique - we don't want all 4 bands on a bill to sound exactly the same, but we typically want them to make sense together (unless we're deliberately doing a grab-bag style showcase of many genres all on one lineup)! We'll sometimes theme around a genre, topic, vibe - something to tie the show together.

We also always keep diversity in mind, and work to make our shows inclusive of all types of womxn - all colors, all shapes, all sizes and all identities. But I'd say that what gravitates us (and the audience) to the bands we feature is their talent and stage presence. And what's especially cool about every Women That Rock show is that, since all the bands include female front-people and/or female musicians, nobody is "the girl" onstage or the "girl band." By making it a femme-focused space, it actually takes the focus OFF gender and makes the experience truly about the music!

More women are joining together and starting bands. What do you think this says about the path it took to get here, and where this will lead femme musicians in the future? Where do you see the sound / content evolving?

I'm so glad to see that more women are banding together and starting new musical projects!! I think this indicates that grrrl musicians are getting more confident, more inclined to collaborate and support one another, and that lines of communication between women in the music world are opening up. Hopefully, more young girls & women will be encouraged to pursue music & pick up instruments. Hopefully, they'll have unwavering confidence that they can achieve whatever they want musically, without feeling that gender is an obstacle. And the more inclusive the music space is, the more this effect will snowball.

I also believe that a shift is happening towards women being less inclined to tolerate sexism & misogyny in the music world. This will likely lead to femme community building - I think (and hope!) that women are feeling more emboldened to go for what they want and if they can't find it, create it themselves - with other women as musical partners, confidants, and friends.

As a woman working in the music industry and putting together these showcases, what are some of the hurdles you face? There is a lot of work involved, as well as a lot of sexism that still exists. What advice can you give other women who are looking to accomplish similar things to you?

I'll start with the positive: Ask for what you want!!! That's my biggest, most universal piece of advice! A lot of the time, getting what you want or need really just requires having a great attitude, being friendly & professional, and asking for whatever you want/need in a confident & fearless way. For example, if I come across an artist, organization or company that I think would be great to partner with (even if they seem big & intimidating), I just reach out and ask! And often, I get a fantastic response! This applies across all areas of Women That Rock's business and all business!

In terms of hurdles, two things come to mind. Firstly, time (or lack thereof!). As you said, there is a lot of work involved! Sometimes, how much work there is to be done versus how many hours are in a day feels like a hurdle! I work A LOT. Often late into the night, on weekends, etc. If you dream of starting your own project or company, be prepared to work really hard!

The second hurdle touches a bit on the sexism issue you mentioned. Yes, a lot of sexism does still exist, unfortunately! Sometimes, behavioral standards for women versus men feel very unequal and marginalizing. Sometimes I feel judged as a woman for being assertive, entrepreneurial & bold. It can feel like certain actions or behaviors if done by a man, would either barely be noticed or would be celebrated. But coming from a woman, it's criticized or threatening. These qualities that are looked at as extremely positive for men are not looked at as extremely positive for women, which can be frustrating.  Beyond that, certain spaces (particularly venues) still feel heavily male-dominated; at moments I have felt overlooked (sometimes even literally - it can be hard to feel noticed in a group of 6ft tall men as a 5ft tall woman!). I combat these things by just persevering with confidence and a good attitude and letting challenging moments roll off as much as possible!

Women That Rock are hosting a showcase tomorrow night (11/29) at the Knitting Factory Brooklyn featuring an incredible lineup of femme-fronted bands: headlining group Starbenders alongside Scarlet Sails, Astra the 22s and opener Natalie Claro. The evening will be MC’ed by popular New York-based artist Ess See. Doors are at 7:30PM. 

In addition to the incredible artist lineup, guests will enjoy a Women That Rock photo booth experience, Brooklyn-based femme vendors, a glitter bar, sparkly mini cupcakes, raffles, and more starry surprises! The event is being sponsored by LIT Cosmetics, Kate’s Magik, Rudy's Music, & Billy’s Bakery.

Tickets for the event can be purchased here. Tickets at the door are only $15.

You can keep up with Women That Rock on Instagram.

Catherine Dempsey will be at this show. Come and say hi and share a sparkly cupcake with her. You can follow her on Instagram and Twitter. 

Follow DRM on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter.

[camerasieunhovn]

How to Add Products to Your Google My Business Listing, Illustrated

“Who has X near me?”

This customer FAQ has become all the more important since 2020, with the public relying heavily on the Internet to help them remotely source goods and services while spending as little time as possible on business premises.

Google gets this, and is taking one step after another to position itself as the intermediary for this foundational query. Becoming the “transaction layer of the Internet” is how my friend and colleague David Mihm of Near Media describes Google’s aims when it comes to online shopping and the role they plan to play in it. As local businesses everywhere have scrambled to implement e-commerce and delivery features, Google has been very busy, too, with its own developments.

Perhaps the simplest of all these opportunities to get started with is Google My Business Products — a sort of virtual window shopping interface that can really spruce up your listings. Located in eligible GMB dashboards and with an output that’s visible on several local search interfaces, this feature could not be easier to use.This illustrated tutorial will walk you through adding your most important products and services to Google My Business Products, building your confidence that you are keeping apace with local search expanding to encompass local shopping search.

Who can and can’t add Google My Business products to their listings?

If you sign into your Google My Business dashboard, and you see a tab in the left menu for “products” you are eligible, with the exception of the products listed here that you can’t upload.

If you lack the “products” link but see that your competitors are using it, it’s likely that they have a Google My Business category you’re missing. Use the GMB Spy Chrome Extension to see all of the competitor’s GMB listing categories so that you can consider adding whatever is necessary to prompt the “products” option to appear in your dashboard.

Google’s documentation of this feature states that it’s intended for small-to-medium local businesses, and that they prefer large, multi-locations brands to provide product data through Local Inventory Ads. It would be helpful if Google would update this page to give a numeric cutoff between a medium-sized business and a large chain.

Meanwhile, if you’re marketing a restaurant, please note that Google prefers you to use the popular dishes and menu functions for showcasing your offerings, rather than the products option. Also for restaurants and service-oriented businesses, be aware that adding items to the products function will delete any meal or service menus that have been created for you by a third party. You’ll need to recreate them with the aforementioned, Google-based menu function or the Services tab in your GMB dashboard.

What can be added as a product to Google My Business listings?

You can list the following as products:

Merchandise

Virtual inventory, like software

Services

There’s a strong argument to be made for listing your services as products, in fact, because they are more visible and have those strong, linked calls-to-action. As far as I’ve seen, Google has no problem with you having both products and services listed, so you can do both!

How to add products to your Google My Business dashboard in 10 easy steps

To keep yourself organized, create a spreadsheet (or make a copy of this freebie I created for you) containing all the products you plan to list, and include a field in it for:

Product image

Product name

Category

Price

Description

Button

Link

BEFORE YOU BEGIN: Note that the last product you add will be the one that shows up first on your profile. So, save the best for last. Made a mistake? You can delete a product and re-add it as the newest item, which will make it show first, or you can edit a product in some minor way and the edit will also trigger re-ordering of the product lineup.

Now you’re ready to get going!

Step 1: Sign into your Google My Business dashboard for the listing you want to add products to, and click on the Products tab in the left-hand navigation menu:

Step 2. This will bring up a popup telling you how many people saw your listing last month and prompting you to add your products. Click the “get started button”.

Step 3. This brings up the simple wizard for adding your products

Step 4: Begin by adding a 1200 x 900 photo representing your first product. I recommend using original photos and graphics rather than stock photos, and it can make a bold visual statement if you choose to overlay the name of the product in text on the image.

Step 5: Give your product a name:

Step 6: Create a category for the product. If this is the very first product you’ve added to your listing, there will be nothing in the dropdown. As you add more products and categories, though, the categories you’ve previously created will appear in the dropdown and you can select them to apply to the next product you add, or you can create further, new categories.

Step 7. Optionally, enter the price. You can either enter a single price, or use the little grey toggle on the right to enter a minimum and maximum price range. Don’t use letters or symbols in this field or Google will reject them. Our product pricing structure at Moz is complex, with special offers and different pricing for monthly vs. annual customers, so we chose to leave this field blank, but if your pricing is simple and not subject to frequent change that would require you to be updating pricing on a regular basis, it’s a good idea to add it.

Step 8: Add a product description of up to 1000 characters. It’s optional to do this, but you should definitely make the most of this opportunity to talk about the benefits of the product. I included a short explanation of the Moz Pro product, plus a customer’s testimonial.

Step 9: Add a call-to-action button from among the choices of Learn More, Buy, Order Online, or Get Offer. There’s also the option not to add a button, but why forego the chance to bring customers from your listing to your website? In the “link for your button” field, add the URL of the page you want this button to take the customer to on your website. If you want to measure how your product listings are performing, use UTM tagging in the link you enter, and you can track engagement in Google Analytics, though not in GMB Insights, sadly.

Step 10: Take a second look at all you’ve entered to be sure you’re happy with your entry and then hit the blue “save” button. Google will then show you the product in your dashboard:

And as you add more products and product categories, you can see them tabbed in the “Products” section of your GMB dashboard:

And, presto! Within minutes to a couple of hours, you should see your products appearing on your Google Business Profile when you search for you brand name (or brand name + city, if Google is a bit confused):

Customers can click on the “view all” link to see all the products you’ve listed:

Or, they can explore using the product categories you’ve created. Look at how big and bold these category buttons are, highlighting key offerings of your business!

And it will also show up on the Google Local Finder version of your GMB listing, though as far as I have seen, not in the Google Maps version of your listing:

The big question: Should you use GMB products?

Can and should are never the same thing. You’ve just learned whether you can upload your inventory via GMB products and you can definitely do it! But to determine whether you should invest the time in doing this, consider all of the following:

Maybe, yes!

Adoption of Google My Business products is so low as of yet, that if you add your products, it will really make your listing fuller than the bulk of your competitors in most markets. This is a definite competitive difference maker.

If you’ve got the ability to take good quality photos or have a graphic designer in-house who can efficiently design some imagery for you, product photos add a very appealing visual element to your listings. If you’d like to make a rather plain listing more inviting, this is a great option.

If you have an inventory that’s relatively stable, meaning you won’t be having to continuously editing existing product listings to avoid customer letdown when items become unavailable, that’s a good bet. If your pricing on stable products changes, you may want to opt out of showing prices.

If you need to drive any additional traffic you can to your website and shopping cart, this is surely an opportunity. Added bonus that this traffic is likely to be qualified traffic, because the searcher is looking for something particular.

If you’ve not yet been able to invest in a full e-commerce solution for your local business, consider GMB products a first step towards alerting shoppers that you have inventory for sale, even if you can’t yet fulfill their desire to buy it online.

Finally, a “yes” vote on adding products to your GMB listings can be consistent with your company’s culture of empathy. Regardless of where you do business, your community is full of elders, neighbors with serious health issues, and unvaccinated small children who are staying at home for safety’s sake for as long as the pandemic is with us. You can think of GMB products as a kind of virtual window shopping for these valued community members, and if you can connect your product showcase with curbside pickup or home delivery, your efforts are making your town a more caring and better-resourced place to call home. Use the description field and buttons to let people know how you can get your products safely into their hands.

