- Hey there guys. It's Pete Moriarty here. Today we're covering some of
Google's best hidden tools. If you are a G Suite user then you definitely wanna check these out because what I'm gonna be
sharing with you is some of Google's tools in the
consumer space and also in the business space which
you may not know about which I use pretty much every day that are pretty key for business owners. Now, I hear when we share these tools with our customers many times over, oh I didn't know Google could do that and so that's what this show is all about. It's all about helping you
find different ways of working with Google technology that can help you to be more productive, help you in your life and
that's what we wanna do. We wanna be more productive and so Google's got a amazing set of tools in the G Suite ecosystem. There are also some
outside of formerly G Suite that are also pretty useful as well and I'm gonna be
sharing some of those. So let's get into the first
thing on our agenda and that is the G Suite News. So if you are like me, you may have heard of
the G Suite updates blog. This is a cool little blog that Google run and they post out all the updates but one of the downsides
of this is you can get kind of a little bit caught
up in all the noise and so Google posts a lot of updates for administrators on admin
updates, changes to G Suite, things that are happening in there but they get a bit boring to be honest and so what I do is I skim the
blog and I find the stuff that is useful for small
business owners and so I'm gonna share that with you and so I'm gonna share just the
stuff that's important just to highlight stuff that I think is relevant
to small business owners. As I said, there's not really much that's that exciting this month
but let me at least share with you a couple of
things that they've added to G Suite in the last little while and we will go through those now. So first up, ability to
add Meet inside of Gmail. So if you haven't already
noticed it inside of Gmail, Google have actually
added a Meet button here to start a meeting and so that's right down
there below your labels. So if that's not switched
on for you by now, you may need to actually switch it on in the admin panel and
what that actually does, I'm gonna zoom right in
here, it's a bit hard to see 'cause it's pixelated but
what that actually does is it lets you with one click, just jump straight into a Google Meet. So if you've been using Zoom and you gotta kinda open up and create, cut and paste it and
share it with someone, Google Meet is really easy
to use for you and your team 'cause it's fully integrated in the G Suite ecosystem and
we use Meet for everything. We don't use Zoom anymore, too many security concerns for me but also why would I
double up if we've already got a great Google meeting tool? So that's another easy way to get started with meetings there if you
hadn't already seen that one. Next up, this is a big one
and this has been talked about for a long, long, long time
and that is being able to chat to people outside your Google domain, inside of Google Chat and so Google Chat is a little bit like Slack. I dunno, maybe using
messenger if you're doing that for the business but what it allows you to do is connect with your team for instant messaging and it allows you to set up rooms and kind
of threaded conversations for everyone to work together and chat for instant messaging. Now, we don't recommend using this much because it can be a real
kind of interruption factory. So I would much prefer you
use a tool like a Asana to do your task coordination
between your team but chat is really useful for
those quick messages like hey, are you free for a quick meet now? Keeping in mind that's
actually interrupting someone or hey, you know, we have
an emergency and I need to get in touch with you or hey, did you get that contract signed? Or whatever or maybe just hey, you know, what are you up to today? Do you wanna grab lunch or something? That's what chat is really useful for but now chat will let you talk to people outside your domain. So you can set up groups or
rooms, they call and chat and also instant messaging between different people outside of your G Suite domain which has been asked for
for a long, long time. So really happy about that. Thank you Google for
putting that in place. And then finally this is another big, most requested feature which I'm very excited
about is the ability to share folders in Shared Drives. So Shared Drives which
were previously called Team Drives actually didn't
have a way to share folders from underneath them and so
if you created a Team Drive then you wouldn't actually
be able to share any folders that were sub folders of that Team Drive and so
inside our Google Drive, we'll go ahead and show
you my Google Drive here. We've got everything nicely
organized in our Shared Drive. So every different area of the business has different Shared Drive and we'll share that with
different groups of people. It's smarter to use group
based permissions rather than individual sharing and we cover that more in some of our other videos. So you can see I've got different groups that I've got these shared with but if I was to go into an actual file, previously I was not
able to share a folder, see how I can't share it there? Well Google have just
opened up a beta program where you can get access
to sharing folders. This has been the number
one most requested feature of Shared Drive. So yeah, really happy about that. That's a really cool one and
if you want access to that, you've just gotta go to the blog and then express your
interest for the beta, doesn't necessarily mean that you're gonna get access but what it does mean is that that's gonna be coming
to Google very, very soon. So let me know if you're
excited about Team Drives. Let me know if you're using Share Drives. I'm curious, if you're
