Thursday, September 2, 2010
A Global Greeting
Members of the AdSense team from all over the world say hello from Mountain View, CA!
Simplifying our IT - The Richmond Group goes Google
Editor's note: Continuing our “Going Google Everywhere” series, we’ve invited Mark Burgess, IT Director of The Richmond Group - a UK based finance company with 350 employees and the recipient of numerous awards for growth, innovation and employee workplace. They migrated to Google Apps in January 2010 with the support of Insight, a leading global single source provider of IT products and services. Learn more about other organizations that have gone Google on our community map.
When I look back at the decision we made 12 months ago to migrate away from Microsoft Outlook and Microsoft Exchange, it was primarily to solve some of the common problems that come with rapid business expansion – our business has grown at over 50% each year for the past seven years. Reaching mailbox quotas were a way of life, disk capacity limits had been exceeded more than once, we had servers to patch, maintain and backup and it was all distracting us from doing what we do well – creating innovative and unique financial products for our customers.
In January 2010 The Richmond Group went Google. With support from our account manager Brinder Bhamra and the rest of the Google Apps team at Insight, a Google Apps Authorized Reseller, we migrated 350 users away from Microsoft Outlook and into the cloud with Google Apps. While I wish some of the Microsoft Exchange migration tools existed then that are available now, the migration went well and it didn’t take long for users to embrace the new system available to them.
During the migration we concentrated specifically on email, calendar and contacts. With users spread across several sites, Google Talk soon became invaluable, improving real-time communication and helping to speed up decision-making. Being able to access our email from any web connected PC, easily search and find our emails, and benefit from threaded conversations has made managing our emails a whole lot easier!
It’s quite exciting to see the product evolve week by week, rather than every three years which is what we were used to from our previous email solution. Highlights for me have been the rich collaboration that is now possible in Google Docs, contextual gadgets in Gmail and more recently the Google Apps Marketplace. It has really got me thinking about how we can integrate with Google Apps and launch our own applications in the Marketplace. Then, in addition to saving money on our email and collaboration systems, we could build new revenue streams as well!
When I look back at the decision we made 12 months ago to migrate away from Microsoft Outlook and Microsoft Exchange, it was primarily to solve some of the common problems that come with rapid business expansion – our business has grown at over 50% each year for the past seven years. Reaching mailbox quotas were a way of life, disk capacity limits had been exceeded more than once, we had servers to patch, maintain and backup and it was all distracting us from doing what we do well – creating innovative and unique financial products for our customers.In January 2010 The Richmond Group went Google. With support from our account manager Brinder Bhamra and the rest of the Google Apps team at Insight, a Google Apps Authorized Reseller, we migrated 350 users away from Microsoft Outlook and into the cloud with Google Apps. While I wish some of the Microsoft Exchange migration tools existed then that are available now, the migration went well and it didn’t take long for users to embrace the new system available to them.
During the migration we concentrated specifically on email, calendar and contacts. With users spread across several sites, Google Talk soon became invaluable, improving real-time communication and helping to speed up decision-making. Being able to access our email from any web connected PC, easily search and find our emails, and benefit from threaded conversations has made managing our emails a whole lot easier!
It’s quite exciting to see the product evolve week by week, rather than every three years which is what we were used to from our previous email solution. Highlights for me have been the rich collaboration that is now possible in Google Docs, contextual gadgets in Gmail and more recently the Google Apps Marketplace. It has really got me thinking about how we can integrate with Google Apps and launch our own applications in the Marketplace. Then, in addition to saving money on our email and collaboration systems, we could build new revenue streams as well!
Wednesday, September 1, 2010
Gaining Altitude: Productivity in the Cloud
Editor's note: As part of a new series, Gaining Altitude, we’ve invited well-known productivity experts and thought leaders to provide their perspectives on managing information overload and tips for success in a world where real-time communication and overflowing inboxes have become the norm.
Our first guest post is about Gmail’s new Priority Inbox by David Allen, widely recognized as a leading authority on personal and organizational productivity. He has been named one of the "Top 100 thought leaders" by Leadership magazine and Fast Company hailed him as "one of the world's most influential thinkers" in the arena of personal productivity. He is the author of three books: international bestseller, Getting Things Done: the Art of Stress-Free Productivity ("GTD" as the method is popularly known), Ready for Anything, and Making It All Work: Winning at the Game of Work and Business of Life.
The volume of email we’re experiencing is a great boon for mankind. In addition to providing chronic complainers with content to justify their lamentations, it’s forcing us to confront our need for a behavior that’s fundamental and necessary to sanity in the modern world. We actually need to decide what stuff means to us when it shows up rather than when it blows up.