Maybe, no!

If your inventory changes constantly, you’ll need to evaluate whether you have the internal resources to regularly edit your product set in the GMB dashboard.

If your inventory is large, you may not want to add every single product. Instead, you could add a representative product for each major category of goods, and write the description to make it clear that you have a wide selection of this type of item.

Mobile phones can take great pictures these days, but if your photos just don’t look great, it could be off-putting to customers seeing low-quality images. You might want to hold off on adding products until you learn to take photos that create a professional impression of the quality of your goods and services.

Some business owners may feel qualms about Google’s increasing involvement between them and their customers, and prefer to work on their own website rather than devoting additional resources to Google My Business features.

If your resources are limited, you may prefer to skip Google My Business products for now and go straight to Google Shopping, with its more sophisticated interface.

Overall, most local businesses will benefit from devoting some time to adding Google My Business products. Google has given us every reason to believe they are intently focused on shopping, with two major signs being their debut of the Shopping Graph at I/O this past spring and making it free to upload products to Google Shopping in 2020. We’ve all learned together over the past few decades that when Google zooms in on an area of search, we should at least be paying attention to how their efforts might be put to work for our local brands.

You have multiple opportunities to explore for enhancing the online visibility of your inventory, and right now, Google My Business products are the easiest way to wade into this work. The holiday shopping season is, incredibly, just around the corner, and if you start uploading products today, it will be your listing that stands out as the place that has what local customers want in December.

[ductrungnguyen87]

How to Add Products to Your Google My Business Listing, Illustrated

“Who has X near me?”

This customer FAQ has become all the more important since 2020, with the public relying heavily on the Internet to help them remotely source goods and services while spending as little time as possible on business premises.

Google gets this, and is taking one step after another to position itself as the intermediary for this foundational query. Becoming the “transaction layer of the Internet” is how my friend and colleague David Mihm of Near Media describes Google’s aims when it comes to online shopping and the role they plan to play in it. As local businesses everywhere have scrambled to implement e-commerce and delivery features, Google has been very busy, too, with its own developments.

Perhaps the simplest of all these opportunities to get started with is Google My Business Products — a sort of virtual window shopping interface that can really spruce up your listings. Located in eligible GMB dashboards and with an output that’s visible on several local search interfaces, this feature could not be easier to use.This illustrated tutorial will walk you through adding your most important products and services to Google My Business Products, building your confidence that you are keeping apace with local search expanding to encompass local shopping search.

Who can and can’t add Google My Business products to their listings?

If you sign into your Google My Business dashboard, and you see a tab in the left menu for “products” you are eligible, with the exception of the products listed here that you can’t upload.

If you lack the “products” link but see that your competitors are using it, it’s likely that they have a Google My Business category you’re missing. Use the GMB Spy Chrome Extension to see all of the competitor’s GMB listing categories so that you can consider adding whatever is necessary to prompt the “products” option to appear in your dashboard.

Google’s documentation of this feature states that it’s intended for small-to-medium local businesses, and that they prefer large, multi-locations brands to provide product data through Local Inventory Ads. It would be helpful if Google would update this page to give a numeric cutoff between a medium-sized business and a large chain.

Meanwhile, if you’re marketing a restaurant, please note that Google prefers you to use the popular dishes and menu functions for showcasing your offerings, rather than the products option. Also for restaurants and service-oriented businesses, be aware that adding items to the products function will delete any meal or service menus that have been created for you by a third party. You’ll need to recreate them with the aforementioned, Google-based menu function or the Services tab in your GMB dashboard.

What can be added as a product to Google My Business listings?

You can list the following as products:

Merchandise

Virtual inventory, like software

Services

There’s a strong argument to be made for listing your services as products, in fact, because they are more visible and have those strong, linked calls-to-action. As far as I’ve seen, Google has no problem with you having both products and services listed, so you can do both!

How to add products to your Google My Business dashboard in 10 easy steps

To keep yourself organized, create a spreadsheet (or make a copy of this freebie I created for you) containing all the products you plan to list, and include a field in it for:

Product image

Product name

Category

Price

Description

Button

Link

BEFORE YOU BEGIN: Note that the last product you add will be the one that shows up first on your profile. So, save the best for last. Made a mistake? You can delete a product and re-add it as the newest item, which will make it show first, or you can edit a product in some minor way and the edit will also trigger re-ordering of the product lineup.

Now you’re ready to get going!

Step 1: Sign into your Google My Business dashboard for the listing you want to add products to, and click on the Products tab in the left-hand navigation menu:

Step 2. This will bring up a popup telling you how many people saw your listing last month and prompting you to add your products. Click the “get started button”.

Step 3. This brings up the simple wizard for adding your products

Step 4: Begin by adding a 1200 x 900 photo representing your first product. I recommend using original photos and graphics rather than stock photos, and it can make a bold visual statement if you choose to overlay the name of the product in text on the image.

Step 5: Give your product a name:

Step 6: Create a category for the product. If this is the very first product you’ve added to your listing, there will be nothing in the dropdown. As you add more products and categories, though, the categories you’ve previously created will appear in the dropdown and you can select them to apply to the next product you add, or you can create further, new categories.

Step 7. Optionally, enter the price. You can either enter a single price, or use the little grey toggle on the right to enter a minimum and maximum price range. Don’t use letters or symbols in this field or Google will reject them. Our product pricing structure at Moz is complex, with special offers and different pricing for monthly vs. annual customers, so we chose to leave this field blank, but if your pricing is simple and not subject to frequent change that would require you to be updating pricing on a regular basis, it’s a good idea to add it.

Step 8: Add a product description of up to 1000 characters. It’s optional to do this, but you should definitely make the most of this opportunity to talk about the benefits of the product. I included a short explanation of the Moz Pro product, plus a customer’s testimonial.

Step 9: Add a call-to-action button from among the choices of Learn More, Buy, Order Online, or Get Offer. There’s also the option not to add a button, but why forego the chance to bring customers from your listing to your website? In the “link for your button” field, add the URL of the page you want this button to take the customer to on your website. If you want to measure how your product listings are performing, use UTM tagging in the link you enter, and you can track engagement in Google Analytics, though not in GMB Insights, sadly.

Step 10: Take a second look at all you’ve entered to be sure you’re happy with your entry and then hit the blue “save” button. Google will then show you the product in your dashboard:

And as you add more products and product categories, you can see them tabbed in the “Products” section of your GMB dashboard:

And, presto! Within minutes to a couple of hours, you should see your products appearing on your Google Business Profile when you search for you brand name (or brand name + city, if Google is a bit confused):

Customers can click on the “view all” link to see all the products you’ve listed:

Or, they can explore using the product categories you’ve created. Look at how big and bold these category buttons are, highlighting key offerings of your business!

And it will also show up on the Google Local Finder version of your GMB listing, though as far as I have seen, not in the Google Maps version of your listing:

The big question: Should you use GMB products?

Can and should are never the same thing. You’ve just learned whether you can upload your inventory via GMB products and you can definitely do it! But to determine whether you should invest the time in doing this, consider all of the following:

Maybe, yes!

Adoption of Google My Business products is so low as of yet, that if you add your products, it will really make your listing fuller than the bulk of your competitors in most markets. This is a definite competitive difference maker.

If you’ve got the ability to take good quality photos or have a graphic designer in-house who can efficiently design some imagery for you, product photos add a very appealing visual element to your listings. If you’d like to make a rather plain listing more inviting, this is a great option.

If you have an inventory that’s relatively stable, meaning you won’t be having to continuously editing existing product listings to avoid customer letdown when items become unavailable, that’s a good bet. If your pricing on stable products changes, you may want to opt out of showing prices.

If you need to drive any additional traffic you can to your website and shopping cart, this is surely an opportunity. Added bonus that this traffic is likely to be qualified traffic, because the searcher is looking for something particular.

If you’ve not yet been able to invest in a full e-commerce solution for your local business, consider GMB products a first step towards alerting shoppers that you have inventory for sale, even if you can’t yet fulfill their desire to buy it online.

Finally, a “yes” vote on adding products to your GMB listings can be consistent with your company’s culture of empathy. Regardless of where you do business, your community is full of elders, neighbors with serious health issues, and unvaccinated small children who are staying at home for safety’s sake for as long as the pandemic is with us. You can think of GMB products as a kind of virtual window shopping for these valued community members, and if you can connect your product showcase with curbside pickup or home delivery, your efforts are making your town a more caring and better-resourced place to call home. Use the description field and buttons to let people know how you can get your products safely into their hands.

Maybe, no!

If your inventory changes constantly, you’ll need to evaluate whether you have the internal resources to regularly edit your product set in the GMB dashboard.

If your inventory is large, you may not want to add every single product. Instead, you could add a representative product for each major category of goods, and write the description to make it clear that you have a wide selection of this type of item.

Mobile phones can take great pictures these days, but if your photos just don’t look great, it could be off-putting to customers seeing low-quality images. You might want to hold off on adding products until you learn to take photos that create a professional impression of the quality of your goods and services.

Some business owners may feel qualms about Google’s increasing involvement between them and their customers, and prefer to work on their own website rather than devoting additional resources to Google My Business features.

If your resources are limited, you may prefer to skip Google My Business products for now and go straight to Google Shopping, with its more sophisticated interface.

Overall, most local businesses will benefit from devoting some time to adding Google My Business products. Google has given us every reason to believe they are intently focused on shopping, with two major signs being their debut of the Shopping Graph at I/O this past spring and making it free to upload products to Google Shopping in 2020. We’ve all learned together over the past few decades that when Google zooms in on an area of search, we should at least be paying attention to how their efforts might be put to work for our local brands.

You have multiple opportunities to explore for enhancing the online visibility of your inventory, and right now, Google My Business products are the easiest way to wade into this work. The holiday shopping season is, incredibly, just around the corner, and if you start uploading products today, it will be your listing that stands out as the place that has what local customers want in December.

[gamebazu]

How to Add Products to Your Google My Business Listing, Illustrated

“Who has X near me?”

This customer FAQ has become all the more important since 2020, with the public relying heavily on the Internet to help them remotely source goods and services while spending as little time as possible on business premises.

Google gets this, and is taking one step after another to position itself as the intermediary for this foundational query. Becoming the “transaction layer of the Internet” is how my friend and colleague David Mihm of Near Media describes Google’s aims when it comes to online shopping and the role they plan to play in it. As local businesses everywhere have scrambled to implement e-commerce and delivery features, Google has been very busy, too, with its own developments.

Perhaps the simplest of all these opportunities to get started with is Google My Business Products — a sort of virtual window shopping interface that can really spruce up your listings. Located in eligible GMB dashboards and with an output that’s visible on several local search interfaces, this feature could not be easier to use.This illustrated tutorial will walk you through adding your most important products and services to Google My Business Products, building your confidence that you are keeping apace with local search expanding to encompass local shopping search.

Who can and can’t add Google My Business products to their listings?

If you sign into your Google My Business dashboard, and you see a tab in the left menu for “products” you are eligible, with the exception of the products listed here that you can’t upload.

