Do you dream of working from a hammock, managing your sales teams from the beach, and still getting an amazing work/life balance? As a startup, you may believe you need to be in the office sitting at the computer. But with Google Apps for Startups, you don’t have to sacrifice your life or productivity! With this suite of tools, you’ll be able to get things done 100% online.
Here is a list of Google tools and resources to help entrepreneurs launch and grow their businesses. There are resources for startup ventures, small businesses, and solo entrepreneurs.
Google My Business
Google My Business is a platform for businesses to manage their online presence with Google. Businesses can synchronize their information, track engagements with insights, build customers using a Google+ page, monitor AdWords campaigns, and more. Businesses with physical locations can enter local search, read and respond to reviews, and get insights on how customers searched for a business.
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Google for Entrepreneurs
Google for Entrepreneurs.
Google for Entrepreneurs partners with startup communities and builds “campuses” where entrepreneurs can learn, connect, and create companies. It features a variety of resources and tools to empower entrepreneurs develop innovative startups.
- Campuses. Google for Entrepreneurs has two campuses: Campus London and Campus Tel Aviv. Three more campuses are coming soon: Campus Warsaw, Campus São Paulo, and Campus Seoul. Each campus offers its own programs, such as a “hack space” to test new ideas, a bootcamp for early stage startups, a community of parent entrepreneurs, and on-campus residence.
- Startup Communities. Google for Entrepreneurs partners with organizations that build community and teach entrepreneurs how to turn ideas into thriving startups. Partners include Startup Grind, UP Global, Blackbox Connect, American Underground, and Capital Factory.
- Tools for Entrepreneurs. Google for Entrepreneurs and General Assembly (the online course company) have partnered to provide weekly lessons for entrepreneurs of all kinds. Take your skills to the next level with business, marketing, and technical classes taught by leading entrepreneurs, academics, and experts. Recent presentations include Designing Persuasive Presentations, Finding Product Market Fit, and Your First Email Marketing Campaign.
- Think with Google. Think with Google is a online magazine to put Google research and insight behind your business strategy. The site is an information resource on the data and trends that Google is tracking, along with behind-the-scenes looks at digital campaigns across industries, platforms and audiences. The site also features terrific tools for entrepreneurs, such as Brand Impressions, Consumer Barometer, Mobile Calculator, Display Benchmarks, and more.
- Google Business Groups. Google Business Groups are independent community-led groups formed by passionate individuals. All events are free and open to business professionals who are interested to learn and become more successful in using the Internet for their business. Search the map to find a group near you.
- Startup Launch. Startup Launch helps startups design, develop, and distribute over the Google Developers’ platform. Apply for access to the pilot program. Get mentorship from Google developers and experts, attend exclusive networking events, access free training, and get featured by Google.
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Google Helpouts
Google Helpouts
Helpouts is Google’s platform for professionals to connect with customers and provide services over live video. Offer your expertise in return for payment, or for free to entice new customers. Offer sessions at times that suit your schedule. Use free online resources to spread the word about your Helpouts.
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Google Small Business Community
Google Small Business Community.
Google Small Business Community is a group created by Google+ Your Business so that small businesses can get the help they need to succeed on the web. The group hosts Hangouts and Q&As with experts and industry leaders, such as the recent Hangout with the leader of the U.S. Small Business Administration and the voice of small business in President Obama’s Cabinet, Maria Contreras-Sweet. Members also enjoy features like #FeedbackFridays and #Bizdom topic-specific training sessions.
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Google Apps for Work
Google Apps for Work.
Google Apps for Work is a suite of apps to help businesses be more productive from anywhere. Schedule and run meetings with Calendar, Gmail, and Hangouts. Draft content in Docs that is automatically stored in Drive, so that everyone on your team has the current version. Google Apps offer entrepreneurs a suite of the tools they need to help reach their goals. Plans start at $5 per user per month.
10) Google Blogger
This Blogging service from Google is popular among individuals but very few businesses are using it to it’s full potential. Start using Google Blogger for business and write about product updates or latest company news. Best part is, Google will give you some SEO love and your content will get indexed more quickly on Google search.
11) Keyword Planner
If you are planning to start advertising on Google, Keyword Planner will give you an estimate of search traffic and budget. Its a great tool to find out which keywords people are searching for more often. You can slice and dice the data based on geography, gender, interest, browser, mobile device and much more.
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12) Webmaster Tools
Google Webmaster Tools is another useful product that give you valuable information about Site Traffic, Site Health, Optimisation suggestions and various other resources.
You can submit your webpages as well as your sitemap to Google’s index.
13) Google Feedburner
With Google Feedburner, you can allowing your visitors to subscribe to your website content, particularly your blog, using RSS feeds. After subscribing, visitors can receive regular updates via their web browsers, RSS readers, or email. This can prove very helpful to the growth and reach of your business blog.