using Shared Drives, write down Shared Drives on the comments 'cause I'm curious if
you're actually using it because for business owners
that we implement G Suite for, we always set it up but it's only been released for two years. So we've got who knows how many customers who
are out there in the wild who are not actually using
Shared Drives right now. One thing you may not
know is that you need to be on the business edition of G Suite. So if you're only paying $8 a month, that's Australian Dollars, formerly the $5 a month
plan which is G Suite basic. You don't get access to the
awesome Shared Drives feature. So if you're on basic right now, you may consider upgrading to business because
business gets you access to that Shared Drives and what that does, the magic of Shared Drives
is it allows someone to place files into folders
but not take them out. So it's really great if
you're like sharing a folder with someone who's external to your business and you
want them to share a file or share a folder with
you but not allow them to then delete it after they've shared it with you and we've heard
horror stories of someone, business owners who hire a VA, that VA does a bunch of work for them but then the VA deletes something from their own Google
Drive and it disappears from your Google Drive because
if you're not the owner of that file then what happens is whoever's created a file
becomes the owner the file. So you can run into problems there. So if you're interested in upgrading to Shared Drives inside your Google Drive or if you want our team to
help out setting that up for you then just drop us a message and we'll be very happy to help out. I wanted to talk a little bit about valuing your time
and the reason I wanted to get into that before we jump into Google's tools is I love saving time. I love optimizing for time. I spent a lot of time in the early stages of my business optimizing for income and then
once I got enough income to be happy and comfortable
and you guys would know that's not really that
much money, you know, I mean maybe if you're living in Sydney, yeah, you've gotta earn a bit of money to pay for your Porsche
and that kind of thing. But for the most part, getting the basics covered, after that your happiness
doesn't really increase much the more money that you earn, right? And so smart business owners
will then start optimizing for time, start optimizing for happiness, start optimizing for
experiences and start optimizing for impact and so once I had kind of ticked the boxes of the
income that I wanted to earn, I started optimizing for all of those other areas and optimizing for time is something that
I'm very passionate about. So one of the ways that
I was able to optimize for time was first, really valuing my time and
in last week's episode, we talked about how to measure the value of your time and to do that
you take your year's revenue. So you take your goal revenue for the year and you divide that by 2048 and 2048 is the number of hours that you have to work per year. So if you only have 2048
hours for work each year, take the total revenue that you wanna make in
your business as a goal, you divide that by 2048 and then you know how much revenue you need
to generate for every hour that you work in the business. Now I know you might not
be selling your time, so it might not be a direct equivalent for how many hours that
you actually deliver in the business but what's important about that number is valuing for everything that you are doing, is it actually worth that much per hour? And for many business owners
when they do this calculation, they take their revenue,
they divide it by 2048, 2080, sorry. They find that they are doing a lot of tasks in their business
and in their home life that are not actually worth
their time and so what do we do? We delegate, we automate or we delete, We pass them on to someone else. We find another way of getting it done or we just stop doing it. So one of the things that I've been doing at home lately is I've always had someone to do the cleaning. I've always had someone to do the washing. I've always had someone
kind of like help me out with maintaining the house type stuff but what I've done recently is I've actually employed a helper and that helper will do things
like go to the post office, do some shopping at some of the shops that don't do online delivery, take care of personal errands when I don't feel like doing
them and I know it's kind of like getting to the point a little bit of like okay Pete, well you know, like how silly are we gonna
get here with how much stuff do you wanna automate and systemize? But let me tell you, having
more time to be able to focus on the things that I love doing. Some of that is running the business. Some of that is spending
time with my partner. Some of that is going out for
a drive, adventuring, camping, doing other things, running and being involved
in other businesses and other organizations, having impact in community
projects that I'm a part of, mentoring other business owners, spending time with friends, doing things that are enjoyable for me, the amount of time that I have to do all those other things
is directly proportionate to the number of things that I find to delegate and take off my plate. So if you haven't already
done that then now might be the time to start to think about that and let me tell you, it's really easy to find
somebody to help out. Jump on Gumtree. That's all we've done. We jumped on Gumtree. There's one person that I found in Sydney who collects mail and
does little errands there and they even, that person posts out books to our customers which is really cool. And then I have one person where I live in Burleigh Heads who will go to the post office up
here and do those kinds of errands as well. So if you're listening right
now and you're thinking wow, that'll be really nice to have a helper, like helping me out to take