That doesn’t mean that people are automatically and naturally stepping up to the plate. There’s still an almost universal resistance to doing what’s required to keep a minimal backlog of unprocessed inputs. I’ve seen more than 40,000 emails in one inbox. But the pain is mounting, and the cry for solutions grows louder.
Google has taken an interesting and potentially important step in coming to the rescue with the new Priority Inbox functionality they’ve added to Gmail. At first it seems like a practical little enhancement for traditional email management. And when I first got wind of what they had done, my first reaction was, “Oh no, not another way to just keep rearranging and avoiding making decisions or actually doing something!”
But after examining what they’ve done, I have to admit that it’s actually part of a really big idea. (Are these Googlers aware of just how big an idea they’re playing with...dunno!) It’s not a complete solution, but I think it’s an important step. They’ve begun to address two key things in how we manage our focus: (1) what kind of attention should I be paying to something, and (2) once I’ve put that attention on it, what do I do with it?
These are decisions – important ones, to maintain a manageable quota of relevant things in your life. And decision-support is one of the bright open vistas for technology. What attention should I give something to begin with? And once I’ve decided what something means, where do those kinds of things go?
Priority Inbox provides a simple way to determine and filter what email inputs I should pay attention to first, a way to group inputs that need dedicated time and focus, and a way to park the “if I have time and feel like it & might want to do something with…” stuff. It’s also not dictator-ware. You have the ability to customize these simple but important front-end sortings, based upon how you think and work.
For those of you who already are familiar with my Getting Things Done best practices, the new Priority Inbox provides an additional tool for dealing with email efficiently. For someone who is simply lost when it comes to navigating the sea of email overload, it provides a simple but elegant starting point toward the only viable solution: rapid clarification and categorization of potentially meaningful input.
The jury is still out on the effectiveness of the sexy, fuzzy logic Gmail has embedded to determine the importance of emails coming to you, but they’ve made a very cool step in the direction of a big, important idea.
Our first guest post is about Gmail’s new Priority Inbox by David Allen, widely recognized as a leading authority on personal and organizational productivity. He has been named one of the "Top 100 thought leaders" by Leadership magazine and Fast Company hailed him as "one of the world's most influential thinkers" in the arena of personal productivity. He is the author of three books: international bestseller, Getting Things Done: the Art of Stress-Free Productivity ("GTD" as the method is popularly known), Ready for Anything, and Making It All Work: Winning at the Game of Work and Business of Life.The volume of email we’re experiencing is a great boon for mankind. In addition to providing chronic complainers with content to justify their lamentations, it’s forcing us to confront our need for a behavior that’s fundamental and necessary to sanity in the modern world. We actually need to decide what stuff means to us when it shows up rather than when it blows up.
That doesn’t mean that people are automatically and naturally stepping up to the plate. There’s still an almost universal resistance to doing what’s required to keep a minimal backlog of unprocessed inputs. I’ve seen more than 40,000 emails in one inbox. But the pain is mounting, and the cry for solutions grows louder.
Google has taken an interesting and potentially important step in coming to the rescue with the new Priority Inbox functionality they’ve added to Gmail. At first it seems like a practical little enhancement for traditional email management. And when I first got wind of what they had done, my first reaction was, “Oh no, not another way to just keep rearranging and avoiding making decisions or actually doing something!”
But after examining what they’ve done, I have to admit that it’s actually part of a really big idea. (Are these Googlers aware of just how big an idea they’re playing with...dunno!) It’s not a complete solution, but I think it’s an important step. They’ve begun to address two key things in how we manage our focus: (1) what kind of attention should I be paying to something, and (2) once I’ve put that attention on it, what do I do with it?
These are decisions – important ones, to maintain a manageable quota of relevant things in your life. And decision-support is one of the bright open vistas for technology. What attention should I give something to begin with? And once I’ve decided what something means, where do those kinds of things go?
Priority Inbox provides a simple way to determine and filter what email inputs I should pay attention to first, a way to group inputs that need dedicated time and focus, and a way to park the “if I have time and feel like it & might want to do something with…” stuff. It’s also not dictator-ware. You have the ability to customize these simple but important front-end sortings, based upon how you think and work.
For those of you who already are familiar with my Getting Things Done best practices, the new Priority Inbox provides an additional tool for dealing with email efficiently. For someone who is simply lost when it comes to navigating the sea of email overload, it provides a simple but elegant starting point toward the only viable solution: rapid clarification and categorization of potentially meaningful input.