If you lack the “products” link but see that your competitors are using it, it’s likely that they have a Google My Business category you’re missing. Use the GMB Spy Chrome Extension to see all of the competitor’s GMB listing categories so that you can consider adding whatever is necessary to prompt the “products” option to appear in your dashboard.

Google’s documentation of this feature states that it’s intended for small-to-medium local businesses, and that they prefer large, multi-locations brands to provide product data through Local Inventory Ads. It would be helpful if Google would update this page to give a numeric cutoff between a medium-sized business and a large chain.

Meanwhile, if you’re marketing a restaurant, please note that Google prefers you to use the popular dishes and menu functions for showcasing your offerings, rather than the products option. Also for restaurants and service-oriented businesses, be aware that adding items to the products function will delete any meal or service menus that have been created for you by a third party. You’ll need to recreate them with the aforementioned, Google-based menu function or the Services tab in your GMB dashboard.

What can be added as a product to Google My Business listings?

You can list the following as products:

Merchandise

Virtual inventory, like software

Services

There’s a strong argument to be made for listing your services as products, in fact, because they are more visible and have those strong, linked calls-to-action. As far as I’ve seen, Google has no problem with you having both products and services listed, so you can do both!

How to add products to your Google My Business dashboard in 10 easy steps

To keep yourself organized, create a spreadsheet (or make a copy of this freebie I created for you) containing all the products you plan to list, and include a field in it for:

Product image

Product name

Category

Price

Description

Button

Link

BEFORE YOU BEGIN: Note that the last product you add will be the one that shows up first on your profile. So, save the best for last. Made a mistake? You can delete a product and re-add it as the newest item, which will make it show first, or you can edit a product in some minor way and the edit will also trigger re-ordering of the product lineup.

Now you’re ready to get going!

Step 1: Sign into your Google My Business dashboard for the listing you want to add products to, and click on the Products tab in the left-hand navigation menu:

Step 2. This will bring up a popup telling you how many people saw your listing last month and prompting you to add your products. Click the “get started button”.

Step 3. This brings up the simple wizard for adding your products

Step 4: Begin by adding a 1200 x 900 photo representing your first product. I recommend using original photos and graphics rather than stock photos, and it can make a bold visual statement if you choose to overlay the name of the product in text on the image.

Step 5: Give your product a name:

Step 6: Create a category for the product. If this is the very first product you’ve added to your listing, there will be nothing in the dropdown. As you add more products and categories, though, the categories you’ve previously created will appear in the dropdown and you can select them to apply to the next product you add, or you can create further, new categories.

Step 7. Optionally, enter the price. You can either enter a single price, or use the little grey toggle on the right to enter a minimum and maximum price range. Don’t use letters or symbols in this field or Google will reject them. Our product pricing structure at Moz is complex, with special offers and different pricing for monthly vs. annual customers, so we chose to leave this field blank, but if your pricing is simple and not subject to frequent change that would require you to be updating pricing on a regular basis, it’s a good idea to add it.

Step 8: Add a product description of up to 1000 characters. It’s optional to do this, but you should definitely make the most of this opportunity to talk about the benefits of the product. I included a short explanation of the Moz Pro product, plus a customer’s testimonial.

Step 9: Add a call-to-action button from among the choices of Learn More, Buy, Order Online, or Get Offer. There’s also the option not to add a button, but why forego the chance to bring customers from your listing to your website? In the “link for your button” field, add the URL of the page you want this button to take the customer to on your website. If you want to measure how your product listings are performing, use UTM tagging in the link you enter, and you can track engagement in Google Analytics, though not in GMB Insights, sadly.

Step 10: Take a second look at all you’ve entered to be sure you’re happy with your entry and then hit the blue “save” button. Google will then show you the product in your dashboard:

And as you add more products and product categories, you can see them tabbed in the “Products” section of your GMB dashboard:

And, presto! Within minutes to a couple of hours, you should see your products appearing on your Google Business Profile when you search for you brand name (or brand name + city, if Google is a bit confused):

Customers can click on the “view all” link to see all the products you’ve listed:

Or, they can explore using the product categories you’ve created. Look at how big and bold these category buttons are, highlighting key offerings of your business!

And it will also show up on the Google Local Finder version of your GMB listing, though as far as I have seen, not in the Google Maps version of your listing:

The big question: Should you use GMB products?

Can and should are never the same thing. You’ve just learned whether you can upload your inventory via GMB products and you can definitely do it! But to determine whether you should invest the time in doing this, consider all of the following:

Maybe, yes!

Adoption of Google My Business products is so low as of yet, that if you add your products, it will really make your listing fuller than the bulk of your competitors in most markets. This is a definite competitive difference maker.

If you’ve got the ability to take good quality photos or have a graphic designer in-house who can efficiently design some imagery for you, product photos add a very appealing visual element to your listings. If you’d like to make a rather plain listing more inviting, this is a great option.

If you have an inventory that’s relatively stable, meaning you won’t be having to continuously editing existing product listings to avoid customer letdown when items become unavailable, that’s a good bet. If your pricing on stable products changes, you may want to opt out of showing prices.

If you need to drive any additional traffic you can to your website and shopping cart, this is surely an opportunity. Added bonus that this traffic is likely to be qualified traffic, because the searcher is looking for something particular.

If you’ve not yet been able to invest in a full e-commerce solution for your local business, consider GMB products a first step towards alerting shoppers that you have inventory for sale, even if you can’t yet fulfill their desire to buy it online.

Finally, a “yes” vote on adding products to your GMB listings can be consistent with your company’s culture of empathy. Regardless of where you do business, your community is full of elders, neighbors with serious health issues, and unvaccinated small children who are staying at home for safety’s sake for as long as the pandemic is with us. You can think of GMB products as a kind of virtual window shopping for these valued community members, and if you can connect your product showcase with curbside pickup or home delivery, your efforts are making your town a more caring and better-resourced place to call home. Use the description field and buttons to let people know how you can get your products safely into their hands.

Maybe, no!

If your inventory changes constantly, you’ll need to evaluate whether you have the internal resources to regularly edit your product set in the GMB dashboard.

If your inventory is large, you may not want to add every single product. Instead, you could add a representative product for each major category of goods, and write the description to make it clear that you have a wide selection of this type of item.

Mobile phones can take great pictures these days, but if your photos just don’t look great, it could be off-putting to customers seeing low-quality images. You might want to hold off on adding products until you learn to take photos that create a professional impression of the quality of your goods and services.

Some business owners may feel qualms about Google’s increasing involvement between them and their customers, and prefer to work on their own website rather than devoting additional resources to Google My Business features.

If your resources are limited, you may prefer to skip Google My Business products for now and go straight to Google Shopping, with its more sophisticated interface.

Overall, most local businesses will benefit from devoting some time to adding Google My Business products. Google has given us every reason to believe they are intently focused on shopping, with two major signs being their debut of the Shopping Graph at I/O this past spring and making it free to upload products to Google Shopping in 2020. We’ve all learned together over the past few decades that when Google zooms in on an area of search, we should at least be paying attention to how their efforts might be put to work for our local brands.

You have multiple opportunities to explore for enhancing the online visibility of your inventory, and right now, Google My Business products are the easiest way to wade into this work. The holiday shopping season is, incredibly, just around the corner, and if you start uploading products today, it will be your listing that stands out as the place that has what local customers want in December.

https://ift.tt/3Ec2vYd

[thanhtuandoan89]

How to Add Products to Your Google My Business Listing, Illustrated

“Who has X near me?”

This customer FAQ has become all the more important since 2020, with the public relying heavily on the Internet to help them remotely source goods and services while spending as little time as possible on business premises.

Google gets this, and is taking one step after another to position itself as the intermediary for this foundational query. Becoming the “transaction layer of the Internet” is how my friend and colleague David Mihm of Near Media describes Google’s aims when it comes to online shopping and the role they plan to play in it. As local businesses everywhere have scrambled to implement e-commerce and delivery features, Google has been very busy, too, with its own developments.

Perhaps the simplest of all these opportunities to get started with is Google My Business Products — a sort of virtual window shopping interface that can really spruce up your listings. Located in eligible GMB dashboards and with an output that’s visible on several local search interfaces, this feature could not be easier to use.This illustrated tutorial will walk you through adding your most important products and services to Google My Business Products, building your confidence that you are keeping apace with local search expanding to encompass local shopping search.

Who can and can’t add Google My Business products to their listings?

If you sign into your Google My Business dashboard, and you see a tab in the left menu for “products” you are eligible, with the exception of the products listed here that you can’t upload.

If you lack the “products” link but see that your competitors are using it, it’s likely that they have a Google My Business category you’re missing. Use the GMB Spy Chrome Extension to see all of the competitor’s GMB listing categories so that you can consider adding whatever is necessary to prompt the “products” option to appear in your dashboard.

Google’s documentation of this feature states that it’s intended for small-to-medium local businesses, and that they prefer large, multi-locations brands to provide product data through Local Inventory Ads. It would be helpful if Google would update this page to give a numeric cutoff between a medium-sized business and a large chain.

Meanwhile, if you’re marketing a restaurant, please note that Google prefers you to use the popular dishes and menu functions for showcasing your offerings, rather than the products option. Also for restaurants and service-oriented businesses, be aware that adding items to the products function will delete any meal or service menus that have been created for you by a third party. You’ll need to recreate them with the aforementioned, Google-based menu function or the Services tab in your GMB dashboard.

What can be added as a product to Google My Business listings?

You can list the following as products:

Merchandise

Virtual inventory, like software

Services

There’s a strong argument to be made for listing your services as products, in fact, because they are more visible and have those strong, linked calls-to-action. As far as I’ve seen, Google has no problem with you having both products and services listed, so you can do both!

How to add products to your Google My Business dashboard in 10 easy steps

To keep yourself organized, create a spreadsheet (or make a copy of this freebie I created for you) containing all the products you plan to list, and include a field in it for:

Product image

Product name

Category

Price

Description

Button

Link

BEFORE YOU BEGIN: Note that the last product you add will be the one that shows up first on your profile. So, save the best for last. Made a mistake? You can delete a product and re-add it as the newest item, which will make it show first, or you can edit a product in some minor way and the edit will also trigger re-ordering of the product lineup.

Now you’re ready to get going!

Step 1: Sign into your Google My Business dashboard for the listing you want to add products to, and click on the Products tab in the left-hand navigation menu:

Step 2. This will bring up a popup telling you how many people saw your listing last month and prompting you to add your products. Click the “get started button”.

Step 3. This brings up the simple wizard for adding your products

Step 4: Begin by adding a 1200 x 900 photo representing your first product. I recommend using original photos and graphics rather than stock photos, and it can make a bold visual statement if you choose to overlay the name of the product in text on the image.

Step 5: Give your product a name:

Step 6: Create a category for the product. If this is the very first product you’ve added to your listing, there will be nothing in the dropdown. As you add more products and categories, though, the categories you’ve previously created will appear in the dropdown and you can select them to apply to the next product you add, or you can create further, new categories.