care of some things for me. I'd like to know in the comments, what kind of things would you delegate? What kind of things are coming up for you? When you think about what
your time is worth per hour and you're thinking about what kind of things you might be able to delegate. I'm curious to know what would you delegate
if you could have a helper to help you out? Now there's no pitch here on the helper. I just wanna illustrate to you the value of your time because it's
gonna become very important to you when I share some
of these Google tools to you because some of them, you're gonna wanna jump in
and start using yourself and that's awesome, that's
great but some of them, it's better use of your
time to actually share with someone else to
help you implement them and that's where a team
like IT Genius may come in handy for you. Okay, cool. So, let's get into our feature now guys, I've kept you waiting long enough. We're gonna talk about
Google's best business tools that you've not yet heard of. I'm gonna take you through
some of my favorites that I use to run the business
and also to run my home life. Now, the reason I talked about my helper and having someone help
me with home outside of just doing the shopping
and those other tasks is that I have this person
take care of errands when I need them taken care
of and I actually use a piece of Google technology to help out with that and that is the Google Shopping List. Now you probably haven't heard
of the Google Shopping List because it's not really that well known. There's no app for it. It's not part of G Suite. It's just one of those hidden
tools that actually exists with the Google Assistant
and the Google Assistant as you guys would know is the
little puck looking device type things and they will
help you around the home. So I would recommend you have at least one of those in your home because you can just kinda yell at it rather than using
this app on the phone. It's a bit slower to do it on the phone but it's great to have in the
lounge room or the kitchen. So if you need to yell hey, add this to my shopping list and I'm
gonna do the actual command soon and show you what it looks like. Then Google will automatically do that for you which is pretty cool. So to get to the Shopping List, you just actually go to
shoppinglists.google.com. So that's how you access it
and you can't see the URL here 'cause my pictures actually, here we go. Let's remove my video there for a second. So you go to shoppinglists.google.com and it just shows you the shopping list. Now, unfortunately
there's no app for it and so it only runs in the browser. So that means when you're out and about when you're actually
shopping, then you have to actually just go in
the browser on your phone. It's not a big deal and
you can save that link to your home screen if you want but the Shopping List is really useful to do exactly what you expect, right? Create a shopping list with it. But what I use this for all the time is when I'm in the kitchen
and maybe I'm halfway through cooking something
from time to time, I do cook myself. I'm enjoying the art of learning to cook. What I will do is I'll
just kinda yell at Google to add things to my shopping list and I literally have to say, hey Google, add toilet
rolls to my shopping list. I don't know if you're
gonna hear it's response. - [Google] Got it. I added toilet rolls. - There we go and it's appeared
immediately on my shopping list and so it's automatically
gonna add anything I add onto my shopping list
and then that's gonna be shared with anyone else that I've shared the shopping list with. Now of course because of the Google, it's collaborative, right? And so you're sharing
this with anyone else who you choose to have
access to this as well and so to do that, really simple, you just add their name or you have to add their email and then it's automatically gonna
share it with that person. So Hazel, our assistant
gets added to this and then when she does the shop
for us then all she has to do is open up the shopping
list and everything will be there and you can
see here we've got like, you know, hundreds and
hundreds of things on there. What I like about it is it actually brings in the images from image
search automatically and it pops all of those
straight onto your list for you which is really cool. Now, not only does it
help you with the shopping which is really useful but
you can have multiple lists as well, right? So you can see here, I've
got a few other lists. You can have multiple lists. So as an example, I might like some tamari
almonds from Woolworths, right? So I might choose to create
a list just for Woolworths or I might choose to create a list just for Bunnings and all I have to do is yell at Google and say that. So let's do that. Hey Google, add pot plants
to my Bunnings list. - [Google] I couldn't find
a list called my Bunnings. Do you want me to make one? - Yes. - [Google] Okay. I made a list called my
Bunnings and added pot plants. - Okay, so it's, called it my Bunnings. I dunno why it called it my
Bunnings but that's okay. Alright. So here we go. We've added that to our
list and Google's doing that all automatically all via voice which is pretty damn cool. So yeah. So jump onto your shopping list
guys and get started there. So that's my first little tip there on Google's hidden tools. Okay, so the next one, we're gonna get into a G Suitey one now and this one is for those that are on G Suite. So you have to be a G
Suite subscriber for this and this one is called Cloud Search and Cloud Search is
using Google's AI in part to help you find what you
need in your Google account. Now you may have noticed in Google Drive 'cause it's been here for the last year or so that in your My Drive
when you open it up, it gives you automated
suggestions on what you may be interested in opening
based on your history, based on meetings that
