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So Totally Business Savvy, Episode Seven.
Hello, everybody, and welcome to So Totally Business Savvy. My name is Dean Soto, business and technology consultant here for you today to talk a little bit of tech stuff, specifically, about Google Apps. Google Apps and why you should be using it and why you probably don’t even know what Google Apps is even though you think you do. It is something that is absolutely vital to my business, extremely inexpensive, and/or free, and something that you should consider; all that coming up.
Hey, my friends, once again welcome to So Totally Business Savvy. Today, we’re going to talk about Google Apps, all about Google Apps. I know that you’re probably thinking, “I know about Gmail, I know about Google calendar; what are you talking about?” We’re not talking about that. Yes, Gmail is involved; yes, Google calendar is involved and so on, but Google Apps doesn’t mean Google Applications. It is a specific product from Google that I just cannot live without, I honestly cannot live without. I don’t know why small businesses don’t use Google Apps nearly as much as they should. It is something that is just fantastic, fantastic!
All right. So, what am I talking about? First thing I want you to do right now as I’m talking is, go to Google.com which I’m going to do right now and I want you to type in “Google Apps standard edition.”
So, what is Google Apps? It is a whole suite of Google products that are tailored specifically to businesses, and specifically to business domains. So, rather than having an email address that says, superawesomesalon@gmail.com or superawesomesalon@yahoo.com or whatever, it is going to say, dean@superawesomesalon.com or dean@youcanworkless.com which is what my domain is. But I get to use Gmail with my business.
Now, there might be some of you out there saying, “Oh, I know about Google Apps,” and so on, but there are so many business owners who don’t understand just how valuable Google Apps is. So traditionally, when you wanted to have your own domain as your email, what you would do is, with your web host, you would connect either via POP or IMAP to that specific web host and have to use either their webmail that they have or use Microsoft Exchange, Microsoft Outlook or Outlook Express or Thunderbird. It would be an application that is on your desktop, on your one computer. And you can still use those with Google Apps. But the beauty of Google Apps is you can reach your business email anywhere. Basically, it is your own private Gmail, your own private Google calendar, your own private Google docs. It has your domain name on it like Proulum.com or Superawesomesalon.com, but you get to use all the Gmail products.
Now, how much does this cost? Well, if you did what I said and went to Google and typed in “Google Apps standard edition” you’ll see that it is absolutely free. It is free up to 50 users and that is awesome. Now I use Pro Version and that’s $50 a year, not a month, yes, I said a year; $50 a year per user. Now, even with that, that is pretty inexpensive—$50 a year per user, but honestly, 99% of businesses out there can do everything and more with standard edition. You got a little bit more with the “Pro Edition” like you get to upload videos, you get Google contacts and be able to share contacts between each other, you get Google Groups and so on. But with the Standard Edition, you get Gmail and seven gigs worth of space for your email and their whole Spam filter and all that stuff. You get Google calendar, you get Google sites, and you get Google docs. That’s pretty amazing! And to have that at your disposal is so key to being able to collaborate and communicate within your business.
Now, you might just be one person like me. Oh, actually I’m not one person, I do have an assistant but what you can do is, like for example, with Google docs, you can share out a doc with your clients. You can share out docs with prospective clients. You can share out documents with friends, people you’re collaborating with for events or something like that. It does not have to stay within your business but you still get real time collaboration on documents. You can share out your calendar with friends, with other businesses and so on so they can see what’s going on. All these, all these you can do with Google Apps. It’s pretty amazing! I do not understand why a lot of businesses do not use this.
So, what spurred this? Well, really two things. One, I was working with a business owner.
I created a website for him and he said, “Okay, well, where do I login to my web host to get to my email?”
And I said, “Well, why not just use Google Apps?”
And I sent him the link and everything and even after sending him the link, he was like, “I don’t understand. I don’t understand how to use this. I don’t understand how this can be free.”
And to me, I’m just flabbergasted. You’re a business owner, you want to save money. You want to do everything as cheaply as possible, and you do not know that these tools are out there? Frustration!
I was also helping another friend. I built him a blog today and he said kind of the same thing. Wow! He was very much more open to it, but his question was, “Why don’t people know that this is out there?”
I think, honestly, it’s for two reasons. One, Google Apps, just by the name, Google Apps connotes all the other products that they have. There are Google docs, Google voice and so on. And so when I hear Google Apps, I just think of their normal applications. So that’s one.
Two is, most people are, especially business owners are so used to having things on their local computer, having things not in the so-called “Cloud” anymore or not anymore but you know, now, which is kind of the way things are going. Honestly, to me, it’s kind of sad. It’s sad because here’s this awesome free tool out there that people could take advantage of especially if you’re a consultant or if you’re like a one-person show. I think it’s absolutely something that should be necessary for you.
