If I sound mellow in this one it’s because A) I had a huge, and awesome, dinner at Sunny Point Cafe in west Asheville, and B) it’s a little past my bed time. This video is almost 10 minutes but if you’re interested in using Google Apps in your small business I think you’ll find it worth your time. If you don’t, check your warranty.

“Sites” are really easy to set up, and you don’t need any technical skills at all. If you can follow simple directions you can build some wicked cool tools in no time. My favorites are the “Filing Cabinet” and “Lists” pages. Those things alone make it worth the set up time. Yes, you can just Google Docs to share most things, but with a “Filing Cabinet” page you upload anything, including, say, a graphic for company letterhead.

One thing I didn’t mention is the URL for sites is uh… not so memorable:

http://sites.google.com/a/yourdomain.com/

This can be changed to something like:

http://intranet.yourdomain.com/

But that gets a little technical. It’s not hard but you do need to have access to your web hosting control panel, and know how to make some tweaks. I may cover that in another video.

Play around with it, and if you get stuck on something don’t hesitate to give me a shout.

Google Apps is a fantastic suite of tools you can use in your small business… fo’ free. I have used Apps for my own businesses, my personal life, and I’ve even set it up for my kids’ small private school.

And just to be clear kids, I’m talking about setting up Google Apps for very own domain. So your employees can have accounts like “EmployeeName@YourCompany.com.” Of course, you can use Apps without also using the email. But…

I really can’t imagine why any small to mid size business would bother with managing their own email solution. I’ve heard a lot of excuses, all of them bogus. I may do another video specifically about that. I understand that some people may not like the Gmail interface (Although everyone I’ve convinced to use it became a convert) but you can still use Outlook or whatever email software you prefer.

As I mention in the video, “Sites” make it possible to quickly make an intranet(s) and project sites where your team(s) can collaborate.  “Sites” is one of the best kept secrets in Google Apps. Stay tuned for a video on that! It’s next.

As always call or email if you have any questions about this stuff. Help is free.

Let me know if you to know more about a particular topic.

Follow these steps to add your company to the Google Local Business Center. Make sure potential customers are able to find you business. I will take you through the entire process in this short video and I also point out a couple things that have caused problems for us in the past. For small businesses operating in a local area, as opposed to only online, it’s critical that your company show up in the Local results, which are usually at the top on search engine results pages.

There are some additional steps to take that will help make sure your company appears in the first set of Local listings, but we’ll cover those in a later video.

If you have any questions or trouble with this process just email or call and we’ll help you get it sorted out. No cost for that, we just want to help.

The “wisdom of the crowds” or at least the “logo designs of the crowds.” This describes LogoMyWay.com. In my opinion this is a fantastic way for a small business or other organization to get a great looking logo designed at a very reasonable cost.

Sure, a full-tilt pro logo designer may do a better job but who has that budget? If you want to go that route, how about this: Submit your concept for a logo design and see what you get from the crowd. If one of the designs is even close to what you want, select it as the winner, and you’ll have a great starting point to take to your big money designer.

On the other hand you might get a logo you love for very little money. So what’s the downside?

DandyID is an interesting service. I haven’t used to it load my standard account info into a new social media account, yet, but it seems like it will be a major time saver. Moreover, if you ever move and need to change an address or phone number you can change the info in one place instead of several social media-type accounts. I definitely love the WordPress plugin and the other widgets they offer that make it easy to display icons and links to all you social stuff.

Certainly the best features are saved for the “Pro” level. The best of those are (from the site):

SEO Enhanced Links:
Increase your visibility in top search engines, by passing the “link juice” through to your individual profiles (I assume this is because they don’t apply “nofollow” tags to the premium accounts.)

Personal Stats:
Track how people are connecting with your complete identity across the web

Social Analytics:
Learn where your contacts exist online and which social networks are most important to them

Here’s my widget with the accounts I’ve added so far. Friend me up!

More about DandyID in their own words:

DandyID lets you easily collect all of your online profiles in one convenient place and allows people to discover the real verified you across the web. Powerful social analytics let you track how people are engaging you online.

Check out DandyID.org to try it for yourself.

This is a version of the blog post checklist our writers use when they submit an article for one of our clients’ sites. The only items I have omitted are related to things that are part of our internal work flow. I’m giving it all away! Definitely watch the video because some of these items need explaining. We’ll do some more focused videos later where we can dive deep into things writing meta descriptions and title tags that can help “win the click” on the search engine results pages.

We use a checklist because we want to keep the quality consistently high, from writer to writer, blog to blog, post to post. It’s important that your business is regularly producing high quality content using SEO best practices. Doesn’t matter if the business is plumbing, a restaurant, or shoe store. Modern marketing means creating relevant media for your audience. If this type of blogging seems like more work than you want to do for your marketing program talk to us. This is what we do.

Check out the checklist below.

You can copy and paste it into Word for a printer friendly version. As always, if you have any questions please leave them in the comments and we’ll do our best to help.

SEO Blog Post Writing Checklist

Topic

Keyword Research

Title / Headline

Linking

Word Count

Meta Description

Tags & Meta Keywords