Last week on the Google Small Business blog, we kicked off our conversation about your wishes for your small business in 2011. We received some great responses about your general business needs and we really appreciate learning about your thoughtful and heartfelt wishes. Your optimistic entrepreneurial spirit came through -- from increasing revenue and sales to banding together to help fellow business owners and following your passions.
Now, we’d like to focus the conversation more specifically on your business’ online presence. So we’re asking you: If you had one wish for improving your business’ online presence 2011, what would it be? Think big and creative. It doesn’t have to be related to Google products.
This is all part of a project we’re working on to help small businesses succeed in 2011, and understanding your aspirations for the coming year will inform this project. We are studying your responses and will share the common themes with you.
Just complete the form below. Or, tell us on Facebook or Twitter using the hashtag #Wish2011. We will be publishing some of the specific wishes so If you'd like us to share your wish (not anonymously) on our blog, provide us your email, We’ll be in touch If your wish is chosen to be featured.
Spread the word and tell your friends -- the more we hear from you, the better we can plan for helping small businesses in 2011.
Imagine you’re a men’s tailor in Bangkok, and you sell custom suits to travelers passing through Thailand. You start a website to sell your suits online and begin to notice that the majority of your website traffic comes from overseas. How do you respond to this international demand?
Businesses of all sizes face a number of obstacles when they want to expand internationally. First, they must identify the right market to sell their products or services, such as custom men’s suits. Then they have to create versions of their website and ad campaigns in the language of the market they want to reach. Finally, and perhaps most importantly, they need to reach new customers who may be interested in their products and services.
Starting today, businesses can access a number of new resources from Google to help them overcome these obstacles and start growing internationally. We’re launching a new website, called Google Ads for Global Advertisers, which will serve as a central hub for Google’s tools and tips for businesses looking to expand to foreign markets. This website pulls together resources for businesses to find the right market for their products and services, translate their websites and ad text, find new customers with relevant online ads, and understand options for international payment, shipping and customer service.
We’re also introducing Global Market Finder, a new free tool to help businesses identify markets with high demand for their products or services. The Global Market Finder automatically translates your keyword — for example, business suit — into 56 languages and then uses Google search trends data to see where in the world people search for your product or service. It helps businesses evaluate new markets by showing the volume of local searches, estimated price for keywords and competition for each keyword in each market. With this tool, businesses can answer questions like “how competitive is this market?”, “how does demand in one country compare to demand elsewhere in the world?” and “how much would it cost to start advertising in this new market?” You can read more about these new tools on the Inside AdWords blog.
Google has already helped hundreds of thousands of businesses reach customers in foreign markets. From a mosaic company in Lebanon to a bespoke shoe retailer in Sydney, a tech support company in India and a bed and breakfast in Poland, tools like AdWords have helped businesses reach new customers and drive traffic to their websites. We think our new website and tools will encourage even more businesses to expand internationally, whether you’re a small business testing a single market for the first time or a mid-size company advertising your products to an entire region.
After all, there are more than 1.9 billion consumers online. Wouldn’t you like to add some of them as customers?
Posted by Michael Galvez and Srinidhi Viswanatha, Global Advertisers team
Editor’s note: We recently launched an improvement that makes over 60 additional Google services available to Google Apps users. This series showcases what’s new and how your organization can benefit.
Welcome to Google Places You already know that Google Apps is a great way to run your business and ensure that your employees can collaborate and work effectively. But are you also taking advantage of Google’s other online tools that can help your company build a strong external presence and customer base? Our recent infrastructure upgrade has made doing so much easier: now you can access Google Places with your existing Google Apps account.
Google Places offers business owners a free and easy way to make sure that potential customers can find their business when searching online at Google.com and in Google Maps, both from desktops and mobile devices. With your free Google Places account, you can:
Be found: Verify your business’s information to make sure people can find you on Google.
Stand out: Engage customers with photos, coupons, custom posts, and more on your Place page.
Get insight: Use feedback about your listing to make smarter business decisions.
Claiming your business listing with Google Places is easy and verification methods are in place to make sure data is accurate. Once you’ve claimed your listing, you can update it through Google Places at any time using your Google Apps account by signing in at google.com/places. In addition to creating your listing, you can also enhance it by highlighting special offers with coupons, sharing photos and videos of your location or products, marking your service areas, and responding to reviews from customers.
Once your business listing is up and running, you can use the Places dashboard to gain valuable insights about your listing’s performance. For example, you can view top search terms for your business, which can help you set up a more targeted AdWords campaign. Or, you can view an interactive map showing the origin of customers who request driving directions to your current location, which could help you decide where to open up a new location.
