Google has given Gmail accounts away to its customers for years. Along with that same google account you can get a host of other applications like google photos and drive. Did you know that you can also use these tools for your business? Small business owners on a budget will quickly find that almost all the productivity tools they ever wished for are available for an unbelievable $5 per month. What follows are just a few of the most valuable parts of this offer.
The main benefit to paying for an Apps account over using the free offerings is that you get to use your domain name for email. In doing so, you keep all of the investment you’ve made into your branding without the hassle of SPAM filtering or managing an email server. Gmail is, by far, one of the fastest, trusted, and most reliable email services available. Using your domain name with Gmail’s great service ensures that you are always able to communicate with your customers in a timely and professional manner.
Once you’ve gotten meetings set with your customers, you need to be able to keep up with them and it might not hurt for your employees to know where you are. Calendar is another tool in this bundle. On the surface, the calendar app is much like any other. When you start digging into it, though, Google has provided a calendar that can help even the most creative entrepreneur stay organized. You can keep separate calendars for different types of activities and share just one of those with your assistant while retaining a single view for yourself. If you enter the location of your event and perform a few configurations, Google maps will take into account the current traffic conditions and your location and remind you when its time to leave for that lunch appointment across town.
A close second to email is google drive. Google’s drive product is really a suite of office tools bundled with cloud storage. Whether you need to create a report, crunch some numbers, or make a presentation to a prospective customer, Google Docs, Sheets, and Presentations will fit your needs well. Included in this tool is also 30GB of cloud storage per-user. You don’t have to do the math to know that is a lot of spreadsheets. If you have more than a few employees, Google has also built collaboration tools in to Google drive. These tools are easier than any you’ve used before.
If you are just getting started and don’t even have a website, your Google Apps for Work account even enables you to use Google Sites to build one. I will admit this is a tool I would only suggest for someone just getting off the ground but it is better than not having a website at all. There is a nice gallery of sites to choose from and the site builder tools are very easy to use.
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