What makes it even more powerful is the fact that they opened up what is called the Google Apps Marketplace. Now the Google Apps Marketplace really sold me on Google Apps. They didn’t have this before when they first opened up Google Apps but now, what they’ve done is they’ve allowed third parties like Freshbooks and Mailchimp and Gist and all these other companies to use the Google Apps API and authentication to connect Google Apps with all those different things.
So, basically, what happens is you login to Google Apps, you login to your back-end, to your Gmail, to your calendar or whatever. There’s a menu up on top where it says, “More” and you have all those things at your disposal. You don’t have to login to those manually anymore; they’re interconnected. In most cases they actually sync up with email, like for example Gist. Anytime I send an email to someone, or someone sends an email to me, they’re automatically populated into my Customer Relationship Manager or my Contact Relationship Manager. It’s all automatic! How awesome is that? What a time saver that is! I’ve already done an episode on this so you can go back to it. I think it was the last episode, yeah, it’s Episode Six. I may be wrong; anyway, I’ll check that out later. And because of this Marketplace, because of its integration, not only are the communications between my clients and I or prospective clients or friends there but also attachments are separated and I can see what new attachments there are and so on, just all automatically all without me even trying. So awesome!
But you know, there are other things out there that connect with Google Apps, and so what I’m going to give you right now is my Google Apps set up. Now, I’m going to warn you that Google Apps is easy to set up, but it’s not that easy. If you’ve ever set up a domain before or set up a web host before, you’re probably going to be able to do what’s necessary for Google Apps. But if you use Dreamhost or if you use Bluehost or Views, other really good web services, they will set up Google Apps for you generally. It will at least help you with the hard parts of Google Apps. So don’t get me wrong, Google Apps is not an absolute breeze to set up but if you do set it up, it is worth it, absolutely, absolutely worth it.
Heck, if you want me to set it up, that’s fine, I do Google Apps consulting, I am a Google Apps reseller; and no, that is not why I am doing this particular podcast but I’m doing this podcast because I think it’s awesome, honestly! I think it’s awesome, and you can ask all my friends and all the people that I talked to about it, who I set it up for free for my friends and so on, why I love it. It’s just awesome.
So what I’m going to do right now is I’m actually going to give you the list of third party apps that I use with Google Apps that make it so amazingly beautiful, amazingly awesome. I don’t know, I just fall completely in love with it. Okay, enough of the love fest.
So, first app that I use is Aviary. Now Aviary is free, completely free and if you don’t know what it is, basically, it is a web-based Photoshop, a web-based audio recorder, a web-based Adobe Illustrator. It doesn’t have the full, extreme functionalities that Photoshop Illustrator and Adobe Audition and so on does, but what they do is they basically bring the Adobe Suite to the Web absolutely free. How they make money off of it? I have no clue. No clue whatsoever but they do, somehow they do make money or maybe they’re they have enough capital to where they don’t have to worry about that right now, I don’t know. It is pretty awesome. Actually, I just used it today to help my friend with his logo on his blog that I helped to create for him. And if you want to go to his blog, it’s tednguyenusa.com. Let me spell that: t-e-d-n-g-u-y-e-n-u-s-a.com. Great guy, awesome PR! If you ever want to know about PR, if you ever want a public relations consultant, he is the man, the myth, and/or the legend.
Anyway, so I used Aviary to help crop a logo for him. You can use it to build logos, you can use it to do whatever. It is so powerful. They have a whole host, like anything that’s in the Adobe Suite that you see really is in Aviary in a basic form but it’s a good introduction to those items that are in there so you have like I said, a Vector Illustrator, you have a Photoshop type thing and so on.
The next thing that I use is Freshbooks. Obviously, I’ve talked about Freshbooks a lot, I’ve bragged about Freshbooks a lot, I love them, they sent me a free t-shirt because I told them that I love them. I do. They help out my accounting tremendously. They’re very easy and honestly, that’s the best part about them. The other part I like about it is they handle contractors very well. So if I have to hire a contractor, the contractors can easily put in their time and so on.
I highly recommend Freshbooks but there are others out there like Harvest and Quickbooks. Quickbooks, if you plan on getting really big, I would probably go with Quickbooks. If you have plan to stay as a consultant or kind of like a one to two person, maybe five people at the most type show, probably, I would recommend Freshbooks. But if you do plan on growing into a larger business, Quickbooks Online is really good, they’ve had some server problems really badly lately to the point where their whole entire infrastructure for Quickbooks Online went down. I had my clients screaming at me and I immediately went to Twitter to see what was up and Quickbooks and Intuit, the company who created Quickbooks said, “Oh, yeah, sorry, our whole entire system went down.” Being IT security type of guy myself, the only thing I could say is, “Wow, guys, you have a really, really poor disaster recovery plan. I mean, honestly, honestly, your entire infrastructure for Quickbooks Online going down? That’s pretty sad.” But you know, they have a good product. Honestly, they have a very, very good product. But just keep in mind, uptime doesn’t seem to be pretty good with Quickbooks Online.
