How It Works: the web-book
—How to broadcast & embed a Google+ video chat

On your Google+ page, click “Start a hangout” (upper-right corner) and invite up to 9 other active participants in the video chat, which they will join via their Google+ account (not this page). Other non-participant visitors may view the session, live or recorded, on your website as described further below.

Invite friends to be active participants, name the hangout, and enable it to be “On Air.”

Start the video hangout, invite participants to join and check their sound & camera feeds, and make sure that all agree to be publicly recorded.

Click the “Embed” button to copy and paste the code of the upcoming video feed to your site (such as a WordPress post or page, using the HTML editor). The embed code will not appear until your hangout has begun, so you cannot do this step ahead of time. This step required me to juggle two things at the same time.

When you and your participants are ready, click the “Start Broadcast” button, wait for the countdown (about five seconds), then officially begin your live, recorded conversation.

Visitors to your website (who are not actively participating via Google +) will see a live video feed during the session. After your hangout session ends, the feed will automatically convert into a YouTube recording for future viewers.

After the live broadcast, I realized that my WordPress site displayed a small YouTube screen that viewers could not enlarge. So I went to my YouTube account, found the URL for the video recording (which finished processing a few minutes after our live session ended), and pasted it into the WordPress page, in place of the embed code. Now viewers have more control over viewing the recorded session.