Alix Axel Weblog

Ok it’s been a long time since I last posted something here so this time I’ll be talking about something that if done right can save you a lot of time and hopefully improve your online business by 200%.

This is a guide in how you can use some of the Google tools and services to aid you in your online business, so lets get started.

Google Gmail is a very powerful web based and POP3 e-mail client, I’m gonna explain how you can take advantage of some of its unique features to really empower the way you work.

Gmail - Cool Features

There are alot of cool features in Gmail to cover them all but some of them that you should be aware of are:

• Giant storage, at the time of this writing Gmail offers 2887MB of storage and increasing, if this is not enough, you can always upgrade it for a reasonable low price.
• POP3 enabled - Gmails lets you download your messages with POP3 and even import messages from other e-mail accounts using POP3 - Google is considering in providing IMAP access as well.
• Google Talk and Voicemail - Gmail also offers a IM service called Google Talk, with Google Talk you can chat using the Gmail interface or the Google Talk IM client, you can even send voice messages and receive messages that were sent to you when you are offline - the only drawback at this moment is the lack for multi-person chat support (chat conference) but Google is working on it..

Gmail - Labels & Filters:

• Gmail labels is something that I really love, why? The reason is simple. They act as folders with one particular yet remarkable difference: you can set an infinite number of labels to each message instead of only being able to move it into one folder. This gives you an enormous flexibility, you can for instance label one message with “Clients” and “Orders” and thus archive a better organization.
• Filters is something that you’re already used to in applications like Outlook or Thunderbird, you can think of them as a persistent search engine that is only executed when a new message arrives or, upon your request. Mixing filters and labels can give you some very good organization intelligence.

Gmail - Going Mobile:

Lets say that you are out of your workplace (vacations, meetings, etc) and you have no internet access to check your e-mail. You’ll have to answer those 50 clients really soon or they will get angry at you, for this purpose Gmail Mobile is here to save the day. If you have a Java capable cellphone just browse to http://www.gmail.com/app/ on your mobile web browser, download and install and you’re on the go - a powerful yet simple and fast Gmail client on your mobile.

Gmail - Hiding your Sins:

I’m sure that by this time you’ve already fallen in love with Gmail, however there is one last thing about Gmail that I would like to explain, lets say I was running a business with this domain (alixaxel.com) it certainly wouldn’t look professional if my e-mail address was alix-axel [at] gmail.com, to solve this problem there are a couple of solutions I can think of, one of the most simple is to create several e-mail accounts like sales [at] alixaxel.com or info [at] alixaxel.com and simply redirect all the incoming e-mail to my Gmail account, using labels and filters it’s possible to get a very well organized inbox. But this poses another problem, when you reply to someone using Gmail you’ll also have to setup the “Send mail as” feature to assure that no one replies to yourbusiness [at] gmail.com. There are also other alternatives such as using the Google Apps for your domain, but I won’t get much into that at this time, just check it out for yourself.

Google Calendar is another great tool that I love, you can use it to schedule meetings, events, deadlines and so on - you can receive alerts on your e-mail account and (this one really blows my mind) on your cellphone via SMS, worldwide.

Google Docs and Spreadsheets is nice tool for - you guessed it - working with documents and spreadsheets, great for storing documents such as contracts or when you’re without OpenOffice (if you are still using Microsoft Office I suggest you go the software libre way).

That’s it! This concludes my guide on “Managing your online business with Google”, there are a couple more things to look at such as Google Apps, Google Finance, Google Analytics, Google Alerts and of course, the Google Search itself, but I’ll leave that for another occasion. If this guide helped you in some way I’ll be very glad to know about it.