Step 7. Optionally, enter the price. You can either enter a single price, or use the little grey toggle on the right to enter a minimum and maximum price range. Don’t use letters or symbols in this field or Google will reject them. Our product pricing structure at Moz is complex, with special offers and different pricing for monthly vs. annual customers, so we chose to leave this field blank, but if your pricing is simple and not subject to frequent change that would require you to be updating pricing on a regular basis, it’s a good idea to add it.

Step 8: Add a product description of up to 1000 characters. It’s optional to do this, but you should definitely make the most of this opportunity to talk about the benefits of the product. I included a short explanation of the Moz Pro product, plus a customer’s testimonial.

Step 9: Add a call-to-action button from among the choices of Learn More, Buy, Order Online, or Get Offer. There’s also the option not to add a button, but why forego the chance to bring customers from your listing to your website? In the “link for your button” field, add the URL of the page you want this button to take the customer to on your website. If you want to measure how your product listings are performing, use UTM tagging in the link you enter, and you can track engagement in Google Analytics, though not in GMB Insights, sadly.

Step 10: Take a second look at all you’ve entered to be sure you’re happy with your entry and then hit the blue “save” button. Google will then show you the product in your dashboard:

And as you add more products and product categories, you can see them tabbed in the “Products” section of your GMB dashboard:

And, presto! Within minutes to a couple of hours, you should see your products appearing on your Google Business Profile when you search for you brand name (or brand name + city, if Google is a bit confused):

Customers can click on the “view all” link to see all the products you’ve listed:

Or, they can explore using the product categories you’ve created. Look at how big and bold these category buttons are, highlighting key offerings of your business!

And it will also show up on the Google Local Finder version of your GMB listing, though as far as I have seen, not in the Google Maps version of your listing:

The big question: Should you use GMB products?

Can and should are never the same thing. You’ve just learned whether you can upload your inventory via GMB products and you can definitely do it! But to determine whether you should invest the time in doing this, consider all of the following:

Maybe, yes!

Adoption of Google My Business products is so low as of yet, that if you add your products, it will really make your listing fuller than the bulk of your competitors in most markets. This is a definite competitive difference maker.

If you’ve got the ability to take good quality photos or have a graphic designer in-house who can efficiently design some imagery for you, product photos add a very appealing visual element to your listings. If you’d like to make a rather plain listing more inviting, this is a great option.

If you have an inventory that’s relatively stable, meaning you won’t be having to continuously editing existing product listings to avoid customer letdown when items become unavailable, that’s a good bet. If your pricing on stable products changes, you may want to opt out of showing prices.

If you need to drive any additional traffic you can to your website and shopping cart, this is surely an opportunity. Added bonus that this traffic is likely to be qualified traffic, because the searcher is looking for something particular.

If you’ve not yet been able to invest in a full e-commerce solution for your local business, consider GMB products a first step towards alerting shoppers that you have inventory for sale, even if you can’t yet fulfill their desire to buy it online.

Finally, a “yes” vote on adding products to your GMB listings can be consistent with your company’s culture of empathy. Regardless of where you do business, your community is full of elders, neighbors with serious health issues, and unvaccinated small children who are staying at home for safety’s sake for as long as the pandemic is with us. You can think of GMB products as a kind of virtual window shopping for these valued community members, and if you can connect your product showcase with curbside pickup or home delivery, your efforts are making your town a more caring and better-resourced place to call home. Use the description field and buttons to let people know how you can get your products safely into their hands.

Maybe, no!

If your inventory changes constantly, you’ll need to evaluate whether you have the internal resources to regularly edit your product set in the GMB dashboard.

If your inventory is large, you may not want to add every single product. Instead, you could add a representative product for each major category of goods, and write the description to make it clear that you have a wide selection of this type of item.

Mobile phones can take great pictures these days, but if your photos just don’t look great, it could be off-putting to customers seeing low-quality images. You might want to hold off on adding products until you learn to take photos that create a professional impression of the quality of your goods and services.

Some business owners may feel qualms about Google’s increasing involvement between them and their customers, and prefer to work on their own website rather than devoting additional resources to Google My Business features.

If your resources are limited, you may prefer to skip Google My Business products for now and go straight to Google Shopping, with its more sophisticated interface.

Overall, most local businesses will benefit from devoting some time to adding Google My Business products. Google has given us every reason to believe they are intently focused on shopping, with two major signs being their debut of the Shopping Graph at I/O this past spring and making it free to upload products to Google Shopping in 2020. We’ve all learned together over the past few decades that when Google zooms in on an area of search, we should at least be paying attention to how their efforts might be put to work for our local brands.

You have multiple opportunities to explore for enhancing the online visibility of your inventory, and right now, Google My Business products are the easiest way to wade into this work. The holiday shopping season is, incredibly, just around the corner, and if you start uploading products today, it will be your listing that stands out as the place that has what local customers want in December.

[drummcarpentry]

How to Add Products to Your Google My Business Listing, Illustrated

“Who has X near me?”

This customer FAQ has become all the more important since 2020, with the public relying heavily on the Internet to help them remotely source goods and services while spending as little time as possible on business premises.

Google gets this, and is taking one step after another to position itself as the intermediary for this foundational query. Becoming the “transaction layer of the Internet” is how my friend and colleague David Mihm of Near Media describes Google’s aims when it comes to online shopping and the role they plan to play in it. As local businesses everywhere have scrambled to implement e-commerce and delivery features, Google has been very busy, too, with its own developments.

Perhaps the simplest of all these opportunities to get started with is Google My Business Products — a sort of virtual window shopping interface that can really spruce up your listings. Located in eligible GMB dashboards and with an output that’s visible on several local search interfaces, this feature could not be easier to use.This illustrated tutorial will walk you through adding your most important products and services to Google My Business Products, building your confidence that you are keeping apace with local search expanding to encompass local shopping search.

Who can and can’t add Google My Business products to their listings?

If you sign into your Google My Business dashboard, and you see a tab in the left menu for “products” you are eligible, with the exception of the products listed here that you can’t upload.

If you lack the “products” link but see that your competitors are using it, it’s likely that they have a Google My Business category you’re missing. Use the GMB Spy Chrome Extension to see all of the competitor’s GMB listing categories so that you can consider adding whatever is necessary to prompt the “products” option to appear in your dashboard.

Google’s documentation of this feature states that it’s intended for small-to-medium local businesses, and that they prefer large, multi-locations brands to provide product data through Local Inventory Ads. It would be helpful if Google would update this page to give a numeric cutoff between a medium-sized business and a large chain.

Meanwhile, if you’re marketing a restaurant, please note that Google prefers you to use the popular dishes and menu functions for showcasing your offerings, rather than the products option. Also for restaurants and service-oriented businesses, be aware that adding items to the products function will delete any meal or service menus that have been created for you by a third party. You’ll need to recreate them with the aforementioned, Google-based menu function or the Services tab in your GMB dashboard.

What can be added as a product to Google My Business listings?

You can list the following as products:

Merchandise

Virtual inventory, like software

Services

There’s a strong argument to be made for listing your services as products, in fact, because they are more visible and have those strong, linked calls-to-action. As far as I’ve seen, Google has no problem with you having both products and services listed, so you can do both!

How to add products to your Google My Business dashboard in 10 easy steps

To keep yourself organized, create a spreadsheet (or make a copy of this freebie I created for you) containing all the products you plan to list, and include a field in it for:

Product image

Product name

Category

Price

Description

Button

Link

BEFORE YOU BEGIN: Note that the last product you add will be the one that shows up first on your profile. So, save the best for last. Made a mistake? You can delete a product and re-add it as the newest item, which will make it show first, or you can edit a product in some minor way and the edit will also trigger re-ordering of the product lineup.

Now you’re ready to get going!

Step 1: Sign into your Google My Business dashboard for the listing you want to add products to, and click on the Products tab in the left-hand navigation menu:

Step 2. This will bring up a popup telling you how many people saw your listing last month and prompting you to add your products. Click the “get started button”.

Step 3. This brings up the simple wizard for adding your products

Step 4: Begin by adding a 1200 x 900 photo representing your first product. I recommend using original photos and graphics rather than stock photos, and it can make a bold visual statement if you choose to overlay the name of the product in text on the image.

Step 5: Give your product a name:

Step 6: Create a category for the product. If this is the very first product you’ve added to your listing, there will be nothing in the dropdown. As you add more products and categories, though, the categories you’ve previously created will appear in the dropdown and you can select them to apply to the next product you add, or you can create further, new categories.

Step 7. Optionally, enter the price. You can either enter a single price, or use the little grey toggle on the right to enter a minimum and maximum price range. Don’t use letters or symbols in this field or Google will reject them. Our product pricing structure at Moz is complex, with special offers and different pricing for monthly vs. annual customers, so we chose to leave this field blank, but if your pricing is simple and not subject to frequent change that would require you to be updating pricing on a regular basis, it’s a good idea to add it.

Step 8: Add a product description of up to 1000 characters. It’s optional to do this, but you should definitely make the most of this opportunity to talk about the benefits of the product. I included a short explanation of the Moz Pro product, plus a customer’s testimonial.

Step 9: Add a call-to-action button from among the choices of Learn More, Buy, Order Online, or Get Offer. There’s also the option not to add a button, but why forego the chance to bring customers from your listing to your website? In the “link for your button” field, add the URL of the page you want this button to take the customer to on your website. If you want to measure how your product listings are performing, use UTM tagging in the link you enter, and you can track engagement in Google Analytics, though not in GMB Insights, sadly.

Step 10: Take a second look at all you’ve entered to be sure you’re happy with your entry and then hit the blue “save” button. Google will then show you the product in your dashboard:

And as you add more products and product categories, you can see them tabbed in the “Products” section of your GMB dashboard:

And, presto! Within minutes to a couple of hours, you should see your products appearing on your Google Business Profile when you search for you brand name (or brand name + city, if Google is a bit confused):

Customers can click on the “view all” link to see all the products you’ve listed:

Or, they can explore using the product categories you’ve created. Look at how big and bold these category buttons are, highlighting key offerings of your business!

And it will also show up on the Google Local Finder version of your GMB listing, though as far as I have seen, not in the Google Maps version of your listing:

The big question: Should you use GMB products?

Can and should are never the same thing. You’ve just learned whether you can upload your inventory via GMB products and you can definitely do it! But to determine whether you should invest the time in doing this, consider all of the following:

Maybe, yes!

Adoption of Google My Business products is so low as of yet, that if you add your products, it will really make your listing fuller than the bulk of your competitors in most markets. This is a definite competitive difference maker.

If you’ve got the ability to take good quality photos or have a graphic designer in-house who can efficiently design some imagery for you, product photos add a very appealing visual element to your listings. If you’d like to make a rather plain listing more inviting, this is a great option.

If you have an inventory that’s relatively stable, meaning you won’t be having to continuously editing existing product listings to avoid customer letdown when items become unavailable, that’s a good bet. If your pricing on stable products changes, you may want to opt out of showing prices.

If you need to drive any additional traffic you can to your website and shopping cart, this is surely an opportunity. Added bonus that this traffic is likely to be qualified traffic, because the searcher is looking for something particular.

