2012: The Ultimate Gmail Apps and Plug-ins for Running a Business (business, tools, tips, davidlim, 0212640000)

Gmail has been popular with small businesses because it’s easy, affordable and has a lot of functionality. But you really aren’t getting everything you can out of Gmail until you start taking advantage of some of the many third-party apps that make Gmail even more powerful. Some Gmail apps require a download; others plug into the Web version.

Regardless, if you find yourself spending a lot of your workday in Gmail, check out these apps that will make your Gmail experience even richer:

Rapportive: Rapportive kills the annoyance of sorting through windows to look up your contacts on social media while you are in Gmail. The browser plug-in saves you the hassle of having to remember who the person who emailed you is and instead looks them up on LinkedIn and Twitter – within your Gmail tab. I use it to quickly place the names and faces of the people who email me, since I’m often out meeting new potential partners for my business and get a lot of emails from our customers. Having the person’s context right there can really speed up responding to an email. You can even follow, reply to and retweet people on Twitter all within your Gmail. Rapportive is a free service.
  ScanDrop for Mac: (Full disclosure, this is our app.) We built this Mac scanner software to make it easier to scan and share paper via email. It connects many, many desktop scanners directly with Gmail (and other cloud storage options) and makes sharing easy by giving you the ability scan, preview and attach the PDF, look up a contact’s email address, and send an email all without having to open a browser. While we were building ScanDrop we heard from small business customers that they were using Gmail to store and sort documents, since it has seven times the storage capacity as Google Docs. So we added a scan and email-to-yourself option that lets you add Gmail labels for easier storage of PDFs within your own Gmail account. Currently ScanDrop costs $9.99 in the Mac App Store, although we are working on a free version.

Courteous.ly: Courteous.ly lets your contacts see how much email you are sorting through at the moment so they can be courteous about interrupting you with additional emails. Basically, the free service displays either how many unread emails you have or how many emails you have in your Gmail inbox so your contacts can get an idea of how busy you are. Courteous.ly will help your contacts manage expectations about when they might hear back from you, and it also helps them choose the best time to reach you. This is a free service.

HotSpot Shield: If you use Gmail from outside the U.S. then you may need a service like HotSpot Shield. This software lets you log into Gmail from countries that block it with a firewall, such as China. Hotspot Shield does this by creating a virtual private network (VPN) between your laptop or iPhone and HotSpot Shield’s Internet gateway.  This prevents snoopers, hackers and ISPs from viewing your Web browsing activities, instant messages, downloads, credit card information or anything else you send over the network – even on public Wi-Fi. So, if you are doing a lot of work for your business on random Wi-Fi networks, you may want free software like this on your computer.

Active Inbox: Active Inbox is for business owners who manage projects or their business from within email – and who are finding their inboxes are out of control. The plug-in allows you to organize emails by project and flag an email chain by status, such as “Waiting on a Reply.”  You can also tag emails for immediate action or mark them so that you remember to deal with them later. Active Inbox also recalls your previous emails with a contact inside your Gmail window for quick reference — no need to open a new browser tab. There is both a free and premium version of Active Inbox.

Please share with me on your effort and result about using Gmail as your business tool.  If you have somethign new or some area which my posting had not covered, please let me on Twitter

Why excellent gmail signature – important tool for your business! davidlim, auckland, iPhone, repair

Use of emails for business communication is increasingly becoming popular.  You can be one business owner who might be using same email address for your personal or business/ professional communication.  There are several tools on the internet that you can use to generate good looking signatures for your webmails.  In this blog post I will introduce you to one such browser extension that does the same amazingly well. This FREE extension works flawlessly with following webmails -

1. AOL
2. Gmail
3. Yahoo mail
4. Hotmail

This plugin/ extension is by the name Wisestamp and works with google chrome , mozilla firefox browsers.  The video demo below  shows how to install and customize the plugin for your gmail / google aps mail using firefox.

Observe the video and share it with others too!!

 

This is how your use Gmail as your business email and it works! davidlim, Auckland

Using Gmail As Your Business Email
I’ve been using Gmail to handle my business email for the past few years and I’m really happy about the decision. When you use Gmail to handle your business correspondence it doesn’t mean you have an email such as yourbusiness@gmail.com; you can easily use something like yourname@yourdomain.com. The email will come to and go from your personal email, it’s just that you will be using the friendly Gmail interface to manage your email. Some of the benefits of using Gmail as your business email are:

You can set up multiple email accounts for your partners and employees under a common link: http://mail.yourdomain.com, with their own logins and passwords.

You can keep archiving the messages forever, since every email account begins with 6GB of memory that keeps on increasing.

