Wednesday, March 25, 2009

Anyone who knows me knows that I love many Google Products - I use Gmail extensively and follow their product releases closely. I wanted to write about how you can use many of these Google products to build your business with the Google Apps suite.

 

Setting up Google Apps

Google Apps is a service that combines many products into a single suite for business and organizations with a focus on collaboration and communication. It allows a company to set up a web presence or Intranet that is hosted on Google's servers and assign an account to each employee or member. These accounts are all tied together, so users can easily e-mail, chat and collaborate with one another.

There are two versions of Google Apps - Standard and Premier. The Standard version is free and packages together all the Google products for up to 50 users. Google subsidizes this service by placing ads within the applications, similar to the way Gmail currently works for regular users.

The premium version has a per-user charge with no maximum account limit and is hosted on separate servers with guaranteed uptime. The premium version comes packaged with some compliance and security tools that can be important for larger organizations and allows for full access for programmers via Google's extensive APIs (application programming interfaces).

To join Google Apps you can purchase a new domain (www.mycompany.com). If you already own the domain and you have full DNS-level access, you can make Google Apps work as well. Once you have registered, you can build your company website and assign accounts and e-mail addresses to your users (user@mycompany.com).

It's amazing that Google provides these services to organizations for free - I was able to set up my organization with 3 accounts within 20 minutes, and when I logged into my Gmail within Google Apps, I could immediately see the other two members of my organization within the Google Chat sidebar.

Links:

• Google Apps for Business
• Google Apps Editions

Using Shared Google Calendar, Talk and Gmail

Google Apps comes with the following applications:

• Full featured Gmail account for every user
• Calendar - Each user has their own calender that can be shared, and can see the company calendar
• Google Chat - A built-in instant messaging tool
• Google Docs - Use the online word processing and spreadsheet tools for collaborating and sharing
• Google Sites - Create an wiki for knowledge management
• Google Pages - Maintain a set of web pages for your organization
• Contact - Organize your contacts and their groups

SalesForce integration is also available at an additional cost.

One benefit of signing up your employees or organization members within a single Google Apps installation is that all the accounts are connected. All users can see their company calendar, and collaboration is easy.

All the applications are also available on mobile phones, and the e-mail, contacts and calendar can all be synchronized with desktop programs like Outlook if preferable. Gmail supports POP and IMAP e-mail protocols and allows all e-mails to be forwarded to a different account or be pulled from other mail servers into Gmail.

 

Using Google Docs

Google Docs is an amazing product. It is much like Microsoft Office, except that it is all hosted by Google and documents are all available online. When you are working on documents, spreadsheets and presentations, you can share them with other users. In fact, this article was originally written within Google Docs, and shared with other users for review. Many users can work on the document at the same time, and all changes are recorded.

Some features of Google Docs include:

• Share and collaborate - documents are stored online so you don't have to worry about multiple copies
• Security and access control - You can decide who can view or edit your documents.
• Revision control - All changes are recorded and can be reviewed
• Notification - Supports email notification when a document has been edited

Google has also recently added a full presentation tool (like Microsoft PowerPoint) and a form builder that allows you to send surveys and have results compiled automatically into a spreadsheet.

There are many competing products that are similar to Google Docs - a few of the major competitors are listed below for reference.

Links:

• Google Docs
• Zoho online office suite
  
• ThinkFree office

Tuesday, March 17, 2009

Improve your productivity and get more done every day by managing your time better. Good time management skills have several benefits:

• Higher productivity
• Lower stress levels
• Job satisfaction
• Increased focus
• Greater ability to meet deadlines

Learning how to manage your emails properly or creating an efficient desktop filing system can help you better manage your daily workload. If you are constantly multi-tasking and trying to catch up, you will increase your stress level and become less productive.