If you’ve not yet been able to invest in a full e-commerce solution for your local business, consider GMB products a first step towards alerting shoppers that you have inventory for sale, even if you can’t yet fulfill their desire to buy it online.

Finally, a “yes” vote on adding products to your GMB listings can be consistent with your company’s culture of empathy. Regardless of where you do business, your community is full of elders, neighbors with serious health issues, and unvaccinated small children who are staying at home for safety’s sake for as long as the pandemic is with us. You can think of GMB products as a kind of virtual window shopping for these valued community members, and if you can connect your product showcase with curbside pickup or home delivery, your efforts are making your town a more caring and better-resourced place to call home. Use the description field and buttons to let people know how you can get your products safely into their hands.

Maybe, no!

If your inventory changes constantly, you’ll need to evaluate whether you have the internal resources to regularly edit your product set in the GMB dashboard.

If your inventory is large, you may not want to add every single product. Instead, you could add a representative product for each major category of goods, and write the description to make it clear that you have a wide selection of this type of item.

Mobile phones can take great pictures these days, but if your photos just don’t look great, it could be off-putting to customers seeing low-quality images. You might want to hold off on adding products until you learn to take photos that create a professional impression of the quality of your goods and services.

Some business owners may feel qualms about Google’s increasing involvement between them and their customers, and prefer to work on their own website rather than devoting additional resources to Google My Business features.

If your resources are limited, you may prefer to skip Google My Business products for now and go straight to Google Shopping, with its more sophisticated interface.

Overall, most local businesses will benefit from devoting some time to adding Google My Business products. Google has given us every reason to believe they are intently focused on shopping, with two major signs being their debut of the Shopping Graph at I/O this past spring and making it free to upload products to Google Shopping in 2020. We’ve all learned together over the past few decades that when Google zooms in on an area of search, we should at least be paying attention to how their efforts might be put to work for our local brands.

You have multiple opportunities to explore for enhancing the online visibility of your inventory, and right now, Google My Business products are the easiest way to wade into this work. The holiday shopping season is, incredibly, just around the corner, and if you start uploading products today, it will be your listing that stands out as the place that has what local customers want in December.

[lakelandseo]

How to Add Products to Your Google My Business Listing, Illustrated

“Who has X near me?”

This customer FAQ has become all the more important since 2020, with the public relying heavily on the Internet to help them remotely source goods and services while spending as little time as possible on business premises.

Google gets this, and is taking one step after another to position itself as the intermediary for this foundational query. Becoming the “transaction layer of the Internet” is how my friend and colleague David Mihm of Near Media describes Google’s aims when it comes to online shopping and the role they plan to play in it. As local businesses everywhere have scrambled to implement e-commerce and delivery features, Google has been very busy, too, with its own developments.

Perhaps the simplest of all these opportunities to get started with is Google My Business Products — a sort of virtual window shopping interface that can really spruce up your listings. Located in eligible GMB dashboards and with an output that’s visible on several local search interfaces, this feature could not be easier to use.This illustrated tutorial will walk you through adding your most important products and services to Google My Business Products, building your confidence that you are keeping apace with local search expanding to encompass local shopping search.

Who can and can’t add Google My Business products to their listings?

If you sign into your Google My Business dashboard, and you see a tab in the left menu for “products” you are eligible, with the exception of the products listed here that you can’t upload.

If you lack the “products” link but see that your competitors are using it, it’s likely that they have a Google My Business category you’re missing. Use the GMB Spy Chrome Extension to see all of the competitor’s GMB listing categories so that you can consider adding whatever is necessary to prompt the “products” option to appear in your dashboard.

Google’s documentation of this feature states that it’s intended for small-to-medium local businesses, and that they prefer large, multi-locations brands to provide product data through Local Inventory Ads. It would be helpful if Google would update this page to give a numeric cutoff between a medium-sized business and a large chain.

Meanwhile, if you’re marketing a restaurant, please note that Google prefers you to use the popular dishes and menu functions for showcasing your offerings, rather than the products option. Also for restaurants and service-oriented businesses, be aware that adding items to the products function will delete any meal or service menus that have been created for you by a third party. You’ll need to recreate them with the aforementioned, Google-based menu function or the Services tab in your GMB dashboard.

What can be added as a product to Google My Business listings?

You can list the following as products:

Merchandise

Virtual inventory, like software

Services

There’s a strong argument to be made for listing your services as products, in fact, because they are more visible and have those strong, linked calls-to-action. As far as I’ve seen, Google has no problem with you having both products and services listed, so you can do both!

How to add products to your Google My Business dashboard in 10 easy steps

To keep yourself organized, create a spreadsheet (or make a copy of this freebie I created for you) containing all the products you plan to list, and include a field in it for:

Product image

Product name

Category

Price

Description

Button

Link

BEFORE YOU BEGIN: Note that the last product you add will be the one that shows up first on your profile. So, save the best for last. Made a mistake? You can delete a product and re-add it as the newest item, which will make it show first, or you can edit a product in some minor way and the edit will also trigger re-ordering of the product lineup.

Now you’re ready to get going!

Step 1: Sign into your Google My Business dashboard for the listing you want to add products to, and click on the Products tab in the left-hand navigation menu:

Step 2. This will bring up a popup telling you how many people saw your listing last month and prompting you to add your products. Click the “get started button”.

Step 3. This brings up the simple wizard for adding your products

Step 4: Begin by adding a 1200 x 900 photo representing your first product. I recommend using original photos and graphics rather than stock photos, and it can make a bold visual statement if you choose to overlay the name of the product in text on the image.

Step 5: Give your product a name:

Step 6: Create a category for the product. If this is the very first product you’ve added to your listing, there will be nothing in the dropdown. As you add more products and categories, though, the categories you’ve previously created will appear in the dropdown and you can select them to apply to the next product you add, or you can create further, new categories.

Step 7. Optionally, enter the price. You can either enter a single price, or use the little grey toggle on the right to enter a minimum and maximum price range. Don’t use letters or symbols in this field or Google will reject them. Our product pricing structure at Moz is complex, with special offers and different pricing for monthly vs. annual customers, so we chose to leave this field blank, but if your pricing is simple and not subject to frequent change that would require you to be updating pricing on a regular basis, it’s a good idea to add it.

Step 8: Add a product description of up to 1000 characters. It’s optional to do this, but you should definitely make the most of this opportunity to talk about the benefits of the product. I included a short explanation of the Moz Pro product, plus a customer’s testimonial.

Step 9: Add a call-to-action button from among the choices of Learn More, Buy, Order Online, or Get Offer. There’s also the option not to add a button, but why forego the chance to bring customers from your listing to your website? In the “link for your button” field, add the URL of the page you want this button to take the customer to on your website. If you want to measure how your product listings are performing, use UTM tagging in the link you enter, and you can track engagement in Google Analytics, though not in GMB Insights, sadly.

Step 10: Take a second look at all you’ve entered to be sure you’re happy with your entry and then hit the blue “save” button. Google will then show you the product in your dashboard:

And as you add more products and product categories, you can see them tabbed in the “Products” section of your GMB dashboard:

And, presto! Within minutes to a couple of hours, you should see your products appearing on your Google Business Profile when you search for you brand name (or brand name + city, if Google is a bit confused):

Customers can click on the “view all” link to see all the products you’ve listed:

Or, they can explore using the product categories you’ve created. Look at how big and bold these category buttons are, highlighting key offerings of your business!

And it will also show up on the Google Local Finder version of your GMB listing, though as far as I have seen, not in the Google Maps version of your listing:

The big question: Should you use GMB products?

Can and should are never the same thing. You’ve just learned whether you can upload your inventory via GMB products and you can definitely do it! But to determine whether you should invest the time in doing this, consider all of the following:

Maybe, yes!

Adoption of Google My Business products is so low as of yet, that if you add your products, it will really make your listing fuller than the bulk of your competitors in most markets. This is a definite competitive difference maker.

If you’ve got the ability to take good quality photos or have a graphic designer in-house who can efficiently design some imagery for you, product photos add a very appealing visual element to your listings. If you’d like to make a rather plain listing more inviting, this is a great option.

If you have an inventory that’s relatively stable, meaning you won’t be having to continuously editing existing product listings to avoid customer letdown when items become unavailable, that’s a good bet. If your pricing on stable products changes, you may want to opt out of showing prices.

If you need to drive any additional traffic you can to your website and shopping cart, this is surely an opportunity. Added bonus that this traffic is likely to be qualified traffic, because the searcher is looking for something particular.

If you’ve not yet been able to invest in a full e-commerce solution for your local business, consider GMB products a first step towards alerting shoppers that you have inventory for sale, even if you can’t yet fulfill their desire to buy it online.

Finally, a “yes” vote on adding products to your GMB listings can be consistent with your company’s culture of empathy. Regardless of where you do business, your community is full of elders, neighbors with serious health issues, and unvaccinated small children who are staying at home for safety’s sake for as long as the pandemic is with us. You can think of GMB products as a kind of virtual window shopping for these valued community members, and if you can connect your product showcase with curbside pickup or home delivery, your efforts are making your town a more caring and better-resourced place to call home. Use the description field and buttons to let people know how you can get your products safely into their hands.

Maybe, no!

If your inventory changes constantly, you’ll need to evaluate whether you have the internal resources to regularly edit your product set in the GMB dashboard.

If your inventory is large, you may not want to add every single product. Instead, you could add a representative product for each major category of goods, and write the description to make it clear that you have a wide selection of this type of item.

Mobile phones can take great pictures these days, but if your photos just don’t look great, it could be off-putting to customers seeing low-quality images. You might want to hold off on adding products until you learn to take photos that create a professional impression of the quality of your goods and services.

Some business owners may feel qualms about Google’s increasing involvement between them and their customers, and prefer to work on their own website rather than devoting additional resources to Google My Business features.

If your resources are limited, you may prefer to skip Google My Business products for now and go straight to Google Shopping, with its more sophisticated interface.

Overall, most local businesses will benefit from devoting some time to adding Google My Business products. Google has given us every reason to believe they are intently focused on shopping, with two major signs being their debut of the Shopping Graph at I/O this past spring and making it free to upload products to Google Shopping in 2020. We’ve all learned together over the past few decades that when Google zooms in on an area of search, we should at least be paying attention to how their efforts might be put to work for our local brands.

You have multiple opportunities to explore for enhancing the online visibility of your inventory, and right now, Google My Business products are the easiest way to wade into this work. The holiday shopping season is, incredibly, just around the corner, and if you start uploading products today, it will be your listing that stands out as the place that has what local customers want in December.

[kjt-lawyers]

How to Add Products to Your Google My Business Listing, Illustrated

“Who has X near me?”

This customer FAQ has become all the more important since 2020, with the public relying heavily on the Internet to help them remotely source goods and services while spending as little time as possible on business premises.

Google gets this, and is taking one step after another to position itself as the intermediary for this foundational query. Becoming the “transaction layer of the Internet” is how my friend and colleague David Mihm of Near Media describes Google’s aims when it comes to online shopping and the role they plan to play in it. As local businesses everywhere have scrambled to implement e-commerce and delivery features, Google has been very busy, too, with its own developments.

