Nathan Gwilliam Blog :: e-Business, Social Enterprise, Faith

What did small businesses do without Google? In this blog entry I’m not referring to the Goolge search functionality, although that has revolutionized the accessibility of information. I am instead referring to the lesser known tools that Google has made available to small businesses. Nearly all of these tools are available for free, and small businesses who use them are essentially receiving free investments in their companies from Google.

Last week Google launched yet another of these free tools, Google Ad Manager, which I will describe later in the blog. This application will radically alter how we do business, how much time and money it costs us to do business and the amount of revenue we can generate from doing business.

Here are a few of my favorite web-based applications for small businesses provided by Google (and a few other companies):

Google Custom Search allows website owners to add powerful site search capabilities for free. Our companies spent tens of thousands of dollars licensing and developing technologies, such as Nutch/Lucene and Atomz to power our site search engines, and the quality of search results was never adequate. Google provides its site search solution with advanced features such as misspelling suggestions, and synonym searches. Not only does Google offer site search for free, but it also incorporates keyword-targeted ads that allow website owners to generate revenue. Competitors, such as Yahoo offer similar products, but the quality of the Google site search appears to be superior.

Google Adsense allows website owners to make money from advertising from the first day their site launches. I remember in the early days of the Internet that new websites might go years without substantive advertising revenues, which were sold in-house, as the sites grew to be popular enough that customers wanted to advertise on them. Then I remember additional years where websites flushed thousands of dollars of unsold advertising inventory down the toilet each month. I remember being elated when Google began to provide the ability for website publishers to put targeted advertising on their sites, fill remnant inventory, and make money without a sales force. Many competitors exist in this space, such as Yahoo and MSN, but Google seems to deliver a higher return for publishers because it has more advertisers bidding competitively.

Google Adwords allows website owners to run effective, targeted advertising campaigns for inexpensive prices. Other than free advertising, Google may be the most effective large-scale advertising on the planet. I remember when Yahoo used to charge $50 or more for every 1000 ad impressions they would deliver for on search results for the keyword “adoption”. Website publishers can now get targeted advertising for their sites for a fraction of that cost. Further, those campaigns can be turned on or off at any time, can be targeted based on geography and other characteristics of the visitors, and provide statistics that allow for amazing analysis of return on investment. Yahoo, MSN and Ask also provide similar solutions which make sense for publishers to use in conjunction with Google Adwords.

GoogleTalk provides free communication tools for remote staff members, such as instant messaging and voice chat. We used to pay ridiculous amounts to call employees in other countries. Now, we know when remote employees arrive and are working by when we see them log in to GoogleTalk. When they are working, we can effectively communicate with them with the instant messenger, and essentially call them and talk to them for free with the voice chat. MSN messenger does provide video chat, but GoogleTalk seems to be more reliable for voice chat, which usually is very adequate. This tool does more than anything to facilitate remote teams to work together effectively.

Gmail and Google Apps proved the ability for site owners to get free email hosting and spam filtering for their domain. We spent tens of thousands of dollars combating SPAM over the years when we hosted our own email. Not only does Google do a dramatically superior job filtering spam, but our mail doesn’t have all the downtime issues we had previously, it has a world-class web-based interface, and it is free. I also love how easy it is to find archived messages with their search feature.

Google Analytics provides free website analytics or statistics for website for free. Although this Google service still needs some improvement, and needs to run faster, the free pricing is incredible, when some of its competitors want to charge sites like mine thousands of dollars a month. Quantcast and Compete.com offer solutions which we need to test.

Google Ad Manager was launched in beta last week. It provides a free web-based system that allows website publishers to manage and deliver advertising on their sites. It has advanced features, such as geographic targeting and support for graphical, video and text ads. Our companies may have spent $150,000 or more to ad features to our ad serving technology, which Google Ad Manager now offers for free.

Google offers many other valuable features which businesses can integrate, such as:

• Google Maps (ad mapping to your website or an interactive map for site visitors),
• Google Calendar (build and share calendars),
• Google News Alerts (receive the most recent news for your industry),
• Google Notebook (clip and share info as you surf the web) and
• Google Docs (shared documents and spreadsheets like Microsoft Office).

Even though these Google applications are revolutionary and invaluable to small businesses, many other companies provide valuable free or very inexpensive solutions which are phenomenal tools for small businesses. Some of my favorites are:

• CraigsList (free classifieds),
• Backpack (shared to do lists),
• eLance (freelance project marketplace),
• eBay (auctions to buy or sell almost anything),
• DomainTools (domain name research tools),
• RememberTheMilk (task management and reminders),
• Central Desktop (collaborate, communicate and share files),
• Wesabe (money management and tracking),
• LinkedIn (networking),
• HiRise (contact and client relationship manager),
• YouSendIt (send large files),
• FreshBooks (time tracking and invoices),
• Amazon.com aStore or WebStore (get paid to sell Amazon.com products and let them handle the fulfillment),
• WordPress or Blogger (add a free blog to your site) and
• eNom (many free features with domain registration, such as world-class DNS).

Over the last eleven years, our companies have spent hundreds of thousands of dollars developing and supporting applications which Google and others now offer for free. I expect that if the value of all these free services being used by businesses were valued, that Google would be the largest angel investor in small businesses.

Small businesses need to thoroughly explore all of the Google offerings to ensure they are maximizing the benefits that they can receive from these amazing, free or low-cost web applications. Because of all the free or inexpensive applications which are now available, this is an exciting time to start a small business online. eBusinesses can use these tools to launch more successful projects in a shorter period of time and with a smaller initial investment. Thank you Google.

Posted on March 22nd, 2008 by admin
Filed under: Business Management, Entrepreneurship, Google, Innovation, Internet Marketing, My Sites, Web Analytics, e-Business, e-Commerce