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Creating a Google-Powered Small Business to Maximize Performance

Google has come a long way since its inception and initial public offering in 1998 as a search engine while competing with heavyweights Lycos and AOL back in those days. However, what separates the company from the pack is their ability to invent and scale up free tools and resources that small businesses can use every day. In a world where small business is boundary less and globalization is as easy as incorporating, that’s a pretty savvy and strategic focus. With these tips, you can create a Google-powered small business that’s efficient, lean, and best of all, maximizes its operational performance.

Sure, Google is a powerful search engine for information on just about anything your little heart may be looking for, and the company has done extremely well in that core business (revenues were nearly $24 billion last year and if you want a piece of the action, be prepared to shell out about $600 a share these days). But over the past few years, Google’s bread and butter has become their small business apps that have allowed companies of all sizes to exchange emails, calendars, documents, spreadsheets, pictures, video, website analytics, advertising, and just about anything else you can imagine – for free.

Here’s a few of Google’s small business apps I use every day that my shop doors are open.

Gmail – Google’s flagship email client Gmail allows for anyone to set up a free account with a 28G capacity; and don’t worry if you don’t understand what a Gig is, because you don’t have to. Just know that’s a lot of space. My favorite feature about Gmail is the new Google Voice application that allows you to make free phone calls to anyone in the US using VoIP. You can even add a “call me” widget to your small business’s website that allows visitors to call your office right from your homepage. When you’re ready to make the conversion, you can import your existing email address, contacts, and emails to your new Gmail account for a seamless conversion.

Google Docs – Google Docs is short for documents, a web-based application that allows for people to create, share, edit, and download word processing and spreadsheet documents and presentations. While there are no fancy features like those available in Microsoft Office’s programs, all of the basic functionalities are there and that’s good enough for most businesses. No longer will you be endlessly emailing documents to and from collaborators every time a revision is made; you and your team can just log on to Google and use the Docs App.

The Docs are stored in what’s called “the cloud” – formally known as cloud computing – which essentially allows for files to be stored and accessed not from your machine’s local hard drive, but from the web-based provider (in this case, Google is the provider). One particularly useful feature is the auto-save and viewing capability. As your editing a document or spreadsheet, Google is automatically saving it for you every second and the people you’ve shared that document with can view your revisions in real-time.

Google Places – It’s a free directory for listing your local business so that it may be found by a Google or Google Maps search. You can add your business’s address, description of services, business categories, areas you serve, keywords, pictures, video, and so much more. Arguably, the best part is that it’s entirely free. Yahoo.com, Local.com, and the Yellow Pages are all paid local business directories, and the irony of it is that most people use Google when searching through local business listings anyway. I also love that Google adds a picture of your store front by default when you enter in your address (Google pays people to take pictures of every address in the world – no kidding!) If you run your business from home like I do, you can easily turn the picture feature off.

Google Social Media Apps – Some analysts and experts quip that Google has had a particularly hard time breaking into social media and bringing unique platforms to the mass market, but I disagree (with the exception of Google Buzz, which allows you to create a profile and share updates, videos, photos and more and was recently hit with a lawsuit over privacy protection). In 2006, Google bought YouTube, the undisputed champ of the social video-sharing sites. As a small business, you can create, upload, and share across multiple end-user outlets that include your websites pages and email marketing campaigns. Use these simple, informative, and attractive online videos to introduce your business, product, or service.

Google’s free blogging platform, Blogger, is one of the biggest blogging platform on the Internet today (close rivals would include WordPress and Typepad). You can easily set up a profile, integrate Blogger into your small business’s website, and you or your employees can begin blogging today about your industry trends, new products or services you’re rolling out or featuring, and just about anything else that relates to your company. Having a blog is becoming extremely more and more essential to building a strong web-based brand for your small business because it gives your company a voice and authority, which immediately helps your Google search rankings.

Lastly, Google Picasa allows you to upload, store, edit, and share hundreds of photos that integrate seamlessly with your small business’s other Google apps, website, and other social media sites.

AdWords, Analytics, and Webmaster Tools – The last category of indispensable Google Apps for small business has to include AdWords, a platform for creating and managing advertisement campaigns on Google; Analytics, a comprehensive platform for detailed tracking of your small business’s website visitors and how they behaved on your site; and Webmaster Tools, the brother of Analytics that helps your small business’s webmaster to understand how Google crawls, indexes, and ranks your website.

My small business is run almost exclusively on the vital Google Apps listed above, and I couldn’t be any happier or more productive. If you need help establishing and maintaining any of these tools, or you’re wondering how you can begin using Google to help make your business run faster, smarter, and more efficient, take a deeper look at Google’s small business tools.

Note that that you don’t have to sign up for each of these small business Apps individually; rather, simply sign your company up for a new Google Account, fill in the necessary information, and then simply “add” these apps right from your account settings page.

 

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Small Web Hosting – Small Business Web Hosting Services

If you own a small business then it is wise to let your customers know more about your products or services. You might have a hair salon or a medium sized clinic. As much as the community around your area knows about your existence you can always do more.

It is a good way to expand your business. By doing it right you can experience more growth with time. You might consider using a small business web hosting to support your trade.

You can start by getting a good design for your business website. The best thing is to give it a simple outlook. Make sure it represents what you do in your daily business activities. A simple layout allows customers to understand what your business is all about. This is the most important part when putting up a website. If clients visiting your site are clueless about what you do then no amount of small business web hosting can save your business.

For your website to have a positive impact on your business you need to provide useful information. You can do this by posting valuable information on activities that go on in your business. If you run a hair salon then let your customers know about techniques used. Give your customers information on how easy it is to make appointments at your salon. You only profit more from small business web hosting if you attract customers to your site.