you've got on your calendar, based on files that
you've opened and based on Google's clever AI and smarts on what it thinks you may be
interested in checking out. Now that app, I actually met the person who
created this in San Francisco, which was pretty groovy, but that app, that kinda
technology has been applied to Cloud Search but
this actually goes right across the whole business
and so it searches all of your files in your whole
entire G Suite account. So it'll search emails, it'll search files, it'll search your Google Drive and it will even find
calendar events as well. So basically anything that's
in your G Suite account, it's gonna find based on what you've got in your profile for Google. So if I was to search for the word cebu and it's gonna open up, here we go. So I've got some Google
Keep Notes it's brought up, there's a room in chat in Google Groups. There's an email that
mentions the words cebu. There's a spreadsheet. I've got a video in My Drive somewhere. I've got a folder in My Drive and you can see here that
this is extremely powerful. This is just gonna find
absolutely everything inside my business with the word cebu. Now, if I wanna drill down, I can choose the advanced
search here and I can choose, you know, if I want a particular file, if I want it to be owned by
me or owned by someone else, if I wanna find only spreadsheets, I could choose to only
search for spreadsheets, things like that, pretty
straightforward, right? But this is a very, very cool tool. Unfortunately, again, there's no mobile app for this one. So this is just one that you
need to use in the browser, but to access that you just
go to cloudsearch.google.com, that's cloudsearch.google.com
and then, yeah, you're good to go. So as long as you're on a G Suite account, I've got a feeling you may have to have a business account for this. I'm not 100% sure. So if that doesn't work for you or if it says it's not available or your administrator
has not given you access, just drop a message through to my team, just PM the page and we'll help
you getting access to that. But that is cloud search, extremely, extremely powerful tool. Okay, cool. So let's move on to our next one. We've covered those three. I next wanna go onto Jamboard, now I know I've covered this a few times in the last few meets that we've done, but just for anyone who has not heard it, Jamboard is an absolutely
amazing tool from Google. Obviously they have the actual Jamboard which I'm working on getting one on order. I'm gonna show you what that looks like. So this is a digital whiteboard. I've not yet splurged
on one but it's an end of financial year gift for
myself if we hit our goals. So this is a digital whiteboard which is absolutely phenomenal. It synchronizes
automatically with a cloud. It lets you run drawings in the browser and I'm gonna show you a couple of what they look like soon
and it's completely connected to Google Meet, Google Hangouts and if you have multiple offices, you could buy multiple boards
and then both work together on these or all work
together rather on these. It's basically a digital re-imagination of what a whiteboard should
be and let me tell you, they are damn cool to work with. Only downside is it's about 10G large to get your hands on one. So it's the kinda thing that you've gotta really
love your whiteboards and I really love my whiteboards. I'm just working on justifying getting one for the office here. Tim, if you're watching, we'd love to have one sponsored by the Google team. But anyway, if you use a Jamboard
in the physical presence, it's gonna mirror
everything to the web and so accessing Google Jamboard on the web, you just go to jamboard.google.com
and you actually get the same app experience
as using the Jamboard. The other cool thing that
you can do is you can jump onto an iPad or any
tablet or an iOS device. If you're on an Android
phone or a Apple phone and you can also use the Jamboard app to access things from there. So you can see here I've
got our new studio here. Let me open this up. I actually did some planning
on the iPad, kinda drawing out where things were gonna
go in the new studio that we've just opened up and here, this was all just drawn on the Jamboard. I did this on the iPad and
this is available online. So I don't just use this for drawings. We also use this for collaboration. Like all of Google tools
you can collaborate in real time and what that means is that you can have multiple people working on one document at the same time. Now, what is that useful for? Well, it's particularly useful for brainstorming when
you have remote teams. So when you have multiple team members and they're working
from different locations and you wanna bring people together but you don't have a way of doing that without third
party complicated tools, the Jamboard works really
beautifully to do that. Now, of course it's available
for everyone who's on G Suite. So you gotta be on G Suite to access it but what I really love about
it is it gives you access to work with your team, collaborate with them
in the Google ecosystem and we love doing everything
in the Google ecosystem. It means we don't have
to spin up another app. It means with the 35, 40
odd people that we've got in the company, we don't have to worry about someone creating something and then leaving the
company and then taking that login with them, right? Because that's always a pain
in the butt when that happens. So let me show you some
of the other examples that we've actually used the Jamboard for, this is a gratitude
journal that the team did as a HR exercise which was pretty cool and then we'll also use it for things like when we do a company conference and so when we get the team together which we'll do once per quarter and we get everyone working
on vision and mission and company planning and you
know, we do exercises together. Sometimes we use it to do
