Okay, so step one of getting your Google My Business listing off the ground and getting started is to actually go to Google My Business and set up an account. So you Edina Google account for this. And you can just go to google.com slash business. And you'll sign in. And so you can just use an account that you have, preferably a business account that you've got set up for this, because you'll be getting emails and communication from this. And once you will get started, you'll, it'll log you in.

And basically what you want to do is set up a new, if you've done this before, like I have, then I have to start something new. So let me once you log in, you'll be faced with this screen if you haven't set this up before and then you type in your business name. Now for this. This tutorial, I'm basically going to create a new business so I'm going to call it Joshua's widgets. And there is no business obviously by that name. So go ahead and fill this out.

It's gonna start Say yes, so I'm just going to have to agree to everything that Google wants to do. And so this is really important, you can actually type in, I'm going to say I'm a real estate agent just to make it easy. But you can see that just real estate, there are a bunch of different ones to choose from. And in another lesson, we'll go into how to access these other categories, so that you can actually get traffic from these as well. But for now, I'm just going to go ahead and say I'm a real estate agency. And then do I want to add a location that customers can visit like a store office.

Now this is very important. If you have a brick and mortar, this is a great place to put that now if you do not have a brick and mortar location where people can actually visit you you enter your house, you can still sign up for Google My Business. You just have to be mindful that that you know you you're not going to want to disclose your address, probably because it'll pop up on the map. But if you've ever done a search for a business near me, you'll probably see some businesses pop up in your neighborhood who've incorrectly kind of set up this this thing so yes, Let's say that I don't have a physical location. So I'm saying Nope. So where do I where my service area is, let's say Atlanta.

Alright, and that's good enough for now, what you can do in the future is actually add in every city that you, you go into. And so you can, you can change and add more later. So that's a good reminder, you can do that. Now you want your details to show so I'm going to put my, my my address in there, and then I'm going to put I don't have a website, I don't need a website. Now what they're going to do is actually send you a postcard to this address to verify that you are who you say you are. And it's like a real person here on and this is where a lot of business owners get caught up is they're trying to use a fake address.

And if that postcard goes somewhere, and then that postcard doesn't get picked up, then you can't verify your listing which means your listings active, so please put an address where you can actually get the mail address and they do check so or they do spot checks. And so what you want to do is make sure that you put address in that, like so that you can get the mail and that if someone was to come by and ask for you, they would say that. So some places that are kind of difficult, like real estate offices where there might be 100 agents accessing the same address, I assume you just wanna be mindful of that, that, you know, put your name on there. So right, there's not really an option to do that. So you put your address in there. But you may want to tell the front desk person that you're going to have this postcard come in.

The other thing is, is that actually, when they come in, they ask for you by name that they can actually find you if they've asked Joshua woods. Yes. The other place that this could run into problems is those Executive Office suites where you can actually purchase sort of a mailbox. And if you're not careful, they you know, you'll lose a postcard and you can't verify it. So just be very mindful of that. Otherwise, punch address in and get going and then once the next step goes, so I'm gonna go ahead and put my address in.

And if you notice over here, you can actually add a line and What I would do is you could put a certain suite until the client are tell your front desk person, if you're using that certain suite number, it'll be odd and that way, they can find it like sweet, you know, 4000 x. And then, or you can put attention, a certain name in here. Sometimes I can help if you're in a place where there's multiple people, same thing here, they have a contact name, so you can actually put attention, so and so there. That also helps if you're in a place like that. But if you have a business and you see the postcard, it doesn't, doesn't have to have that. And then you can hit mail.

And then once you get your post once a once you get your postcard, then you'll have a code enter in and that's where we'll pick up on the next lesson.