The jury is still out on the effectiveness of the sexy, fuzzy logic Gmail has embedded to determine the importance of emails coming to you, but they’ve made a very cool step in the direction of a big, important idea.
Making Money by Blogs or Incentivized Websites
The amount of money you can make by blogs seems low in the beginning but it eventually becomes passive income. With any money making method you need to get traffic. Being smart and having good ideas isn't worth a cup of coffee at starbucks. It's the ability of those intelligent thoughts to attract traffic. Important pubmed articles on fat loss rank way down low in the search engines. While inaccurate information like the BMI reigns supreme. Search engines like google do not seem to be interested in providing people with the correct information but rather the one with the most backlinks.
With websites designed to garner traffic the ideal traffic is those with more money than sense. You can monetize smart traffic by building alliances and developing new ideas. However, most people just want that money. Incentivized websites like Neobux where you get a percentage of income for every click that your referrals make seems like a good alternative seems like a good alternative than to target credit card happy people. Instead of targeting people with money, you're targeting people with time. This is a lot like monetizing smart traffic where you're recruiting people's minds and ideas by ranking high in the search engines.
With sites like Neobux, you make pennies a day. With a website, you can make a cent for just 20 people visiting and you can do that just by ranking for fluke things or by advertising on forums. The way to make money by Neobuxian-websites is by referrals and to do that you need to either do social marketing(making friends on forums or games and then selling to them by IM), SEO marketing(which makes it competing with building links for other websites), or by PPC advertising. With the amount PPC costs you need targeted traffic that will click on ads for a long time to benefit from PPC. SEO is based on economic theory of opportunity cost and I think in most situations ranking your website to get referrals for an incentivized website will lose to building links for another niche. Make Money Online is an extremely competitive niche after all and some of the top people do have referral links to incentivized websites. Social marketing is the best for this. Gamers are the best because they have Pavlonian training to click for a reward. You can also offer free game items to people who sign up using your refferal link.
If you play a lot of games, then go the neobux and neobuxian sites route. If you want to do SEO, then either recruit traffic who have ideas or credit card happy traffic.
With websites designed to garner traffic the ideal traffic is those with more money than sense. You can monetize smart traffic by building alliances and developing new ideas. However, most people just want that money. Incentivized websites like Neobux where you get a percentage of income for every click that your referrals make seems like a good alternative seems like a good alternative than to target credit card happy people. Instead of targeting people with money, you're targeting people with time. This is a lot like monetizing smart traffic where you're recruiting people's minds and ideas by ranking high in the search engines.
With sites like Neobux, you make pennies a day. With a website, you can make a cent for just 20 people visiting and you can do that just by ranking for fluke things or by advertising on forums. The way to make money by Neobuxian-websites is by referrals and to do that you need to either do social marketing(making friends on forums or games and then selling to them by IM), SEO marketing(which makes it competing with building links for other websites), or by PPC advertising. With the amount PPC costs you need targeted traffic that will click on ads for a long time to benefit from PPC. SEO is based on economic theory of opportunity cost and I think in most situations ranking your website to get referrals for an incentivized website will lose to building links for another niche. Make Money Online is an extremely competitive niche after all and some of the top people do have referral links to incentivized websites. Social marketing is the best for this. Gamers are the best because they have Pavlonian training to click for a reward. You can also offer free game items to people who sign up using your refferal link.
If you play a lot of games, then go the neobux and neobuxian sites route. If you want to do SEO, then either recruit traffic who have ideas or credit card happy traffic.
Identify new opportunities in your AdWords account with the Opportunities tab
We’ve just added a new course to the AdWords Online Classroom about the Opportunities tab in your AdWords account.
In case you’re not familiar with the Opportunities tab, it’s designed to help you discover ways to potentially improve your campaign's effectiveness by providing keywords, keyword bids, and budget ideas. These ideas are specifically catered for your account based on your campaign's past performance and may help increase your AdWords return on investment.
Our newly added course will help you learn to use the Opportunities tab to its full potential. You’ll also hear stories from other advertisers who have used the Opportunities tab to extend their advertising reach and improve their account performance.
Click on the country flag most appropriate to you to watch this course now:
In case you’re not familiar with the Opportunities tab, it’s designed to help you discover ways to potentially improve your campaign's effectiveness by providing keywords, keyword bids, and budget ideas. These ideas are specifically catered for your account based on your campaign's past performance and may help increase your AdWords return on investment.
Our newly added course will help you learn to use the Opportunities tab to its full potential. You’ll also hear stories from other advertisers who have used the Opportunities tab to extend their advertising reach and improve their account performance.
Click on the country flag most appropriate to you to watch this course now:
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