Announcing Our New Blog! Today’s Feature: Google Apps

Welcome to Focus Marketing & PR’s new blog! The purpose of our blog is to share our knowledge about internet marketing and how it can be leveraged to help small and medium sized businesses. We plan to cover a variety of topics and hope to get some ideas going for you that could help your business. We are passionate about internet marketing and excited to engage in discussions– please post responses or get in touch with us anytime at[email protected]. Let’s get started!

Our first series of blogs will focus on one of our favorite topics – Google. With so many new Google products launched it is hard to keep up with new tools. In this four–part series we will highlight some of our favorite Google products and how you can use them to organize and market your business. 

First up is Google Apps For Business. Like many people out there, you may have used Google Docs. (This is a way to store an online version of a Microsoft document that can be edited and accessed by multiple users .) Did you know that Google Docs is just one part of Google Apps? There are other great Google Apps and for small businesses, you don’t have to spend big bucks.

If you are a small business you can’t necessarily invest in a dedicated IT department, server storage, software licenses, etc. The answer to your problems could be Google Apps. Think about this way – you pay a small fee to Google every month to let them worry about data storage, software updates, security issues and licenses. You don’t have to worry about having an IT team in-house to keep things running smoothly. Essentially everything is saved on the web.

Here is how it works: You pay Google $5 per month per user and to use Google Apps. (Nervous about signing up? They allow a 30-day free trial with no obligation.) Google Apps includes a calendar feature, an email account (we will come back to that in a second), Google Docs, intranet site capabilities and more! (Click here for a list of products.) When you use Google Apps for your company’s email system you won’t have an @gmail address. You can actually use an email address that matches your business name and web address –[email protected]. Pretty cool.

And remember you can let Google worry about the IT issues. As part of the deal you get 24/7 Google support and there is no need to worry about software updates either. You just have to refresh Google Apps for updates.

Another cool feature about using Google Apps? Google is a carbon-neutral company powered by energy-efficient data centers, renewable energy purchases and carbon offsets so by using their products you are going green!

Want more? Click here to hear some success stories from small business owners using Google Apps.

Up next week we will be diving into using Google for your internet marketing. We will discuss Google AdWords, AdWords Express and Google Local.