Internet Marketing

Google has tons of great tools but today I want to focus on three of them to help you increase your productivity.

I am one of those people who can come up with a great idea, yet lose interest quite easily, then rush onto the next idea (Even while typing this I have managed to come up with four other articles I would prefer to write and played around with my site badges for half an hour!).

So, to combat this, I have had to take away a lot of my distractions and organize myself better. My main time wasters are Facebook and Online browser games, which are pretty hard to get away from when I am on the internet.

The three Google products that I have found me to be more productive and finish the tasks I set for myself are:

1. Gmail (Google Mail)
2. Google Calendar
3. Google Desktop

Gmail

I have had a Gmail account for years yet never used it to its full potential. Today I depend on it as my number one email address, using Google's powerful sorting, labels and filters to organize my mail.

Those are the things I want to quickly cover as why you should use Gmail.

You may be wondering, what are labels? Labels in Gmail are similar to folders but with more flexibiliy. For example, if you wanted to move an email into a folder in Outlook, you could drag it into your folder and it would disappear from your inbox. But what if that email also falls into another category? You can only have the email in one folder though. Gmail Labels solves this problem. Now an email can cross over into as many categories as you would like. Filters are another cool edition to Gmail. Similar to how rules work in Outlook, you can use Gmail filters to label your emails, or even forward them on to another email address. I am yet to find any other free email account (or even a paid one!) that offers as much flexibility and customization as Gmail does.

The above example is a great way of using filters to separate social media emails from sites such as Twitter, Facebook and MySpace. This way it skips going into my inbox and goes straight into my Twitter label, making it easier for me not to miss an important email.

Google Calendar

This one goes hand in hand with your Gmail account. Got an important event that you need to be reminded of? Simple! Just add the date into Google Calendar and set it to send an email reminder.

Google Desktop

I find by having Google Desktop, I never lose focus of what needs doing. If I think of a great domain name, an idea for a website or blog post, I make a note of it. As you can see from the picture I have also added my Gmail and Google Calendar to it also. I have tried to keep it quite minimal to avoid distractions. So while adding the Facebook gadget seemed like a good idea at the time, I removed it to avoid me checking status updates every five minutes. If the Google desktop is not for you, you may want to consider iGoogle. You can set up the same functions on an iGoogle webpage and set this as your homepage.

Three great products from Google, all absolutely free. You can also use them anywhere in the world, providing you have an internet connection.

Now ... I should probably get back to the task I should have been doing before this!