Learn more and get started Google Places can be enabled by your domain administrator from the Google Apps Control Panel at https://www.google.com/a/[your_domain.com] (replace [your_domain.com] with your actual domain name). If your organization isn’t using Google Apps yet, you can learn more and sign up today at http://www.google.com/apps/more.
Sebastian Hejnowski’s parents built the Villa Zdroj Bed and Breakfast in 2002 to share Poland’s beauty with weary travelers. Located in Miedzyzdroje, a city on the coast of Polish island Wolin, Villa Zdroj is one of the island’s first modern bed and breakfasts.
Sebastian’s parents handle reservations, property development and sometimes breakfast. Sebastian runs the advertising efforts for his parents’ Villa, including Google AdWords. “When we first started our AdWords campaigns, we focused on Poland but we soon realized that there was increasing interest from our neighboring countries,” says Sebastian. When he noticed an upward trend in drop-in visitors from other countries, he decided to launch campaigns across Poland’s borders as well.
According to Sebastian, the variety of outdoor activities combined with the relatively inexpensive cost of Polish tourism make Wolin a vacation paradise for Germans and Scandinavians. “Germans and Scandinavians were coming to Miedzyzdroje, but mostly staying in expensive five-star hotels,” says Sebastian. “B&B’s were never an option since they didn’t know where to find them.” So Sebastian made Denmark, Germany, Norway and Sweden his first international targets. The strategy proved correct: “We were one of the first Polish B&B’s to create a website in English. When we targeted an AdWords campaign to these people, they started calling and booking reservations.”
As time went on, Sebastian noticed that Poland had become more and more accessible to Europeans due to an increase in flights to the area. To capitalize on this trend, Sebastian expanded his AdWords campaigns even beyond bordering countries. “With time we extended the campaign to the Great Britain and the Netherlands.” says Sebastian. “Europeans tend to explore new places and travel extensively.”
Today, foreigners account for more than half of Villa Zdroj’s guests. And Sebastian estimates that up to 60% of those international guests book Villa Zdroj because they found his AdWords ads.
Thanks to his effective targeting, Sebastian now sells out all of the villa’s rooms during peak summer travel season. He adjusts his ad campaigns to reflect availability: “In summer, we track vacancies and adjust our campaigns accordingly. We pause the campaigns if we’re booked a few weeks out.”
In 2012, Poland will host the Euro Cup and Sebastian’s dad is already getting ready for an influx of visitors. “My father is considering buying a big projector so everyone can watch the games together in the communal room,” says Sebastian. “We’re already excited to share the Polish seaside with more out of town visitors!”
Learn more about Villa Zdroj Bed and Breakfast and Sebastian’s successes online in this short video (it's in Polish, but you can view captions).
Posted by Piotr Zalewski, Communications Associate, Poland
Editor’s note: We recently launched an improvement that makes over 60 additional Google services available to Google Apps users. This series showcases what’s new and how your organization can benefit.
Welcome to Google SketchUp & 3D Warehouse 3D can be a great tool for solving all kinds of problems, like redesigning an office space or envisioning the neighborhood around the new office park in Shanghai. However, the software to generate 3D models and images has traditionally been prohibitively expensive or too difficult for non-professionals to learn. Enter: Google SketchUp.
We like to say that SketchUp is “3D for everyone.” By stripping out the technical hurdles that make traditional 3D software difficult to learn in favor of a simple, intuitive interface, most users are up and modeling in less than 10 minutes. We also made SketchUp free and as a result, we’ve found that people are using SketchUp in all sorts of creative ways to solve everyday problems and make their jobs easier.
Store owners are using SketchUp to visualize ways to maximize foot traffic in their stores. Facility managers are using SketchUp to redesign the office space to accommodate more desks. Event planners are using SketchUp to figure out how to set up their booth for their next event.
But building models in SketchUp is just scratching the surface. You can also use Google 3D Warehouse, which is a searchable repository of hundreds of thousands of 3D models, to discover existing 3D elements and share those that you create. Seamless auto-complete integration with your existing contacts in Google Apps makes it effortless to share models and collaborate with colleagues. To give you more control over the content you create, 3D Warehouse also allows you to set sharing permissions so you can manage who has viewing and editing access to your models.
Learn more and get started The web sharing functionality of Google 3D Warehouse can be enabled by your domain administrator from the Google Apps Control Panel at https://www.google.com/a/[your_domain.com] (replace [your_domain.com] with your actual domain name) and you can get started by downloading the Google SketchUp application. If your organization isn’t using Google Apps yet, you can learn more and sign up today at http://www.google.com/apps/more.