things like playing games but when we're bringing
the whole team together and we want to get
everyone on the same page with their brainstorming, then we do it using the Jamboard. It's just taking its time to load up. This is a really, really big one. Sometimes it takes a
little while to load up. So while we are waiting
for this bad boy to load, it's just thinking about it. I'm gonna read through some of your comments here and
just have a quick check in. Tim said, emailing me as we speak. That is awesome. Phil said the Rocket Book stickers for the whiteboard are great. Oh, that is awesome. That's a great recommendation, Phil. Maybe you can drop a link to that below but there is an app called Rocket Book. It's actually, it's a physical book. Or you can get like a sticker that you put onto your
physical whiteboard. A Rocket Book is like
a poor man's Jamboard. You can take a physical whiteboard, Take a photo with it with a call app and it automatically uploads that image to your Evernote or to your Google Drive. You can kind of put
that wherever you want. Now that's static whereas
Jamboard is interactive but still very cool. So Phil if you can drop a link down there, that would be awesome. Tom has said, can you
use it on a touch screen? Tom, you actually can. What I like about that is so it works on the iPad and I use the
pen on the iPad for that. So when I'm working with the Jamboard then it's just you know, pretty much natural input. The app is excellent on an iPad Pro. I have used it on my Pixelbook as well which is my Chromebook
laptop, works pretty good. The pens just not quite as good as the iPad but it certainly
works on the Pixelbook. So if you've got, I
think Tom, from memory, you have an Acer 13? If I remember your laptop correctly. So any Chromebook with
a touchscreen you should be able to use it but third party styluses
are not always great and so if you're using a
notepad or a Chromebook that actually has a proper
stylus designed for it, then you're probably gonna
have a better experience with that but I also have
set up a TV and plugged that TV into the iPad using
HDMI and that was another way of kinda setting up a poor man's Jamboard where I could have you know,
like a really big screen where I had a couple of
people in the same room as me and I could draw
on it, have it displayed to everyone nice and
big and I was just able to draw straight from
the tablet or the iPad. So it works really great for
that but honestly you know, having used the Jamboard for games, for team conferences
and I'll show you some of the examples of some of the things that we've used at for here, our team just use it for like absolutely everything
and you can see some of our team are artists
here which is pretty cool but there's been no
trouble at all using it on the mobile and using it in the browser as well and so we've been using it here, it's pretty obvious for some activities but also for like some team
building type stuff you know, company planning, we've got all kinds of like cool graphs and
other bits and pieces there but yeah, that's the Jamboard. So if you're interested
in getting your hands on an actual physical Jamboard, awesome, awesome investment for
you and the business, then get in touch with us because we can help you
to get your hands on one. Okay, cool. So the next one that I wanted
to cover is Google Keep. If you've not yet heard of Google Keep, it's a little bit like
Googles answer to Evernote and for many business owners
who have been on board with the cloud revolution from the start, you would know that among Dropbox, Evernote was one of the very
first cloud collaboration apps. It was one of the very
first apps that actually let you synchronize your data between different devices and what I mean by that was it had an app
experience on the phone, an app experience on the tablet and then it also eventually was able to be run in the cloud as well. First off, it was just on your desktop
and then it went to the cloud as well and Evernote really
took off, like Dropbox, they had amazing consumer penetration and what ended up happening was pew, they wanted this crazy growth curve and interestingly Zoom have been in the same position
throughout the COVID pandemic where they've just taken
this leadership position and just completely taken off. Now when I first started using Evernote and I was literally one of the first users to get access to it, I was one of the first people in Australia to get an iPad, the very
first generation one, I had it shipped to my
door and I opened it and the first app that
I installed was Evernote because the beauty of
having a digital notebook with all of your notes from
everywhere in one place, accessible on all your
devices and backed up to the cloud is absolutely
magic and you know, we just kinda take that for granted now, putting everything in Google Drive, using Google Docs, we take for granted being able to have everything everywhere but if you remember the old days, we had to access our emails
or access files via a VPN or remote desktop or dialing in and it was to be honest, a shit show. If you remember getting your
very first email address back in the 90s which I do,
when you got an email sent to your phone, well we didn't
have phones back then, right? But when you got an email
sent to your computer, let's say you had a laptop and a desktop, each computer would
have to download a copy of that twice right? So Evernote completely
changed the game and where Evernote did really, really well is being a digital
version of a scrapbook. It's kind of the place where
you can dump your thoughts and dump your notes and not really have to go back and ever organize them but they were always searchable and so when they're always searchable, it means that you can always
retrieve that information. Couple of other cool things