Five Time Management Tips

1. Make a prioritized task list at the start of every day.
2. Work through your tasks one at a time.
3. Set aside a specific time slot to catch up on emails and phone calls.
4. Create a filing system that works for you and stick to it.
5. Focus on what you do best and delegate or outsource the rest.

Of course, managing your time effectively is easier said than done! How about starting off by making a list of your top priorities for tomorrow?

Check out the following online services for list makers:

• Ta-da list - an online to-do list creator
• DontForgetTheMilk.com - an online shopping list manager

Sunday, March 1, 2009

As a web freelancer, I often get people asking me about their small business websites. As much as I sometimes have trouble making time for these small sites, the online marketing part of these projects can be both fun and challenging. The excitement of a small-business entrepreneur when he starts to see his site rise on the search engine results is very satisfying.

For a couple small business sites recently, I was tasked with setting up their sites on a major CMS platform and performing the initial search engine optimization. I thought I would share my experiences here. Some of these are quite obvious, but I find that keeping these small basic tasks in mind really help build a good platform for online marketing. When you follow the rules and build the site reputation methodically, you should find that the site has a lot of "staying" power - the popularity of the site rarely decreases.

1. Have a marketing plan

It's important that any marketing project has a plan. In the case of a small business website, the plan does not need to be comprehensive, but it is well worth doing some research. Some tips:

• Spend a long time surfing and reading the competitor's sites
• Do a lot of searches so that you can see what kind of results are available
• Pick the keywords that you think people will use to find you

If you're selling a physical product, it is very appropriate to market locally and try to make sure your search engine rankings are very high for your local area. Google runs country-specific sites (like www.google.ca and www.google.fr), and adding a city name to the keywords usually filters results down further. Focusing on the local search engine traffic really helps narrow the focus and get you off to a good start.

2. Create a sitemap

This is basic stuff, but having a sitemap can really help search engines like Google find and categorize the major pages and categories of your site. A sitemap acts as a list of all the major pages of your site, and so it acts as a jumping point for search engines to find all those pages.

In Joomla, there is an extension called 'XMap' that creates nice sitemaps based on your site structure. It also allows you to upload copies of your sitemap to Google Webmaster Tools.

Useful Links:

• Description of a web sitemap
  
• Google Webmaster Tools
  
• XMap extension for Joomla

3. Measure your success

Anytime you start even the smallest marketing effort, it is important to be able to measure your success. Without the ability to check your results, you have no way to know what works right and what does not. One thing I set up early on for most web projects is integration with Web Analytics applications. In most cases, being a Google fanboy, I find that Google Analytics works really well for measuring traffic to your site.

I also downloaded a copy of the freeware/adware Link Popularity Checker. This tool allows us to see the relative ranking of the site and the leading competitors. This is immensely handy in determining where competiting sites are more popular - for example, if competitor A has a much higher ranking, you can see that it is due to a large number of search results in MSN. You can drill down into those results to see what they are doing to achieve that.

Useful Links:

• Link Popularity Checker
  
• Google Analytics

 

4. Two online references per week

I started this early on. Every week, I try to post two references about the new site on any site I can, paying close attention to the sites that help the most. There are many sites where you can showcase your work - this is an easy option, discussion forums that are related to the particular industry are even better. Ideally you should get yourself within a community related to the industry. It doesn't take a long time, and I was able to very quickly push my small sites above their local competitors. In reference to the application mentioned above (Link Popularity Checker), you can see the different sites that the competitors have posted to, and do the same.

Don't be tempted to post too much, you may not be spending your time wisely. Post a few each week, and measure the success of those posts.

Don't be tempted to fight dirty and join too many "spammy" sites - these will hurt your search engine ranking much more than they will help.

Useful Link:

• Google Webmaster Guidelines

 

Conclusion

I recently read an article about the early days of a leading social networking site. They would make personal contact with everyone that signed up for their service. In this day and age of quick web searches and globalization, I think we tend to forget about the importance of making regular efforts to build your online reputation and tweak your marketing efforts. Good luck!