You can either use the web interface, or use an email client like Microsoft Outlook or Thunderbird to manage emails. I’ve decided to use the web interface as my wife is helping me manage my projects and correspondence and we will be accessing the same email account from different computers.

Setting up Gmail as your business email
It is difficult or easy, depending on how comfortable you are changing your hosting setup. The steps involve (I’m assuming you have a domain hosted somewhere):

Signup at Google Apps and then create the email account (if you don’t create the email account now you may lose your crucial emails once the email start arriving at the new server).

Sign into your hosting account control panel and go to the section where you can manage your email and there, try to find how you can change the MX records. This link has all the procedure explained.

The changes may take up to 48 hours to propagate throughout the Internet and till then you will keep on receiving your email through your current mail server. As soon as your MX records changes are properly propagated, your will be able to go to http://mail.yourdomain.com and manage your email using Gmail.

It may sound a bit doubtful, using a free service for your business email, but it doesn’t make a difference because you will still be using your old email, just with added Gmail features.

 

Top Ten (10) tips for using Gmail for your business! davidlim, auckland, new zealand

 
Working with a lot of small business owners who have moved their email over to Google Apps, we’ve found that many started out managing their work email through their personal @gmail.com accounts. So, in honor of National Small Busines Week and the estimated 27.2 million small businesses in America, we wanted to share some tips we’ve picked up from them (and other people at Google) on how to get the most out of using Gmail at work. 

1. Get a Gmail account at your own domain (e.g. michelle@yourdomain.com) with Google Apps. Google Apps is a suite of communication and collaboration tools, including Gmail, Google Calendar, and Google Docs, which run on your own domain, so instead of using your @gmail.com email address, you (and other employees) can have email addresses @yourdomain.com. Using a customized email address can help build an identity around your business and make you look more professional along the way.

2. Add a custom signature to the bottom of your email messages. Email signatures are automatically inserted at the bottom of every message you send, and can be a great place to add your title, contact information, and even the latest news from your company. Just go to Settings at the top of your inbox and enter your signature text in the box at the bottom.

3. Manage multiple email accounts from a single interface. If you’re like a lot of business owners, you probably regularly receive email in several different accounts. By centralizing your correspondence in Gmail, you’ll be able to keep track of it all more easily. To do this, either forward your other email addresses to your main Gmail account or route them there using Gmail’s Mail Fetcher, which downloads messages via POP from up to five other accounts. To set it up, visit the Account and Import Tabunder Settings.
 
4. Set up custom “From” addresses. This feature allows you to send messages from Gmail with one of your other email addresses listed as the sender. Once you set it up, you can choose the address you want to reply from while composing messages in the "From:" address drop down. This too is under Settings on the Account and Import tab.

5. Embrace labels. Folders are familiar, especially when it comes to work email. If you want to organize your emails in a similar way, make sure you’re using Gmail labels.Combined with filters, they can be a powerful tool to manage your mail. Create labels for projects, vendors, customers, weekly reports, launches, to-do’s -- the list goes on. You can also add custom colors to your labels, order them based on priority, and search the contents of specific labels. And don’t forget that you can drag messages into labels, just like you can with folders.

6. Use chat and video chat to communicate with colleagues, or provide real-time customer support. 
No matter where everyone is located, you can communicate in real-time as though you were in the same room with video chat or just chat via voice or text. Try using "Reply by Chat" at the bottom of each message if you want to reach the sender quickly. To add video chat capabilities to Gmail, all you need is this small plugin and a webcam.

7. Keep track of your to-do’s with Tasks. 
You spend a lot of time in your inbox, so why not keep track of what you have to do there too? Task allows you to create multiple lists, add notes to each task, assign due dates, and get the satisfaction of checking off completed items.

8. Use offline Gmail anytime you're not online. Despite having Internet access almost everywhere, work may take you to places where you just can’t get online. Turn on offline Gmail from the offline tab under Settings and Gmail will download a local cache of your mail which synchronizes with Gmail's servers while you’re connected. When you lose connectivity, Gmail automatically switches to offline mode, so you can continue to work, and your replies are automatically sent the next time Gmail detects a connection.

9. Create canned responses and quickly reply to common questions. When it comes to emailing at work, you’re probably used to sending out weekly reports, or answering the same questions from customers or colleagues multiple times. That’s where canned responses can save precious time: turn on this feature in Gmail Labs, compose your response once, save it, then use it over and over again.

10. Make sure you have the right Bob before hitting send. If you’ve ever accidentally sent a personal email to the wrong co-worker, or emailed your internal meeting notes to an external contact, then you'll want to turn on "Got the wrong Bob?" from the Labs tab under setting. Based on the groups of people you email most often, Gmail will try to flag when you've accidentally included the wrong person.