that Evernote did was it let you put them into like notebooks or tags or labels or
whatever they call them and you were able to add
rich media to them as well. So you could add an audio file. You can add a PDF, you could add an image in there and that all went great. Now what happened was the industry changed and big businesses like
Amazon, like Google, like Apple started building all of these small apps into
their ecosystems and you know, Google did that with Google Drive. They basically copied
all the best features of Dropbox and turned
it into Google Drive. They then did the same
kinda thing with Evernote and they turned it into Google Keep and so Google Keep is the
place for your notebook, for your unorganized notes and Google Keep is really great at helping you have everything you need quickly
snapshotted into one place. Now it does have a couple
of drawbacks and some of those drawbacks are that it doesn't have every single feature that Evernote has and that can be a bit frustrating for
some people because you know, when you have to change
from one app to another app, then that change in
yourself can be a bit hard, particularly if you don't
have all the buttons and the bells and whistles that you would normally be used to. So a couple of things
that it's missing out on, oh my God. I have to think now 'cause it's been so long since I used Evernote, you can't do audio note recording. Although you can capture an audio note in, I think it's only for short
bursts on the audio notes. What else can't you do? You can't integrate it with other apps and so unfortunately there's no API for Keep as at this present moment for you to be able to have data
automatically added or removed from Keep based
on something like Zapier or if this then that, can't do that either but what you can do with Keep
is because it's of course, in the Google ecosystem, is you can search it from Cloud Search. You can access it using your
Google login which means again, one less login for you, one less login for your team. The other thing I love
about Google Keep is because it's connected
to your Google account it's completely encrypted
and so your connection between you and Google is locked down with all of Google security
protocols and it means that accessing your data is
locked down to your device. Now, some of the other cool nifty things that you can do with Keep is
you can draw in from an iPad. You can do things like copy notes on a document straight from your Google Keep note automatically into a Google Doc which is pretty cool. You can collaborate on
notes so you can share notes in real time with other people, you can create things like
to do lists and what not. So you've got all of those basic
tools and you can see here, you've got some other fancy
features like you know, setting up different colors for your notes and I'll do things like you know, switch on tick boxes if
you wanna like turn it into like a list of some sort, you can do those kinda things. To be honest, I try not to use too
many of those features. I typically use this as a dumping ground which is what it is designed for. Keep is really for you
to just get things out of your head and drop them somewhere and when you drop them somewhere, then you've got them taken care of. Now, the other thing that I use Keep for is I snapshot all of my important personal
documents like my passport, my driver's license, birth certificate, all of those kind of
things that are critical to me if for example, I'm
traveling and maybe lose those documents and
I've got a digital copy of all of those documents sitting in the documents folder
which I won't show you now for obvious reasons. I will also use it for
the business for very, very, very raw content ideas. Although I try and keep
disciplined and put them into the marketing project in Asana but from time to time you can see here, I've got like a note here
that I just jotted down that you know, ideas
that I had for content that I might wanna create in the future. I like being able to capture stuff. Honestly, I use Google Keep way more in my personal life
than I do for business. Most of my tasks and notes go into Asana for the business and
therefore I use Keep more for my personal notes. Now, what are some of the things that I use it for my personal notes? Well I use it for a journal
and I love journaling into Google Keep 'cause it's
so easy and frictionless, there's just no distractions. I can bang out a journal
pretty much every day straight into Google Keep and I just have one label that I call journals and I
put them straight into that. One of the other things I
use it for is my cooking. Now I learnt how to cook a long time ago, but I never really enjoyed
cooking until a couple of years ago when I found myself with a lot more time once I'd systemized and mostly removed myself
operationally from the business. So what I do is when
I'm cooking up a storm in the kitchen and I create
something that's really great. I actually snap photos
of the dish into Keep and I snap a photo of the
ingredients into Keep. So now I have my own
kind of like recipe book of all of the stuff that I've created. I don't have to go to the trouble of like actually documenting
the steps one by one. I just snap photos into there, into my little Keep notes
and then I've got them all in there in one place
which I absolutely love. It's really cool. So if you wanna access Google Keep, head along to keep.google.com. Now the question that we
inevitably get all the time is well how do I convert all
my notes from Evernote or I really, really love my OneNote. Why is Keep better? Or how do I move my old notes out of my old system and into keep? And unfortunately, because there's no way to import your notes into Keep, you may have to leave
your old notes as a bit of an island and I remember I kind of made that switch into keep a long time ago and then just left the
old ones in Evernote. I copied over the ones
