Product DescriptionGoogle is not only the search engine of choice for millions of users, it is an immensely powerful tool for savvy businesspeople who know how to use its advanced features. "Go Google" is a comprehensive guide to everything readers need to know about Google's myriad applications, including Google Apps, Google Docs and Spreadsheets, Google SMS, Google Base, and other services that will help businesses get organized - and get noticed. Complete with information on research tools like Google Local, Google News, and Google Alerts, this is the ultimate guide for businesses of every size.
Product Details- Amazon Sales Rank: #1262906 in Books
- Published on: 2008-01-02
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: .96" h x 7.42" w x 9.16" l, 1.45 pounds
- Binding: Paperback
- 356 pages
Editorial ReviewsGreg Holden (Chicago, IL) has written more than 30 books on computers and the Internet, including Starting an Online Business for Dummies , Selling Beyond eBay (978-0-8144-7349-8), and How to Do Everything with Your eBay Business. He is founder and owner of Stylus Media, his own small Internet-based business. Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
Learning from Google: A 21st-Century Model for Success You know what Google is. At least, you think you know Google. Chances are you associate Google with being among the most successful high-tech businesses in the world, as well as being the most popular search service on the World Wide Web. And you have probably heard ‘‘google’’ used as a verb, meaning ‘‘to search for or find something online,’’ as in: ‘‘I Googled my professor and found his home page . . . I Gmailed him my report.’’ (Gmail is Google’s email service; you’ll hear quite a bit about it in the pages that follow.) If that’s all you think of when you hear the word ‘‘Google,’’ you’re missing the latest Internet revolution. What you can learn from this book will improve your life immeasurably, especially if your goals are to work more efficiently and to do a better job of marketing yourself or your company. What’s So Great About Google? Back in 1996, two graduate students started their own Web-based search service, which they called BackRub. By 1998, the project had gained a lot of attention, secured some investors, and turned into a corporation called Google—a Web site that made specific Web pages, discussion groups, or even individual words and phrases easy to locate. In recent years, Google has expanded its services for businesses in a dramatic way. Its Gmail and AdWords services are now in widespread use. For example, Google offers scheduling, word processing, spreadsheet, email, and other applications both separately and as part of an umbrella package called Google Apps. These days, Google is also an increasingly popular solution for small businesses that need to increase their visibility and build their brand. Google is fast becoming the most affordable and effective marketing venue for businesses. Through its expansion into the business services space, Google itself provides you with a role model that you can follow as you develop your own business online. It all starts when you create a service that gives you a solid foundation. After a steady stream of customers are knocking at your virtual door, you can expand into new areas. Google can help you make that exciting move. This book will give you comprehensive descriptions of the site’s search engine, advertising, marketing, workflow, and communications features. Not only that, but you’ll be provided with tips on how they can best meet your needs. Google’s search tool and other services can help businesses get organized and on the same page, often for little or no cost. The new Google Apps will let businesses take their online communications and data sharing to a new level. This book will examine ways in which businesses like yours can communicate messages and make Web sites more visible to prospective customers; it will go a step beyond what has previously been said about Google to describe how clients and coworkers can use it to communicate with one another more effectively. These days, Google is much more than a directory of the Web’s contents. It’s on the verge of becoming an integral part of many small business operations. Google is itself a model for a 21st-century business. You can learn a great deal about how a successful company operates by reading the sections that follow. Googling Google: Researching an Internet Success Story Plenty of books have written about Google and how it started. In a nutshell, the business was founded by two men, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, who first met in late 1995 when they were graduate students at the University of Michigan. They spent a lot of time and programming effort to come up with a complex algorithm for finding content on the Web with amazing accuracy. It should come as no surprise that the best way to find out about Google is to Google the company history yourself. If you enter the search terms Google History on the home page (http://www.google.com), you will see that the first returned result is a link to Google Corporate Information: Google Milestones (http://www.google.com/ corporate/history.html). This will reveal a comprehensive and up-to-date timeline detailing the company’s achievements. Here you will find personal anecdotes from and biographies of Larry and Sergey (who are shown below), as well as a detailed history of their company’s humble beginnings and remarkable growth. Don’t be afraid of being bored. You won’t be. It’s all told with the straightforward and laid-back style that have become synonymous with the name Google. For more information, you can also scroll down to the bottom of any page on the Google website and click on the link labeled About Google (http://www.google.com/ about.html). This will take you to a map of all of the products, services, and support features that Google offers, as well as provide links to more corporate information. The ‘‘take away’’ point here is that Google succeeds by providing a service that everyone wants and needs: access to information and links to virtually any kind of online content. Information Sells What’s the first lesson you learn from Google’s story? Having identified a need that is shared by each one of the millions of individuals who go online every day, Brin and Page stuck to their core business and kept improving it. They spent many years building their company, slowly focusing on the basic activity of searching for content on the Web. Only when that process became widely accepted did they begin to sell ads that would appear alongside search results pages. Only after several years did the company go public. Only recently have they begun to provide the business applications described in this book. When you start up your own Web site, whether or not you use Google, you need to identify your mission and stick to it without trying to take on too much at once. Define the kinds of customers, clients, or visitors you want to reach. Determine how you’re going to meet their needs by making your own products or services available online. Start with a few pages or business applications and build your presence gradually. Once you have a firm base—a Web site created with Google’s Web Page Creator (see Chapter 11), a domain name obtained through Google Apps (Chapter 6), or a sales channel created with Google Base (Chapter 15)—you can expand your presence to build a wider audience. On the Internet, the more prospective customers who can reach and the richer the level of content you provide, the more effective your business will be. As you’ll learn in subsequent chapters, you improve your search engine rankings for both venues when you are able to make links from one Web site you own to another one you own. If your sites have three or four ‘‘levels’’ of content (in other words, if your visitors are able to click through from one page to another and keep finding new forms of information) your site will be ‘‘stickier.’’ You’ll be able to hold those visitors on your site for a longer period of time, which make it that much more likely they’ll perform the action you are hoping for—whether that action is making a purchase, filling out a form, or sending you an email inquiry. Google gives you a virtual toolbox full of options for creating a Web presence that is expansive and extensive. It can help you in one of two ways: • If you already have a Web site dedicated to your business or club (or to your own personal exploits), Google provides you with a set of tools that are surefire ways to help you meet your goals. (And you can use Google’s Page Creator as described in Chapter 11 to create another Web site, too.) • Google gives you a free and yet powerful way to establish a full-fledged Web presence if you don’t have one already. Keep It Simple When you look at the Google home page shown in Figure 1-1, what do you see? Along with the search box and heading and links, your eyes will rest on lots of white space. While other Web sites (such as that of Google’s competitor Yahoo!) are cluttered with links, words, images, and corporate logos, Google’s remains remarkably Figure 1-1. Google’s home page points to a model of simplicity you should try to emulate. uncluttered. No doubt Google could make millions by placing a single ad or two on its well-traveled home page. But the site’s managers know the value of simplicity, and you should appreciate it too. There’s no doubt about it: You can go ahead and hire Web designers and computer programmers to create a complex and world-class Web site that will ‘‘Wow!’’ everyone who visits it. But chances are you have picked up this book because you want to avoid just this sort of expense and complication. You want to be in control and plan your online site in a way that reflects your personality and your interests. And you don’t want to pay a...
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