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14) Google Scholar
Fed up of routine articles on a specific topic – like business growth? Get more meaningful information using Google Scholar. It is an online, freely accessible search engine that provides a simple way to broadly search for scholarly literature. It searches a wide variety of sources, including academic publishers, universities, articles, theses, books, abstracts and court opinions.
Google Scholar aims to rank documents the way researchers do, weighing the full text of each document, where it was published, who it was written by, as well as how often and how recently it has been cited in other scholarly literature.
15) Hangouts For Business
Google Hangout started as a simple communication platform for individuals but with its powerful video conferencing feature, more and more businesses started using it. You can have a conference call with your overseas customers, present a webinar to your users, host a QnA session online, interview candidates and even hold group meetings.
16) Google Calendar For Business
Google calendar is not just about keeping track of your meetings. It has many hidden functions that can improve your productivity. At ProfitBooks, we have to conduct product demos almost every day. With Google Calendar, we can setup appointment slots so that our customers can schedule the demo easily.
Apart from this, you can create different calendars for different purpose (specific to a team, etc), schedule meetings with groups using “Find a Time” or “Suggested Times”, add a Google Hangout to your event, browse interesting calendars, sync it with your CRM and do much more.
17) Google Keep
There is numerous tools to manage notes like Evernote and OneNote. However, Google Keep is light weight and super easy tool that comes handy while managing daily chores.
Best part of Google Keep is its native integration with other Google services. It has a spectacular system for setting reminders that ties directly into other Google services.
For example, you can create a note in Keep and then tell the app to remind you about it at a specific date and time or even when you are at a certain location (say, at a client’s office or the grocery store). When the appropriate time or place arrives, you’ll get a notification on phone as well as in your Inbox.
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18) Google Drawings
We all know about Google Docs, Sheets, and Slides but very few people know about its “neglected” siblings. Google Drawings is the freshest among all Google Drive tools. It is not a full-blown image editor like MS Paint but the graphic editor is more powerful for one simple fact – it is a real-time collaborative application. At its most basic, it is an online whiteboard.
Lay out diagrams, create flow charts, and then easily add them to other documents or embed them on a website with Google Drawings.
Here are a few specific things you can do:
- Edit drawings online in real time with anyone you choose, and invite others to view your edits in real time.
- Chat with others who are editing your drawing, from within the drawings editor.
- Publish drawings online to the world as images, or download them in standard formats.
- Insert text, shapes, arrows, scribbles, and images from your hard drive or from the Web to enhance a diagram or painting.
- Insert drawings into other Google Docs, Sheets, or Slides using the web clipboard, then tweak them inline.
- Design an Infographic.
- Screen design with Wireframes.
19) Google Groups
Google Groups is one of Google’s oldest services but still unknown to most people. It is a collaborative space for online discussions around any topic. Each group has its own email address, and members can share information using this single email address instead of emailing each member separately. Discussions are threaded and you can join a conversation on Google Groups or via email if you are part of a group’s mailing list.
A Google Group can be a forum, a Q&A website, a customer support center, a knowledge base, a shared platform for all of Google’s tools, and much more. Any small and big organization can use Google Groups to facilitate communication. You can even embed a group on your website to build up user engagement with your site visitors.
20) Google Resizer
As more and more devices are coming up with different screen sizes, crafting an user experience for a website or app that’s intuitive and powerful is a tricky proposition. To help Web designers achieve a balance, Google has introduced a useful utility called Resizer.
With this tool designers can test Material Design across platforms, and see where the breakpoints are. Rather than hope for the best when designing a Webpage, Resizer shows you — in real time — if the site is recursive for mobile.
It was designed for Google’s material design but it works fine with any URL. Its a great way to test how your website is visible on different devices.
21) Google PageSpeed
Google give a lot of importance to how quickly your webpage loads as this directly affects the visitor experience. To help developers to optimize the webpage, Google introduced couple of handy tools under the name PageSpeed.
With this tool, you can find out the possible issues that might be slowing down your website. Google also suggests ways to fix the errors. Faster loading pages get better ranking on Google search engine.
22) URL Shortener (goo.gl)
Sometimes sharing a long URL on social networks like Twitter can be painful. This is where Google’s URL Shortener comes handy. You can feed any long URL to it and this tool generates a short link that can be shared anywhere.
Not only this, you can get detailed analytics on number of clicks, referrers, browsers, country and much more.
23) Google Classroom
Designed for teachers and students, Google Classroom helps easily connect the class, track their progress and achieve more together.
Teachers can create classes, distribute assignments, send feedback, and see everything in one place. Google Classroom ties Google’s many products together to help educational institutions go to a paperless system.
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Conclusion
Google Apps for Startups is a program created by Google to help small businesses and startups get the tools they need (email, calendar, storage, etc) at a very low price. It’s also very easy to setup and use which makes it perfect for startups looking to get set up on Google Apps quickly. If you’re looking to get started on Google Apps this article will show you how.