Information - Resources - Tools - Strategies

Google Personal Finance Tools

Google Personal Finance Tools makes it a cinch for you to manage your expenses, pay down your debt and grow your savings by using Google Docs templates. Your doucments are stored securely online and you can access them whenever you want from any computer.

There are a variety of templates you can choose from. Simply select the template that best suits your needs and get started organizing your finances.

Analytics

Google Analytics is a handy web-tracking program that provides statistics on pageviews, keywords, referers, search engine traffic, and many other indicators that are critical to helping you test and measure the performance of your Web pages.

It integrates easily with AdWords, can track all your promotional campaigns, and gathers important data which you can use to refine your strategies and gain that edge.

Notebook

Google Notebook requires you to download an extension in order to access its powerful features. And then, with only a click of the icon that appears in your browser's status bar, you'll be able to clip and collect information from any Web page as you surf the Web.

You can create several notebooks or arrange a single notebook into various sections. Managing your clippings is as simple as dragging and dropping them from one section or notebook to another.

There is a search box for ease in locating information, and you can give others full or partial access to your notebook(s) to collaborate, edit or add notes. You can also publish your notebook(s) online to a restricted or global audience.

Docs & Spreadsheets

Google Docs & Spreadsheets is an online editor that allows you to perform a wide range of functions for a variety of documents like Word, OpenOffice, RTF, HTML, TXT, PDF and more.

You can create, view, upload, download, import, export, e-mail, post to a blog, embed, save, format, spell-check, edit, publish, share, and execute just about any action with your documents or spreadsheets.

And you can do all these things comforted by the knowledge that your work lives on a secure online server, removing any risk of losing information, should you experience a local hard drive crash.

Webmaster Tools

Google Webmaster Tools are designed to help you increase your site's visibility in Google. You can use them to find out the last time Googlebot crawled your site, and exchange information that would be useful in diagnosing and fixing potential problems.

You can see which words other sites are using to link to yours, and if you were penalized because of violations discovered on your site, you will have a chance to correct the problems and request reinclusion.

Google Webmaster Tools provide a free and easy way to make your site more Google-friendly.

Alerts

Google Alerts is a useful email update system that lets you monitor Google results for any number of topics you wish. It is flexible and comprehensive, and you can be kept abreast of what's happening with:

• the latest development on your query topic
• trends in your industry
• your competitors
• breaking news stories
• anything that pertains to you, your products, your reputation, your articles, and so on.

You can design your alerts to be as general or specific as you want according to the keywords you use.

For example:

If you write articles for distribution and want to keep tabs on where they are published online, you could...

1. Enter a query for your byline. This will get you results with your byline, but will also include refererences to others with names matching yours.
2. Enclose an article title in quotation marks – "Article Title Goes Here". This query will narrow your search to return only pages that contain the precise string of words sandwiched between the quotation marks.

Google Alerts is a fun and easy way to stay "in the loop" on those subjects that interest you.

Picasa

Picasa is a very powerful photo organizer that makes it a breeze to locate, organize, edit, sort and share the entire collection of photos on your computer's hard drive.

You can group your photos into albums for viewing as slide shows and movies; there's a system for rating your favorite shots and you can even password protect your collections.

When it comes to what you can do with this software, that's just the tip of the iceberg. You can also:

• remove red eye
• adjust lighting
• add color effects
• add captions
• rotate
• crop
• burn to disc
• and much more

Picasa makes it a snap to upload and publish photos to the Web and offers 1GB of free storage space, which is sufficient to accomodate thousands of photos. This award winning software is easy to use and a joy to explore.