Google: Everyone's Best Friend!

I’ve been recommending Google accounts to my clients for about 2 years now.  There are so many reasons to use Google other than just to search for things.  Here are 6 applications that you may not know about but should be using.

1. With Google Alerts, I can be alerted every time my name, my company’s name or a competitors name shows up on a website or social network.  In this way its the best kind of friend because I can even set clear boundaries as to when I want to ‘hear’ about the gossip. Sometimes I’m in for getting the gossip as it happens and some days I just need one fix.
2. With Google Reader, I don’t have to visit all my favorite blogs or websites. It keeps track of all that information for me in one convenient place I can access online anytime.
3. Google keeps track of who is visiting my website and helps me find better ways of serving my visitors. With Google Analytics I can track the visitors on all of my websites.  I can find out where they came from, how long they stayed on my website, what pages they viewed and so much more.
4. While you’ll never be able to completely stop me from buying book because I truly love their smell, I am a book junkie and Google lets me read thousands of books for free with Google Books. They’ve got self-help books, business, cooking, relationships, health & fitness, pets, philosophy, poetry…you name it they got it!
5. Google helps me communicate with the people that are important to me . That’s where Gmail comes in. If you’re still using AOL then its definitely time you get yourself a new email address and get a Gmail account. You can also feed other email accounts into Gmail so that you can access all your emails in one account saving time and eliminating stress.
   Gmail blocks the most spam, integrates with Google Docs, Reader and Calendar.
6. What do people see when they Google you? You can control how you appear in Google by creating a personal profile with Google Profiles. You can create a personal page that links to your blog or other websites or social networking profiles. This is a must do for anyone wanting to brand themselves.

There are many more free resources that Google provides but those are my top six. In future posts I’ll explain in more detail how to get the most out of these resources. Which ones are you currently using? I’d love it if you left a comment below.

Oh and I almost forgot. If you have a Google account then any site that asks for an “Open ID” you can log into with your Google information. Pretty cool huh?!