that were super important but I just kind of had to leave the rest until there is a way to get our data into Google Keep automatically via an API. Unfortunately, there is no
current option for that. So if you're currently using OneNote or if you're currently using Evernote, then you're kind of a
little bit out of luck. Now, the other argument
that comes up is well Pete, why would I use Keep if
I've got all of my stuff in this app and it does these particular things that keep my, that are good for my process? So I like doing things the way
that I do them in Evernote, or I like doing things the
way that I do them in OneNote or it has this one feature that is just absolutely key for me. And here's where I've got
a bit of a challenge in how to answer that one because
I'm certainly not a purist. I don't believe that
everyone must use Google just because they must use Google, right? I understand that everyone has the choice to use whatever apps they wanna use. I'm certainly a Google fan boy but that doesn't mean that if something is the
most productive for you, that you shouldn't use
a tool that's outside the Google ecosystem but
I'm also a minimalist and what I know is that when I
have less tools, less apps, less things that I have to think about, less log ins to manage, less
security vulnerabilities with all the different apps and Login's that we have across our business. When I have less of those
I'm more productive, I'm happier and I work better and I know that my team
work better as well. So you've really gotta weigh up you know, is that one feature in the app
outside the Google ecosystem worth having your team have another login for all these different apps? And is it worth you having
another jelly bean out of your jar with your concentration on yet another app that is outside of the Google world and
again, outside of the browser. If you've got everything in a browser it just keeps
things nice and simple. Guys and the last one that I wanna cover off
is Google Data Studio. We've been talking a lot
about Google Data Studio in the angle of managing your KPIs for the business and managing
your team's performance for the business and
Google Data Studio is a way of visualizing your business
data and taking data from different applications that you have, whether it be Zero, whether
it be your YouTube channel or your Facebook ad
account or maybe even data that you've got hanging
around in a Google spreadsheet and visualizing that data
in a live dashboard and so this is very useful for businesses and you'll see up on the
TV that I have behind me, I've literally got my dashboard
sitting behind me here up on the TV live and what
we find this is useful for is making sure that
businesses are on track, whether you wanna display it to your team or whether you just wanna
keep yourself accountable. It is really useful. So Data Studio is actually not part of the internal G Suite
suite of applications. It's part of the Google Marketing Suite and Google Data Studio is a
live and interactive dashboard and what it allows you to do is not only visualize your data, but also manipulate that data
and perform analysis on that. And so if you are a business
owner often you're gonna be asking questions of your data. How did our team go this quarter? How did our team go the previous quarter? You know, how do we compare
the results to different times? You may also be looking
at things like you know, what are the different lead sources from marketing campaigns? Of course my demographs are
broken on our board here but that's okay. I've got my exact numbers,
that'll do for now. So one of the things that I love about Jamboard is not only
does it bring all the data from different apps into one place. So I don't have to run reports
from different applications. It allows me to manipulate the data and that's probably the
most useful thing for me. So if I say, jump on this
date picker here and I say, show me stuff from last quarter
and I hit the apply button, then it's gonna update all of my graphs and let me access that. So if right now you do
not have a dashboard in your business then it's
time to get one organized. If you're interested in
building out a dashboard inside of Google Data Studio, it's gonna help you to get clarity on what numbers you should be focusing on. When you bring all the
data into one place, it makes it really easy
for you to just kind of see everything that's going on in the business and
monitor and manage that. I heard Ryan Dice speak at the Traffic and Conversion Summit, who's one of the founders of a company called Digital Marketer. He runs about six or
seven different businesses because they've got different brands and different business
partners and you know, different investments in different places. And he has one dashboard
for each of those companies and the thing that he said
was he wakes up every day, he looks at the dashboard
on his phone and on that dashboard, if he sees that anyone of the six companies that he
runs is below target on one of those graphs, then that's the business
that he works on that day. If not, if everything is in the green and everything is on target
then he rolls back over and he goes to bed. So I think that's about as good analogy as you can get on why a
dashboard is important. It's so you know exactly where you should put your
focus and attention each day and if things are on track, then you should be enjoying some of that freedom time that we all crave as business owners and isn't that why we got into business
in the first place? Excellent. So I wanna take you guys
through the last one. I let you know what that tool was, it's called Optimize and that is part of the Google Marketing Suite. Let me go ahead and open it. So I'm gonna bring up my screen here. Okay. It's at optimize.google.com. What Google Optimize lets