Perhaps the simplest of all these opportunities to get started with is Google My Business Products — a sort of virtual window shopping interface that can really spruce up your listings. Located in eligible GMB dashboards and with an output that’s visible on several local search interfaces, this feature could not be easier to use.This illustrated tutorial will walk you through adding your most important products and services to Google My Business Products, building your confidence that you are keeping apace with local search expanding to encompass local shopping search.

Who can and can’t add Google My Business products to their listings?

If you sign into your Google My Business dashboard, and you see a tab in the left menu for “products” you are eligible, with the exception of the products listed here that you can’t upload.

If you lack the “products” link but see that your competitors are using it, it’s likely that they have a Google My Business category you’re missing. Use the GMB Spy Chrome Extension to see all of the competitor’s GMB listing categories so that you can consider adding whatever is necessary to prompt the “products” option to appear in your dashboard.

Google’s documentation of this feature states that it’s intended for small-to-medium local businesses, and that they prefer large, multi-locations brands to provide product data through Local Inventory Ads. It would be helpful if Google would update this page to give a numeric cutoff between a medium-sized business and a large chain.

Meanwhile, if you’re marketing a restaurant, please note that Google prefers you to use the popular dishes and menu functions for showcasing your offerings, rather than the products option. Also for restaurants and service-oriented businesses, be aware that adding items to the products function will delete any meal or service menus that have been created for you by a third party. You’ll need to recreate them with the aforementioned, Google-based menu function or the Services tab in your GMB dashboard.

What can be added as a product to Google My Business listings?

You can list the following as products:

Merchandise

Virtual inventory, like software

Services

There’s a strong argument to be made for listing your services as products, in fact, because they are more visible and have those strong, linked calls-to-action. As far as I’ve seen, Google has no problem with you having both products and services listed, so you can do both!

How to add products to your Google My Business dashboard in 10 easy steps

To keep yourself organized, create a spreadsheet (or make a copy of this freebie I created for you) containing all the products you plan to list, and include a field in it for:

Product image

Product name

Category

Price

Description

Button

Link

BEFORE YOU BEGIN: Note that the last product you add will be the one that shows up first on your profile. So, save the best for last. Made a mistake? You can delete a product and re-add it as the newest item, which will make it show first, or you can edit a product in some minor way and the edit will also trigger re-ordering of the product lineup.

Now you’re ready to get going!

Step 1: Sign into your Google My Business dashboard for the listing you want to add products to, and click on the Products tab in the left-hand navigation menu:

Step 2. This will bring up a popup telling you how many people saw your listing last month and prompting you to add your products. Click the “get started button”.

Step 3. This brings up the simple wizard for adding your products

Step 4: Begin by adding a 1200 x 900 photo representing your first product. I recommend using original photos and graphics rather than stock photos, and it can make a bold visual statement if you choose to overlay the name of the product in text on the image.

Step 5: Give your product a name:

Step 6: Create a category for the product. If this is the very first product you’ve added to your listing, there will be nothing in the dropdown. As you add more products and categories, though, the categories you’ve previously created will appear in the dropdown and you can select them to apply to the next product you add, or you can create further, new categories.

Step 7. Optionally, enter the price. You can either enter a single price, or use the little grey toggle on the right to enter a minimum and maximum price range. Don’t use letters or symbols in this field or Google will reject them. Our product pricing structure at Moz is complex, with special offers and different pricing for monthly vs. annual customers, so we chose to leave this field blank, but if your pricing is simple and not subject to frequent change that would require you to be updating pricing on a regular basis, it’s a good idea to add it.

Step 8: Add a product description of up to 1000 characters. It’s optional to do this, but you should definitely make the most of this opportunity to talk about the benefits of the product. I included a short explanation of the Moz Pro product, plus a customer’s testimonial.

Step 9: Add a call-to-action button from among the choices of Learn More, Buy, Order Online, or Get Offer. There’s also the option not to add a button, but why forego the chance to bring customers from your listing to your website? In the “link for your button” field, add the URL of the page you want this button to take the customer to on your website. If you want to measure how your product listings are performing, use UTM tagging in the link you enter, and you can track engagement in Google Analytics, though not in GMB Insights, sadly.

Step 10: Take a second look at all you’ve entered to be sure you’re happy with your entry and then hit the blue “save” button. Google will then show you the product in your dashboard:

And as you add more products and product categories, you can see them tabbed in the “Products” section of your GMB dashboard:

And, presto! Within minutes to a couple of hours, you should see your products appearing on your Google Business Profile when you search for you brand name (or brand name + city, if Google is a bit confused):

Customers can click on the “view all” link to see all the products you’ve listed:

Or, they can explore using the product categories you’ve created. Look at how big and bold these category buttons are, highlighting key offerings of your business!

And it will also show up on the Google Local Finder version of your GMB listing, though as far as I have seen, not in the Google Maps version of your listing:

The big question: Should you use GMB products?

Can and should are never the same thing. You’ve just learned whether you can upload your inventory via GMB products and you can definitely do it! But to determine whether you should invest the time in doing this, consider all of the following:

Maybe, yes!

Adoption of Google My Business products is so low as of yet, that if you add your products, it will really make your listing fuller than the bulk of your competitors in most markets. This is a definite competitive difference maker.

If you’ve got the ability to take good quality photos or have a graphic designer in-house who can efficiently design some imagery for you, product photos add a very appealing visual element to your listings. If you’d like to make a rather plain listing more inviting, this is a great option.

If you have an inventory that’s relatively stable, meaning you won’t be having to continuously editing existing product listings to avoid customer letdown when items become unavailable, that’s a good bet. If your pricing on stable products changes, you may want to opt out of showing prices.

If you need to drive any additional traffic you can to your website and shopping cart, this is surely an opportunity. Added bonus that this traffic is likely to be qualified traffic, because the searcher is looking for something particular.

If you’ve not yet been able to invest in a full e-commerce solution for your local business, consider GMB products a first step towards alerting shoppers that you have inventory for sale, even if you can’t yet fulfill their desire to buy it online.

Finally, a “yes” vote on adding products to your GMB listings can be consistent with your company’s culture of empathy. Regardless of where you do business, your community is full of elders, neighbors with serious health issues, and unvaccinated small children who are staying at home for safety’s sake for as long as the pandemic is with us. You can think of GMB products as a kind of virtual window shopping for these valued community members, and if you can connect your product showcase with curbside pickup or home delivery, your efforts are making your town a more caring and better-resourced place to call home. Use the description field and buttons to let people know how you can get your products safely into their hands.

Maybe, no!

If your inventory changes constantly, you’ll need to evaluate whether you have the internal resources to regularly edit your product set in the GMB dashboard.

If your inventory is large, you may not want to add every single product. Instead, you could add a representative product for each major category of goods, and write the description to make it clear that you have a wide selection of this type of item.

Mobile phones can take great pictures these days, but if your photos just don’t look great, it could be off-putting to customers seeing low-quality images. You might want to hold off on adding products until you learn to take photos that create a professional impression of the quality of your goods and services.

Some business owners may feel qualms about Google’s increasing involvement between them and their customers, and prefer to work on their own website rather than devoting additional resources to Google My Business features.

If your resources are limited, you may prefer to skip Google My Business products for now and go straight to Google Shopping, with its more sophisticated interface.

Overall, most local businesses will benefit from devoting some time to adding Google My Business products. Google has given us every reason to believe they are intently focused on shopping, with two major signs being their debut of the Shopping Graph at I/O this past spring and making it free to upload products to Google Shopping in 2020. We’ve all learned together over the past few decades that when Google zooms in on an area of search, we should at least be paying attention to how their efforts might be put to work for our local brands.

You have multiple opportunities to explore for enhancing the online visibility of your inventory, and right now, Google My Business products are the easiest way to wade into this work. The holiday shopping season is, incredibly, just around the corner, and if you start uploading products today, it will be your listing that stands out as the place that has what local customers want in December.

[xaydungtruonggia]

How to Add Products to Your Google My Business Listing, Illustrated

“Who has X near me?”

This customer FAQ has become all the more important since 2020, with the public relying heavily on the Internet to help them remotely source goods and services while spending as little time as possible on business premises.

Google gets this, and is taking one step after another to position itself as the intermediary for this foundational query. Becoming the “transaction layer of the Internet” is how my friend and colleague David Mihm of Near Media describes Google’s aims when it comes to online shopping and the role they plan to play in it. As local businesses everywhere have scrambled to implement e-commerce and delivery features, Google has been very busy, too, with its own developments.

Perhaps the simplest of all these opportunities to get started with is Google My Business Products — a sort of virtual window shopping interface that can really spruce up your listings. Located in eligible GMB dashboards and with an output that’s visible on several local search interfaces, this feature could not be easier to use.This illustrated tutorial will walk you through adding your most important products and services to Google My Business Products, building your confidence that you are keeping apace with local search expanding to encompass local shopping search.

Who can and can’t add Google My Business products to their listings?

If you sign into your Google My Business dashboard, and you see a tab in the left menu for “products” you are eligible, with the exception of the products listed here that you can’t upload.

If you lack the “products” link but see that your competitors are using it, it’s likely that they have a Google My Business category you’re missing. Use the GMB Spy Chrome Extension to see all of the competitor’s GMB listing categories so that you can consider adding whatever is necessary to prompt the “products” option to appear in your dashboard.

Google’s documentation of this feature states that it’s intended for small-to-medium local businesses, and that they prefer large, multi-locations brands to provide product data through Local Inventory Ads. It would be helpful if Google would update this page to give a numeric cutoff between a medium-sized business and a large chain.

Meanwhile, if you’re marketing a restaurant, please note that Google prefers you to use the popular dishes and menu functions for showcasing your offerings, rather than the products option. Also for restaurants and service-oriented businesses, be aware that adding items to the products function will delete any meal or service menus that have been created for you by a third party. You’ll need to recreate them with the aforementioned, Google-based menu function or the Services tab in your GMB dashboard.

What can be added as a product to Google My Business listings?

You can list the following as products:

Merchandise

Virtual inventory, like software

Services

There’s a strong argument to be made for listing your services as products, in fact, because they are more visible and have those strong, linked calls-to-action. As far as I’ve seen, Google has no problem with you having both products and services listed, so you can do both!

How to add products to your Google My Business dashboard in 10 easy steps

To keep yourself organized, create a spreadsheet (or make a copy of this freebie I created for you) containing all the products you plan to list, and include a field in it for:

Product image

Product name

Category

Price

Description

Button

Link

BEFORE YOU BEGIN: Note that the last product you add will be the one that shows up first on your profile. So, save the best for last. Made a mistake? You can delete a product and re-add it as the newest item, which will make it show first, or you can edit a product in some minor way and the edit will also trigger re-ordering of the product lineup.

Now you’re ready to get going!

Step 1: Sign into your Google My Business dashboard for the listing you want to add products to, and click on the Products tab in the left-hand navigation menu:

Step 2. This will bring up a popup telling you how many people saw your listing last month and prompting you to add your products. Click the “get started button”.

Step 3. This brings up the simple wizard for adding your products

Step 4: Begin by adding a 1200 x 900 photo representing your first product. I recommend using original photos and graphics rather than stock photos, and it can make a bold visual statement if you choose to overlay the name of the product in text on the image.