Your site does not have to involve a lot of technical work. A good idea is to have a website designer show you a few design samples. You can select what you want to adopt according to the nature of your business. Make sure your website is free from flashy or graphic pictures. Give it a clean and classic look. Customers are put of by flashy type of websites. Give them a chance to read more about your business. It is the only way to use money wisely with small business web hosting.

You can work with small business web hosting services that are reputable for providing good traffic to websites. A good idea is to conduct an online search for these kinds of services. Find out how well they are performing. This can help you make a good decision when choosing a web business hosting service.

It is good to note that not all popular small business web hosting services suite your needs. You can look out for less popular but competent services. They are more cost effective as they don’t ask for very high fees.

 

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Small Business Marketing That Actually Works

Effective principles for standard and home based small businesses:

To best understand small business marketing we first need to agree on a definition. In simple terms it means “exposing your business idea to as many of the right people as possible and convincing them that you have the solution to their problem”. That’s about as “un-technical” as I can put it.

How did I come up with this definition?

A while back before I started my own small home based business I learned about marketing as an affiliate marketer promoting other peoples products. At the time I thought I had a very good idea of what this would involve to be successful. Now, as an affiliate marketer I have found that the most effective way to market to the general public is to use pay per click marketing, primarily through Google AdWords. I can’t begin to tell you how much you can actually learn about consumers and their habits by simply experimenting with AdWords.

To summarize my point, I just want to say that what Google taught me is that it is financially most beneficial to reach only those people who are already looking for my product or service rather than trying to market to the whole community in hopes of trying to “sell them” on the idea of my product or service.

Read that again and let it sink in.

With any small business your marketing must be as precise as possible and incur the lowest expense. If you can execute that equation you’ll reap the biggest reward. To clarify my point I would like present to you two examples.

Once again, let me refer to Google AdWords. Let’s say you’ve decided to become an Avon representative. I’ve chosen this only because my wife loves Avon and she also markets the products. One of the things that Avon doesn’t tell you is that it will take an incredible amount of work to build your business. The main obstacle anyone involved in this type of business has to overcome is TIME. You can only talk to or reach so many people in a given day or year. At some point you have to stop reaching out and service the customers you’ve acquired and/or develop the contacts you’ve made that want to start their own Avon business.

One the best things that Avon has recently done is to provide their rep’s with their own website. In theory this is great. But right away there are a couple of problems with this. Let’s take a look:

– simply having a website doesn’t mean a thing to the success of your business – most of these folks who pay for this benefit actually think that this will bring them more customers (why they would think this I don’t know) – very few people know how to take advantage of an already built website

If you understand small business marketing then you’ve already had the proverbial light bulb already go off. You’ve a great looking website that’s easy to use, you just need visitors. That’s where Google comes in.

I would advise anyone who planned on selling Avon and making use of this website to learn the basics of Google’s AdWords to conduct as many marketing tests as possible. For example, if you’re passion is “skin care” then I would learn as much as possible about the subject and study the pages on the website that are dedicated to this topic. Once you’ve done that then I would begin to think about the type of person who would benefit from these products. With that basic information you can conduct a few marketing experiments.

One of the things Google will help you discover is whether or not there is a market of the product or service you’re promoting as where and how to reach them. By setting a simple ad campaign using the topic “skin care” you can develop a list of keywords/phrases that people would type into Google’s search engine. Start with a bid of $0.05/click and cap off your daily expense and about $3.00/day and let it run for about a couple of weeks. The destination URL would simply be http://www.avon.com. Over a 14 day period if you got enough clicks to use up your daily budget you would have accumulated about 840 clicks. This means that over 800 people would have found your site.

Now, why would you want to spend $42 dollars with no chance of making any money? Simple, wouldn’t you rather know up front if you could get people to find your site before you spend a lot of time and money after you’ve made the plunge? Think about it. By simply spending $42 at the onset you would have a pretty good idea of what you’re chances are at generating leads for your Avon business before you totally commit yourself and end up being disappointed and frustrated.

This is a very simple small business marketing experiment you can conduct every time you have a great business idea you want to try out. Folks, this is simply good business sense. Do you think companies like McDonald’s, Wendy’s, WalMart, Home Depot simply put up retail outlets before conducting a single marketing experiment? You can operate just as smart as these guys.

Here’s my second example. We’ll build on the previous example just a bit. The method I now use to drive traffic to what I call an “affiliate website” like Avon’s I use a website builder program that actually uses a simple building block method along with powerful keyword research software to determine which terms are the most profitable and I design my web pages around these terms to attract “targeted traffic” to my site.

Let’s refer again to the topic of “skin care”. I can, for example, conduct a keyword research on the phrase “skin care” and come up with a list of words/phrases with high demand but low competition. Once I have this list I begin to write informative content that is based on these words. For example, I can write a page on “acne skin care”. The whole content of this page would address this subject and nothing more. The search engines would index this page and know exactly how to classify it so that it comes up with the right search terms on their search engine. This is exactly what I want. Why? Because to succeed with my small business marketing I need to attract “targeted visitors.

How is this being done you ask? Well, once visitors arrive at my website page, read my captivating and informative content they will want MORE information. At this point I will already have a included a “text link” within the context of my page that would direct them to my Avon affiliate site. But more specifically, they would be directed to the “exact page” with the information or product they are looking for, not the “home” page. The web page I created and submitted to the search engines does the most important job of all…it PREsells each visitor. If I have done a good job at this point then by the time they reach my Avon site they are probably ready to buy.

That is the essence of small business marketing as it pertains to the online world. For more information on this subject you can visit my site.