you do is actually create experiments and Google are a company built on experiments and what that means is that Google have taken all of their data. All of the masses amounts of data that they've
collected from search, from analytics, from the
use of G Suite and all of that aggregate data and they look for trends in that data and then once they've identified
a trend or a potential trend or something that they
think might be interesting to improve their product,
Google will do experiments. What experiments are, are taking a small subset of users, changing something and
then measuring the results. So if you had a goal
to have someone filling out a form on your website
or maybe your goal is for someone to spend
more than three minutes on your website or maybe
a goal is for someone to visit your contact page, you could do experiments on your website to make small changes and hopefully influence
someone's behavior. So that's what Google
Optimize allows you to do. We can make small changes
and run small experiments on our website and measure
the results of those. Now it's integrated with Google
Analytics for your goals. So you have to have goals set up in your Google Analytics
first but if for example, I wanted to change the headline in my business to a different
headline and measure how likely a customer is to
stay on the website longer with a different headline or how likely a customer
is to fill out a form for an inquiry based
on a different headline then this tool is gonna allow us to do that which is pretty cool. So once you've added it to your website, it's pretty straightforward. I'm gonna go ahead and open up
one that I prepared earlier. This is gonna allow you
to basically edit the text on your page. So we created a, we had an original here
and I created a variant. The variant was basically
a headline change. You can see that I had only
very slightly conversion rates here but I did have a probability that one was gonna beat the other, even though there was only a very small difference between the two and the conversion rates. You can see here that
Google gave me a probability that one was gonna beat the other and so effectively what's
happening here is Google is doing statistical analysis on everyone who visits the site. It's split testing between
the different pages and the different options that I've created which were
all very easy for me to create. It's completely idiot proof, no coding required and
then they're reporting back on the effectiveness of that. So if you ever wanted to like
test a different headline, test some sales copy, test
images in a different place, test a smiling image
versus a frowning image. Any of those, that's what
this tool allows you to. It's called Google Optimize. Okay, I'm gonna wrap it up there guys. I hope you have enjoyed these tools. I hope you have enjoyed
the show and everything that I've shared. If this has been useful for you, please drop a thumbs up or
a comment or a thanks below. I'd love to have the feedback from you and we are gonna be
running a more regular show. So it's gonna be Tuesdays
at 5:00 PM in the same slot. Let me know if this is like
a good time length for you. If this was a good kind of cadence, did I go too fast? Did I go too slow? We'd love to get your feedback guys. And if you're watching the replay, I'd love to know what was
your number one takeaway? What's the number one tool
that you found the most useful? We went through Google Keep, we went through the Jamboard. We went through Data Studio. We went through Cloud Search. We went through the Shopping
List and then finally, we went through Google Optimize. Let me know out of those five or six tools that we went through there. Let me know which one was the most useful for you because I'm curious to know which one you may be interested in implementing in your business. Now of course, earlier
in the episode we talked about the value of your time and where you may be able
to get more time back by delegating tasks to someone else. Well we are in the
business of delegation and what that means is that
IT Genius is your way to delegate tasks to someone else when they're not the
best use of your time. So if you need some help
setting up something like Google data studio, if you need some help
training your staff on how to use Google Keep, I don't think you need help
setting up the Shopping List. I think you can work
that out for yourself, but if you wanna set up a
great folder structure inside of Google Drive and do a big
cleanup of your Google Drive, we know many people have
a messy Google Drive. Then that's where our team can help. We are a concierge service
for businesses working in the Google ecosystem and not only can we help
you with Google tools, we can help you with many
third party applications that are integrated with Google and so they will be CRM systems, task management systems, project management systems, shared mailbox systems,
all of those apps that work with the Google ecosystem and
will help you and your team be more productive. So if right now you are the IT manager for your business and you're
managing everything yourself, then it might be worthwhile
having a chat to our team to see if we can provide
some value for you. So I'm gonna drop a link right below now to our G Suite community which is a free and open Facebook group for anyone to join who's in the Google ecosystem. If you're interested in
getting more value out of Google or if you're
interested in recommendations in other tools and applications which integrate with the
Google world and support cloud, working support remote teams, then you'd be very wise
to join that group. I've dropped the link below. It's called the G suite community and in there we have business owners who are working in the
Google ecosystem and working with all of these online tools. I'm gonna say thank you now
guys and wrap up the show. I hope you have a wonderful evening and I will catch you in the next one. Take care.