Step 5: Give your product a name:

Step 6: Create a category for the product. If this is the very first product you’ve added to your listing, there will be nothing in the dropdown. As you add more products and categories, though, the categories you’ve previously created will appear in the dropdown and you can select them to apply to the next product you add, or you can create further, new categories.

Step 7. Optionally, enter the price. You can either enter a single price, or use the little grey toggle on the right to enter a minimum and maximum price range. Don’t use letters or symbols in this field or Google will reject them. Our product pricing structure at Moz is complex, with special offers and different pricing for monthly vs. annual customers, so we chose to leave this field blank, but if your pricing is simple and not subject to frequent change that would require you to be updating pricing on a regular basis, it’s a good idea to add it.

Step 8: Add a product description of up to 1000 characters. It’s optional to do this, but you should definitely make the most of this opportunity to talk about the benefits of the product. I included a short explanation of the Moz Pro product, plus a customer’s testimonial.

Step 9: Add a call-to-action button from among the choices of Learn More, Buy, Order Online, or Get Offer. There’s also the option not to add a button, but why forego the chance to bring customers from your listing to your website? In the “link for your button” field, add the URL of the page you want this button to take the customer to on your website. If you want to measure how your product listings are performing, use UTM tagging in the link you enter, and you can track engagement in Google Analytics, though not in GMB Insights, sadly.

Step 10: Take a second look at all you’ve entered to be sure you’re happy with your entry and then hit the blue “save” button. Google will then show you the product in your dashboard:

And as you add more products and product categories, you can see them tabbed in the “Products” section of your GMB dashboard:

And, presto! Within minutes to a couple of hours, you should see your products appearing on your Google Business Profile when you search for you brand name (or brand name + city, if Google is a bit confused):

Customers can click on the “view all” link to see all the products you’ve listed:

Or, they can explore using the product categories you’ve created. Look at how big and bold these category buttons are, highlighting key offerings of your business!

And it will also show up on the Google Local Finder version of your GMB listing, though as far as I have seen, not in the Google Maps version of your listing:

The big question: Should you use GMB products?

Can and should are never the same thing. You’ve just learned whether you can upload your inventory via GMB products and you can definitely do it! But to determine whether you should invest the time in doing this, consider all of the following:

Maybe, yes!

Adoption of Google My Business products is so low as of yet, that if you add your products, it will really make your listing fuller than the bulk of your competitors in most markets. This is a definite competitive difference maker.

If you’ve got the ability to take good quality photos or have a graphic designer in-house who can efficiently design some imagery for you, product photos add a very appealing visual element to your listings. If you’d like to make a rather plain listing more inviting, this is a great option.

If you have an inventory that’s relatively stable, meaning you won’t be having to continuously editing existing product listings to avoid customer letdown when items become unavailable, that’s a good bet. If your pricing on stable products changes, you may want to opt out of showing prices.

If you need to drive any additional traffic you can to your website and shopping cart, this is surely an opportunity. Added bonus that this traffic is likely to be qualified traffic, because the searcher is looking for something particular.

If you’ve not yet been able to invest in a full e-commerce solution for your local business, consider GMB products a first step towards alerting shoppers that you have inventory for sale, even if you can’t yet fulfill their desire to buy it online.

Finally, a “yes” vote on adding products to your GMB listings can be consistent with your company’s culture of empathy. Regardless of where you do business, your community is full of elders, neighbors with serious health issues, and unvaccinated small children who are staying at home for safety’s sake for as long as the pandemic is with us. You can think of GMB products as a kind of virtual window shopping for these valued community members, and if you can connect your product showcase with curbside pickup or home delivery, your efforts are making your town a more caring and better-resourced place to call home. Use the description field and buttons to let people know how you can get your products safely into their hands.

Maybe, no!

If your inventory changes constantly, you’ll need to evaluate whether you have the internal resources to regularly edit your product set in the GMB dashboard.

If your inventory is large, you may not want to add every single product. Instead, you could add a representative product for each major category of goods, and write the description to make it clear that you have a wide selection of this type of item.

Mobile phones can take great pictures these days, but if your photos just don’t look great, it could be off-putting to customers seeing low-quality images. You might want to hold off on adding products until you learn to take photos that create a professional impression of the quality of your goods and services.

Some business owners may feel qualms about Google’s increasing involvement between them and their customers, and prefer to work on their own website rather than devoting additional resources to Google My Business features.

If your resources are limited, you may prefer to skip Google My Business products for now and go straight to Google Shopping, with its more sophisticated interface.

Overall, most local businesses will benefit from devoting some time to adding Google My Business products. Google has given us every reason to believe they are intently focused on shopping, with two major signs being their debut of the Shopping Graph at I/O this past spring and making it free to upload products to Google Shopping in 2020. We’ve all learned together over the past few decades that when Google zooms in on an area of search, we should at least be paying attention to how their efforts might be put to work for our local brands.

You have multiple opportunities to explore for enhancing the online visibility of your inventory, and right now, Google My Business products are the easiest way to wade into this work. The holiday shopping season is, incredibly, just around the corner, and if you start uploading products today, it will be your listing that stands out as the place that has what local customers want in December.

[epackingvietnam]

How to Add Products to Your Google My Business Listing, Illustrated

“Who has X near me?”

This customer FAQ has become all the more important since 2020, with the public relying heavily on the Internet to help them remotely source goods and services while spending as little time as possible on business premises.

Google gets this, and is taking one step after another to position itself as the intermediary for this foundational query. Becoming the “transaction layer of the Internet” is how my friend and colleague David Mihm of Near Media describes Google’s aims when it comes to online shopping and the role they plan to play in it. As local businesses everywhere have scrambled to implement e-commerce and delivery features, Google has been very busy, too, with its own developments.

Perhaps the simplest of all these opportunities to get started with is Google My Business Products — a sort of virtual window shopping interface that can really spruce up your listings. Located in eligible GMB dashboards and with an output that’s visible on several local search interfaces, this feature could not be easier to use.This illustrated tutorial will walk you through adding your most important products and services to Google My Business Products, building your confidence that you are keeping apace with local search expanding to encompass local shopping search.

Who can and can’t add Google My Business products to their listings?

If you sign into your Google My Business dashboard, and you see a tab in the left menu for “products” you are eligible, with the exception of the products listed here that you can’t upload.

If you lack the “products” link but see that your competitors are using it, it’s likely that they have a Google My Business category you’re missing. Use the GMB Spy Chrome Extension to see all of the competitor’s GMB listing categories so that you can consider adding whatever is necessary to prompt the “products” option to appear in your dashboard.

Google’s documentation of this feature states that it’s intended for small-to-medium local businesses, and that they prefer large, multi-locations brands to provide product data through Local Inventory Ads. It would be helpful if Google would update this page to give a numeric cutoff between a medium-sized business and a large chain.

Meanwhile, if you’re marketing a restaurant, please note that Google prefers you to use the popular dishes and menu functions for showcasing your offerings, rather than the products option. Also for restaurants and service-oriented businesses, be aware that adding items to the products function will delete any meal or service menus that have been created for you by a third party. You’ll need to recreate them with the aforementioned, Google-based menu function or the Services tab in your GMB dashboard.

What can be added as a product to Google My Business listings?

You can list the following as products:

Merchandise

Virtual inventory, like software

Services

There’s a strong argument to be made for listing your services as products, in fact, because they are more visible and have those strong, linked calls-to-action. As far as I’ve seen, Google has no problem with you having both products and services listed, so you can do both!

How to add products to your Google My Business dashboard in 10 easy steps

To keep yourself organized, create a spreadsheet (or make a copy of this freebie I created for you) containing all the products you plan to list, and include a field in it for:

Product image

Product name

Category

Price

Description

Button

Link

BEFORE YOU BEGIN: Note that the last product you add will be the one that shows up first on your profile. So, save the best for last. Made a mistake? You can delete a product and re-add it as the newest item, which will make it show first, or you can edit a product in some minor way and the edit will also trigger re-ordering of the product lineup.

Now you’re ready to get going!

Step 1: Sign into your Google My Business dashboard for the listing you want to add products to, and click on the Products tab in the left-hand navigation menu:

Step 2. This will bring up a popup telling you how many people saw your listing last month and prompting you to add your products. Click the “get started button”.

Step 3. This brings up the simple wizard for adding your products

Step 4: Begin by adding a 1200 x 900 photo representing your first product. I recommend using original photos and graphics rather than stock photos, and it can make a bold visual statement if you choose to overlay the name of the product in text on the image.

Step 5: Give your product a name:

Step 6: Create a category for the product. If this is the very first product you’ve added to your listing, there will be nothing in the dropdown. As you add more products and categories, though, the categories you’ve previously created will appear in the dropdown and you can select them to apply to the next product you add, or you can create further, new categories.

Step 7. Optionally, enter the price. You can either enter a single price, or use the little grey toggle on the right to enter a minimum and maximum price range. Don’t use letters or symbols in this field or Google will reject them. Our product pricing structure at Moz is complex, with special offers and different pricing for monthly vs. annual customers, so we chose to leave this field blank, but if your pricing is simple and not subject to frequent change that would require you to be updating pricing on a regular basis, it’s a good idea to add it.

Step 8: Add a product description of up to 1000 characters. It’s optional to do this, but you should definitely make the most of this opportunity to talk about the benefits of the product. I included a short explanation of the Moz Pro product, plus a customer’s testimonial.

Step 9: Add a call-to-action button from among the choices of Learn More, Buy, Order Online, or Get Offer. There’s also the option not to add a button, but why forego the chance to bring customers from your listing to your website? In the “link for your button” field, add the URL of the page you want this button to take the customer to on your website. If you want to measure how your product listings are performing, use UTM tagging in the link you enter, and you can track engagement in Google Analytics, though not in GMB Insights, sadly.

Step 10: Take a second look at all you’ve entered to be sure you’re happy with your entry and then hit the blue “save” button. Google will then show you the product in your dashboard:

And as you add more products and product categories, you can see them tabbed in the “Products” section of your GMB dashboard:

And, presto! Within minutes to a couple of hours, you should see your products appearing on your Google Business Profile when you search for you brand name (or brand name + city, if Google is a bit confused):

Customers can click on the “view all” link to see all the products you’ve listed:

Or, they can explore using the product categories you’ve created. Look at how big and bold these category buttons are, highlighting key offerings of your business!

And it will also show up on the Google Local Finder version of your GMB listing, though as far as I have seen, not in the Google Maps version of your listing:

The big question: Should you use GMB products?

Can and should are never the same thing. You’ve just learned whether you can upload your inventory via GMB products and you can definitely do it! But to determine whether you should invest the time in doing this, consider all of the following:

Maybe, yes!

Adoption of Google My Business products is so low as of yet, that if you add your products, it will really make your listing fuller than the bulk of your competitors in most markets. This is a definite competitive difference maker.

If you’ve got the ability to take good quality photos or have a graphic designer in-house who can efficiently design some imagery for you, product photos add a very appealing visual element to your listings. If you’d like to make a rather plain listing more inviting, this is a great option.

