Starting a business is costly, but wireframing your business or putting the necessary web-based components in place can be extremely cheap, like shoe-string cheap. Like all you perhaps really need to pay for that professional web-component look and feel is your own domain name! That is under US10.00 cheap. Got mine from namecheap.
Google allows you to have all the best things that a typical large scale company has (with a shoe-string budget). No, I dont have a fully implemented business model to reference you to, but that's what this blog is about. Its about noting the things that I've discovered on my way towards creating a Web2.0 company. Here are some things to consider:
Data Capture
Google forms are easy to create and even easier to integrate and embed within your website.
Sign-Up Forms -
Here's a Sign-Up form example
People can join your mailing list, request live demos of your services or just provide you with contact information for you to reach out to them. Sign up forms help you to connect with potential clients, that is, the ones that your advertisements reach which you dont get a chance to meet in person. It's like a third employee or like a net for catching fishes. Not sure what the best analogy is but suffice it to say, to have a website without a sign-up form reduces you truly maximising the value of your website.
Surveys:
Here's a survey example
Getting feedback from your actual clients are another great way to put google to use for you. If you know much about statistics, you'll know about SPSS and its power for analysing your data, but data capture is really the first step that you need to take.
Google forms are again great for doing data capture especially since they support Multiple Choice, Free Form, Grids and a couple other formats that you can put to real use.
Data Analysis.
Now, again, one of the powerful aspect is that a form that you design can standalone as a webpage, so all you would have to do is to send someone a hotlink and voila. I've had need to gather data for a garage before and for that I decided to use the companies facebook group and send a message with a hotlink to the clients. It becomes so much easier for ppl to actually complete the forms. Data is captured in google spreadsheet which I can download as .csv or .xls for uploading into SPSS for really powerful data analysis.
Emaling: No more @gmail.com
Now, again, you may need to get that professional look and feel to your business but dont need the headache of setting up a server, configuring email clients etc. This is definately the option I work with. For a very cheap domain that i paid less that USD10.00 for, I get a custom domain e.g. www.namecheap.com as well as personalised email addresses.
Now each of those 50 email accounts can each send a maximum of 2000 emails per day. I'm sorry, if that isnt immense value then I dont know what is.
Marketing Reach
I had the option of going with wordpress vs blogger. I choose blogger for one reason, I'm already using other google products which suggest to me that it will be easier to incorporate google gadgets, analytics and of course I love the Single Sign On.
What's more important though is that with google analytics, you can see how many persons are actually visiting your website. Of course, Blogger comes with that already configured, but whether you are running a google-powered website or not, you can implement google analytics.
One of the first things I do everytime I log into my blog is check the stats section.
Each of these topics will definately get their own Blog post but this is just a quick overview of my reason for viewing Google as feasible.
Cheers.
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