Next, I use Gist. I’ve talked about Gist before, I love Gist, great Contact Relationship Manager and the best part about it is it’s relatively automatic. It will take all your Facebook contacts, or get their phone numbers that they have in there and put them into a nice format. It will go out to your email, your Google contacts and so on and grab all those. It will build relationships between people, all these kind automatically.
Today I went into Gist, they updated their Terms of Service and I could not get in to my Google Apps account. It said that I needed to authorize it; I had already authorized it previously, I went to authorize it again and I could not get in to Google Apps. I was able to log in with my normal account with them but that kind of scared me. I’m not going to lie to you, they kind of scared me. They’re still in beta so I’m a little bit more forgiving but you know, it really did kind of scare me that I wasn’t able to login through Google Apps.
But anyway, the fact that they’re awesome, kind of negates that. So if problems keep on happening, then I might consider another CRM because I used Batchbook before. I didn’t say that now but I said that in my CRM podcast which you might want to go and listen to.
Next, Mailchimp. I always use Mailchimp for my newsletters which I will send out my newsletters more regularly, I promise. I was going to do an eBook but I think I’m going to do an audio thing on how to build your business from scratch, build a quick business from scratch. I don’t know, I’m still kind of thinking about it. It’s going to come out this week. I’m just going to talk and I love that stuff so it shouldn’t be that big of a deal. So but for anyone who’s been listening and has wanted to get that eBook or my newsletter, I apologize, I think this is going to be much more valuable and I’ll probably have it transcripted through oDesk or something like that.
Mailchimp is awesome, very easy to use, it’s free for the first 500 people that you have signed up. I love the free version. It works very, very well and you can send out up to 2000 emails. If you have 500 people, you can send up to four campaigns. It’s very easy to use. I love it.
Next, for project management. If you have projects out there, I highly recommend Manymoon. It is free and very much integrated with Google Apps. Now, I was using Basecamp for a while. I think it’s a little bit expensive for what they give you. 37signals guys are awesome! The whole user interface is easy but I found that for the money, I just didn’t get the return that I wanted. And Manymoon has a lot of the functionalities that Basecamp does, but it’s free. It uses Google docs, two gigabyte limit thing, it basically integrates with Google docs’ storage space so you get two gigabytes of storage free. It’s just a very, very good project management tool. And so I highly recommend it. The user interface, don’t get me wrong, it is kind of clunky, I’m not going to lie, it is kind of clunky. I haven’t seen what it looks like when clients login or how easy it is when they get sent an email. That’s one thing I really liked about Basecamp. It was very, very, very simple for my clients to login. However, how often did my clients log in? Umm, not too often, but that’s not necessarily what it’s for. It’s so you can either keep track of projects or communicate with your team on keeping the projects going.
Now, it doesn’t have any Gantt Charts or anything like that, so if you’re really, really into PMP style project management, not going to happen, there are a lot of other tools out there that integrate with Google Apps and that’s another reason why I changed from Basecamp. 37signals has been very slow to integrate with Google Apps, very slow to do anything; they’re a great company, don’t get me wrong and they do that purposely. If you’re a heavy, heavy project management person, you’re not going to like it. It is basically out there to show what task needs to be done, what milestones there are, what the whole project thing is. If they did add Gantt Charts, I haven’t seen them but you’ll not going to find that there. For easy, inexpensive Gantt Charts you might want to try Zoho Projects. Zoho Projects is what I started off with. The user interface is clunky but it works, it definitely works.
For my presentations, I was going to try out SlideRocket but at that time (I don’t know if it has changed yet, I haven’t even looked at them in like two, three months) they didn’t have a way of exporting their slides into PowerPoint which, sorry, is the de facto standard. I hate using PowerPoints but that’s the way it is. Honestly, I prefer to use a Prezi or SlideRocket, but there is no way of exporting to PowerPoint. I had actually created an entire presentation which took me a couple of hours and then afterward I realized that I could not export it. And it was something for my work, my full-time job. They do not use and they would never let me install SlideRocket, their Desktop client. And so I was using them. Don’t get me wrong, the design, the UI – user interface and everything and the way you can do with SlideRocket is just awesome but it’s too bad that there wasn’t no export, at least at that time.