For more answers to specific questions about Google SketchUp and Google 3D Warehouse you can view our Help Center or get the latest news, tips, and tricks on the SketchUp Blog.
Editor’s note: We recently launched an improvement that makes over 60 additional Google services available to Google Apps users. This series showcases what’s new and how your organization can benefit.
Welcome to Google Translator Toolkit As the world’s citizens come online, more and more businesses are seeing the value of offering their services in multiple languages. Translation, however, can be costly and time-consuming, making it hard for businesses to take the first step. Whether you have an in-house translator or are a small translation service yourself, we think you will be excited by the newest addition to Google Apps: Google Translator Toolkit.
Translator Toolkit is a web-based translation editor that makes it easier and faster for translators to translate documents, web pages, and other content into dozens of other languages. To begin, upload a document from your desktop or enter the URL of a website that you want to translate. Translator Toolkit will then automatically load the text and generate a machine translation.
Once the translated content appears in Translator Toolkit, a user can easily make changes directly to the text or use tools designed to help make the translation process easier – such as the ability to see previous translations provided by others or the ability to reference bilingual dictionaries. Using Translator Toolkit with your Google Apps account makes it easy to collaborate on translations with colleagues. Others you share translations with can access your document and contribute in real-time, much like collaboration works in Google Docs.
Many professionals, individuals, and institutions have already started using Translator Toolkit to help bring their content into other languages and reach new markets. For example, within Google’s philanthropic arm Google.org, the Health Speaks team uses Translator Toolkit to make public health education more widely accessible across languages. In the coming weeks we plan to translate critical public health information into Arabic, Hindi and Swahili – all with the help of Translator Toolkit.
Learn more and get started Google Translator Toolkit can be enabled by your domain administrator from the Google Apps Control Panel at https://www.google.com/a/[your_domain.com] (replace [your_domain.com] with your actual domain name). If your organization isn’t using Google Apps yet, you can learn more and sign up today at http://www.google.com/apps/more.
You can learn more about Google Translator Toolkit in the Help Center or stay up-to-date on the latest launches on the Google Translate Blog.
Editor’s note: We recently launched an improvement that makes over 60 additional Google services available to Google Apps users. This series showcases what’s new and how your organization can benefit.
Welcome to YouTube With more than 1 billion subscribers and 2 billion video views per day, YouTube is one of the top destinations for watching, uploading, and discussing video. Now, your company can benefit from the tools and scale provided by YouTube integrated with your users’ Google Apps accounts.
Many companies are already using YouTube in interesting ways to promote communication, both within the organization and to external audiences. Here are some examples:
Build a public YouTube channel for your brand or product: You can maintain a public YouTube channel for your entire organization or for individual departments. For example, your marketing team can create a brand channel on YouTube to advertise your company to external customers. Take a look at HP's brand channel for a nice example of how a business can use YouTube to build a community around the exchange of product knowledge.
Build an archive of all your company’s videos in one place: From training videos to strategy updates, you can centralize both externally-facing and internally-facing video in one video archive. YouTube’s sharing options let you choose whether you want your videos to be accessible publicly on YouTube or privately to people who you individually invite to watch, giving you control over your content.
Build a channel to support your business processes: Customers and employees can stay up-to-date on new videos and channel activity by subscribing to the appropriate channels. Recent activity from those channels, such as new video content uploads, will then be delivered automatically to the subscriber’s homepage or to their email inbox, if they choose. For example, P&G maintains a hiring channel on YouTube targeting potential employees, so interested candidates can subscribe to the channel and ensure they don’t miss P&G’s latest hiring updates.
End users can also engage in conversations relating to the video content using the YouTube Moderator feature, which provides a forum for questions and answers directly in the video interface. This type of conversation can bring invaluable product or service feedback directly from customers to your organization.
YouTube provides a platform on which your organization can manage and archive video communications and control how those videos are shared both internally and externally. YouTube's features also allow for easy and intuitive uploading, viewing, collaboration, and conversation covering all of your organization’s video collateral. And now that YouTube is integrated with Google Apps, sharing content with colleagues and distribution lists is easy with contact list integration.
Learn more and get started YouTube sign-in can be enabled by your domain administrator from the Google Apps Control Panel at https://www.google.com/a/[your_domain.com] (replace [your_domain.com] with your actual domain name). If your organization isn’t using Google Apps yet, you can learn more and sign up today at http://www.google.com/apps/more.
