Create a Custom Google Map

Posted • September 22, 2008 • Comments Off

Google Maps can Make a Good Marketing Tool.

Hand your audience the world. Google maps can be placed on a website, emailed, and used as a marketing tool.

Have you created your custom Google Map yet?

I have a client that needed a map for his new business Taco Miendo. Taco Miendo is a Mexican food fast and served your way drive in and drive thru restaurant in Oregon City.

I figured I would take you along with me as I created a custom Google map for Taco Miendo. You will need a Google account and a small amount of time.

Building your own custom Google map is painless and easy.

Here are the basic steps:

1. Go to Google Maps.
2. Click My Maps > Create new map.
3. Add a title and description for your map. You can make your map public or unlisted. Learn more.
4. Use the icons in the the top left corner of the map. These include:
   1. Selection tool. Use this to drag the map and select placemarks, lines, and shapes.
   2. Placemark button Placemark tool. Use this to add placemarks.
   3. Polygon button Line tool. Use this to draw lines.
   4. Shape button Shape tool. Use this to draw shapes.

Click My Maps > Create new map.

The create a Google Map interface is basically simple and straight forward.

It really is that simple they even allow you to edit the balloon text in html, rich text with a wygiwyg editor, or plain text. Google also gives you the html code to embed in your page and/or a html link to publish. To access this code you just click on the “Link” text in the upper right hand corner of the blue bar above the map.

When you are done you have a Google map with the description you have entered you can share place in a blog post, on a website, a Google map to link to, or your imagination will allow.

Here is the Live version of the Taco Miendo Google Map

View Larger Map

I am sure that the Yahoo and MSN maps are just as easy and simple to customize as Google Maps but they just don’t have the volume search traffic attached to them.

Late,
Gary Pool

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