If you have an inventory that’s relatively stable, meaning you won’t be having to continuously editing existing product listings to avoid customer letdown when items become unavailable, that’s a good bet. If your pricing on stable products changes, you may want to opt out of showing prices.

If you need to drive any additional traffic you can to your website and shopping cart, this is surely an opportunity. Added bonus that this traffic is likely to be qualified traffic, because the searcher is looking for something particular.

If you’ve not yet been able to invest in a full e-commerce solution for your local business, consider GMB products a first step towards alerting shoppers that you have inventory for sale, even if you can’t yet fulfill their desire to buy it online.

Finally, a “yes” vote on adding products to your GMB listings can be consistent with your company’s culture of empathy. Regardless of where you do business, your community is full of elders, neighbors with serious health issues, and unvaccinated small children who are staying at home for safety’s sake for as long as the pandemic is with us. You can think of GMB products as a kind of virtual window shopping for these valued community members, and if you can connect your product showcase with curbside pickup or home delivery, your efforts are making your town a more caring and better-resourced place to call home. Use the description field and buttons to let people know how you can get your products safely into their hands.

Maybe, no!

If your inventory changes constantly, you’ll need to evaluate whether you have the internal resources to regularly edit your product set in the GMB dashboard.

If your inventory is large, you may not want to add every single product. Instead, you could add a representative product for each major category of goods, and write the description to make it clear that you have a wide selection of this type of item.

Mobile phones can take great pictures these days, but if your photos just don’t look great, it could be off-putting to customers seeing low-quality images. You might want to hold off on adding products until you learn to take photos that create a professional impression of the quality of your goods and services.

Some business owners may feel qualms about Google’s increasing involvement between them and their customers, and prefer to work on their own website rather than devoting additional resources to Google My Business features.

If your resources are limited, you may prefer to skip Google My Business products for now and go straight to Google Shopping, with its more sophisticated interface.

Overall, most local businesses will benefit from devoting some time to adding Google My Business products. Google has given us every reason to believe they are intently focused on shopping, with two major signs being their debut of the Shopping Graph at I/O this past spring and making it free to upload products to Google Shopping in 2020. We’ve all learned together over the past few decades that when Google zooms in on an area of search, we should at least be paying attention to how their efforts might be put to work for our local brands.

You have multiple opportunities to explore for enhancing the online visibility of your inventory, and right now, Google My Business products are the easiest way to wade into this work. The holiday shopping season is, incredibly, just around the corner, and if you start uploading products today, it will be your listing that stands out as the place that has what local customers want in December.

#túi_giấy_epacking_việt_nam #túi_giấy_epacking #in_túi_giấy_giá_rẻ #in_túi_giấy #epackingvietnam #tuigiayepacking

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How to Add Products to Your Google My Business Listing, Illustrated

“Who has X near me?”

This customer FAQ has become all the more important since 2020, with the public relying heavily on the Internet to help them remotely source goods and services while spending as little time as possible on business premises.

Google gets this, and is taking one step after another to position itself as the intermediary for this foundational query. Becoming the “transaction layer of the Internet” is how my friend and colleague David Mihm of Near Media describes Google’s aims when it comes to online shopping and the role they plan to play in it. As local businesses everywhere have scrambled to implement e-commerce and delivery features, Google has been very busy, too, with its own developments.

Perhaps the simplest of all these opportunities to get started with is Google My Business Products — a sort of virtual window shopping interface that can really spruce up your listings. Located in eligible GMB dashboards and with an output that’s visible on several local search interfaces, this feature could not be easier to use.This illustrated tutorial will walk you through adding your most important products and services to Google My Business Products, building your confidence that you are keeping apace with local search expanding to encompass local shopping search.

Who can and can’t add Google My Business products to their listings?

If you sign into your Google My Business dashboard, and you see a tab in the left menu for “products” you are eligible, with the exception of the products listed here that you can’t upload.

If you lack the “products” link but see that your competitors are using it, it’s likely that they have a Google My Business category you’re missing. Use the GMB Spy Chrome Extension to see all of the competitor’s GMB listing categories so that you can consider adding whatever is necessary to prompt the “products” option to appear in your dashboard.

Google’s documentation of this feature states that it’s intended for small-to-medium local businesses, and that they prefer large, multi-locations brands to provide product data through Local Inventory Ads. It would be helpful if Google would update this page to give a numeric cutoff between a medium-sized business and a large chain.

Meanwhile, if you’re marketing a restaurant, please note that Google prefers you to use the popular dishes and menu functions for showcasing your offerings, rather than the products option. Also for restaurants and service-oriented businesses, be aware that adding items to the products function will delete any meal or service menus that have been created for you by a third party. You’ll need to recreate them with the aforementioned, Google-based menu function or the Services tab in your GMB dashboard.

What can be added as a product to Google My Business listings?

You can list the following as products:

Merchandise

Virtual inventory, like software

Services

There’s a strong argument to be made for listing your services as products, in fact, because they are more visible and have those strong, linked calls-to-action. As far as I’ve seen, Google has no problem with you having both products and services listed, so you can do both!

How to add products to your Google My Business dashboard in 10 easy steps

To keep yourself organized, create a spreadsheet (or make a copy of this freebie I created for you) containing all the products you plan to list, and include a field in it for:

Product image

Product name

Category

Price

Description

Button

Link

BEFORE YOU BEGIN: Note that the last product you add will be the one that shows up first on your profile. So, save the best for last. Made a mistake? You can delete a product and re-add it as the newest item, which will make it show first, or you can edit a product in some minor way and the edit will also trigger re-ordering of the product lineup.

Now you’re ready to get going!

Step 1: Sign into your Google My Business dashboard for the listing you want to add products to, and click on the Products tab in the left-hand navigation menu:

Step 2. This will bring up a popup telling you how many people saw your listing last month and prompting you to add your products. Click the “get started button”.

Step 3. This brings up the simple wizard for adding your products

Step 4: Begin by adding a 1200 x 900 photo representing your first product. I recommend using original photos and graphics rather than stock photos, and it can make a bold visual statement if you choose to overlay the name of the product in text on the image.

Step 5: Give your product a name:

Step 6: Create a category for the product. If this is the very first product you’ve added to your listing, there will be nothing in the dropdown. As you add more products and categories, though, the categories you’ve previously created will appear in the dropdown and you can select them to apply to the next product you add, or you can create further, new categories.

Step 7. Optionally, enter the price. You can either enter a single price, or use the little grey toggle on the right to enter a minimum and maximum price range. Don’t use letters or symbols in this field or Google will reject them. Our product pricing structure at Moz is complex, with special offers and different pricing for monthly vs. annual customers, so we chose to leave this field blank, but if your pricing is simple and not subject to frequent change that would require you to be updating pricing on a regular basis, it’s a good idea to add it.

Step 8: Add a product description of up to 1000 characters. It’s optional to do this, but you should definitely make the most of this opportunity to talk about the benefits of the product. I included a short explanation of the Moz Pro product, plus a customer’s testimonial.

Step 9: Add a call-to-action button from among the choices of Learn More, Buy, Order Online, or Get Offer. There’s also the option not to add a button, but why forego the chance to bring customers from your listing to your website? In the “link for your button” field, add the URL of the page you want this button to take the customer to on your website. If you want to measure how your product listings are performing, use UTM tagging in the link you enter, and you can track engagement in Google Analytics, though not in GMB Insights, sadly.

Step 10: Take a second look at all you’ve entered to be sure you’re happy with your entry and then hit the blue “save” button. Google will then show you the product in your dashboard:

And as you add more products and product categories, you can see them tabbed in the “Products” section of your GMB dashboard:

And, presto! Within minutes to a couple of hours, you should see your products appearing on your Google Business Profile when you search for you brand name (or brand name + city, if Google is a bit confused):

Customers can click on the “view all” link to see all the products you’ve listed:

Or, they can explore using the product categories you’ve created. Look at how big and bold these category buttons are, highlighting key offerings of your business!

And it will also show up on the Google Local Finder version of your GMB listing, though as far as I have seen, not in the Google Maps version of your listing:

The big question: Should you use GMB products?

Can and should are never the same thing. You’ve just learned whether you can upload your inventory via GMB products and you can definitely do it! But to determine whether you should invest the time in doing this, consider all of the following:

Maybe, yes!

Adoption of Google My Business products is so low as of yet, that if you add your products, it will really make your listing fuller than the bulk of your competitors in most markets. This is a definite competitive difference maker.

If you’ve got the ability to take good quality photos or have a graphic designer in-house who can efficiently design some imagery for you, product photos add a very appealing visual element to your listings. If you’d like to make a rather plain listing more inviting, this is a great option.

If you have an inventory that’s relatively stable, meaning you won’t be having to continuously editing existing product listings to avoid customer letdown when items become unavailable, that’s a good bet. If your pricing on stable products changes, you may want to opt out of showing prices.

If you need to drive any additional traffic you can to your website and shopping cart, this is surely an opportunity. Added bonus that this traffic is likely to be qualified traffic, because the searcher is looking for something particular.

If you’ve not yet been able to invest in a full e-commerce solution for your local business, consider GMB products a first step towards alerting shoppers that you have inventory for sale, even if you can’t yet fulfill their desire to buy it online.

Finally, a “yes” vote on adding products to your GMB listings can be consistent with your company’s culture of empathy. Regardless of where you do business, your community is full of elders, neighbors with serious health issues, and unvaccinated small children who are staying at home for safety’s sake for as long as the pandemic is with us. You can think of GMB products as a kind of virtual window shopping for these valued community members, and if you can connect your product showcase with curbside pickup or home delivery, your efforts are making your town a more caring and better-resourced place to call home. Use the description field and buttons to let people know how you can get your products safely into their hands.

Maybe, no!

If your inventory changes constantly, you’ll need to evaluate whether you have the internal resources to regularly edit your product set in the GMB dashboard.

If your inventory is large, you may not want to add every single product. Instead, you could add a representative product for each major category of goods, and write the description to make it clear that you have a wide selection of this type of item.

Mobile phones can take great pictures these days, but if your photos just don’t look great, it could be off-putting to customers seeing low-quality images. You might want to hold off on adding products until you learn to take photos that create a professional impression of the quality of your goods and services.

Some business owners may feel qualms about Google’s increasing involvement between them and their customers, and prefer to work on their own website rather than devoting additional resources to Google My Business features.

If your resources are limited, you may prefer to skip Google My Business products for now and go straight to Google Shopping, with its more sophisticated interface.

Overall, most local businesses will benefit from devoting some time to adding Google My Business products. Google has given us every reason to believe they are intently focused on shopping, with two major signs being their debut of the Shopping Graph at I/O this past spring and making it free to upload products to Google Shopping in 2020. We’ve all learned together over the past few decades that when Google zooms in on an area of search, we should at least be paying attention to how their efforts might be put to work for our local brands.

You have multiple opportunities to explore for enhancing the online visibility of your inventory, and right now, Google My Business products are the easiest way to wade into this work. The holiday shopping season is, incredibly, just around the corner, and if you start uploading products today, it will be your listing that stands out as the place that has what local customers want in December.