I use SurveyMonkey for my surveys. That’s the next thing that integrates very well with Google Apps. SurveyMonkey. If you want some quick, quick surveys and some meaningful surveys, it’s very inexpensive. They do have a free version; I only use the free version right now. Very awesome, I love SurveyMonkey. It works very well, very easy to use. I’m going to say, very, very, very, very – a lot more, they say, very. Anyway, done – done with very. SurveyMonkey. If you really care about what your customers are thinking, I highly recommend them.
I use Tripit, that’s another thing that will allow you to integrate well with Google Apps. Tripit is a really cool app that allows you to plan your trips. That’s why it’s called Tripit – your itineraries, where you’re going to stay, and so on. My virtual assistant will plan out all those things for me. It’s a very easy way for both of us to communicate exactly what I need in regards to my hotel stay, my car rentals and so on. Tripit, I highly recommend.
And lastly, I use Tungle.me. If you don’t know what Tungle is, it is awesome! I love it, I love it, I love it! It helps me when my virtual assistant is not available. Tungle is a scheduling app. And basically, it looks like your Google Apps calendar and it has a public-facing webpage that you can direct people to. And it will show when you’re available. People can actually go and highlight specific times, proposed times in which you can go and have lunch or go and do a meeting or whatever. They go and propose all these different times. I think it’s up to five or six different times and you can select which ones will work best for you.
So, it allows them to very efficiently propose times rather than go “Hey, send an email. Hey, are you free for lunch?”
“Yeah, I’m free for lunch, when are you available?”
“Oh, I don’t know, I’m available anytime you are.”
“Oh, I’m available anytime you are” and so on.
No, it allows you to give specific time so you don’t waste your time sending emails back and forth. And then, when you’re all done, and you’ve picked when you want it will actually populate your calendar and the other person’s calendar if they so choose. Awesome! I love Tungle without me.
But anyway, the benefit of all these is that it is all in one shot, it is all in one place and when you have things all in one place, it makes your job and the job of anyone else in your organization so much easier.
For example, like when I brought my virtual assistant on, all I had to do was “Hey, all these apps that I use for these specific purposes are in the “More” tab and these are what the apps do. Go ahead and go and explore see what they do and get back to me if you have any questions.” Boom! That’s all I had to do. All the apps that I want to use or need to use are all in one place. And now all I have to do is login to Google Apps and they’re all there. Pretty awesome! So if you do not use Google Apps, I highly recommend it, even if you only have your own blog. It looks so unprofessional when you have Gmail.
So even when you have your own blog or when you have your own site, it looks so cheesy when you have like dean@gmail.com, or even worse, like prosulum@gmail.com or prosulumconsultant@gmail.com. No! People know that you mean business, that you might possibly be a 200-person business when it says dean@youcanworkless.com or sam@superawesomehappyfunsalon.com. It just denotes that you take your web presence seriously. And to couple that with the ability to be more productive, to manage your email, to manage calendar, to manage all these things all in one place really shows your professionalism.
So I highly, highly recommend that you at least look into Google Apps. There are other options out there like Zoho Business. Zoho is really, really good. They have a lot of really awesome business apps and they are Google’s competitor, probably main competitor when it comes to an all-in-one solution for a business. So they are one that you might want to look into. You just don’t get the same integration with Zoho and in fact, Zoho, being the smart guys that they are, are integrating much of what they have with Google Apps. In that way, you can go to Zoho Projects, you can go to all these other things and purchase their services and so on. So they’re not dumb. They’re awesome! So that’s another alternative that you might consider out there. Their writer – Microsoft Word kind of clone is top notch, much better than Google’s document writer that they have on Google Apps. I’m going to say that right now—much better. I kind of use Google’s right now, but I used to use Zoho Writer a lot more than Google Apps’ writing software because there’s no comparison.
So with that guys and gals, I’m going to ask for your feedback. Send me questions in email format. But more importantly, send me questions in your own voice, in your own words. I would love to hear from you. 714-643-5301. Leave me a message. It is 24 hours a day, 24 hours a day and you can leave me a message, asking me a question, give me a tip and so on, because people do not want to hear me the whole time and you know what?, I have proof because my Paul Tran interview which is Episode Four of So Totally Business Savvy is the best one, probably because Paul is a lot more notable than I am. By far, it has the most downloads out of all of my podcasts.
So, people I want to hear from you, and when you call, leave your website, your podcast, where you’re calling from; any information that you would like to plug in my podcast, feel absolutely free in doing so. So, once again, 714-643-5301. I have had a blast talking about Google Apps. I can’t speak enough about it. I love it! And now you have my secrets. You have all the programs I use. All right, guys. Goodbye, God bless! Thank you for listening!
