8 Simple Extensions That Make EVERYTHING Easier on Chrome!

Hi, I'm Evan Carmichael. Welcome to another edition of Ask Evan. Today I'm answering a question from one of our YouTube viewers. I love you guys. This is George who wrote in to say, "Hey, could you please tell me all your Google Chrome extensions that you use in the comments please?" So thanks George for the question. I love using Chrome. I found it's really fast and easy to use, and I love all the different extensions that come along with it. I have some that I use at home and some that I use at the office. So I'm on my office computer now, so the extension is a little bit different, more for business purposes. So I'm going to do a quick review of the ones I use here. Usually the Chrome extensions are up here on the right, top right, so you can kind of see what they're all about. There's two that I use always, a lot, a lot, a lot, and they save me so much time, and the other ones are supplemental. So the two that I love absolutely The first is LastPass. This is the LastPass icon here, and basically what this does is allows me to log in to any website that I have a password, an account with. So if I'm logging into YouTube, or if I'm logging into my forums, or I'm logging into Evernote, or any third-party service that I use, it automatically remembers my password and logs me in for me. So I don't have to remember all of those passwords that you have to create for different sites. It also will help me create a new password. If I'm launching a new— if I'm signing up for a new account on some website, I don't want to use the same password for everything, so it will generate a new password and then remember that new password, and every time I come back, it will automatically log me in as well. So it saves so much time. I'm so used to it that I can't imagine what it would be like without having LastPass now. I've done reviews on it with screenshots and workflow that you guys can check out on the YouTube channel, but this one is a lifesaver. I use it all the time. Huge, huge boost. It's free as well. I think there is a paid program, but I'm on the free one. It works wonders for me. The second one that I really use a lot is the email one here, and this basically allows you to send an email from any page, and this is tied into Gmail. So I'm a Gmail user. So for example, if I go to my website and I click on an article, Russell Simmons, and Say, you know, okay, click on one of his articles that we have on the site. Say I really like this page, and I find that I'm emailing both other people a lot and also myself. I'll send myself an email as a reminder to do something or read something later, and so I love having that option built right into the browser instead of having to copy and paste it into a separate email. So say I'm reading this. You know, say I really like this quote, do a good job of it and it'll grow on its own. And say I want to send out as an email either to myself or to a friend. I'll just click on, I'll highlight it and click on the email link. And what it will do, I'll just pull it over here. It loaded up a separate email. I could type it, say to myself, it pulls in the title of the page that I'm on and it pulls in the quote. Quote that I highlighted as well as the link. And so I can then send this email. I don't actually want to send this, so I'll delete that. But it's a fantastic way to be able to quickly send email. If you don't need to highlight something specific, if you just want to send the page, you just, you know, don't highlight anything and just click on it and it'll load that fresh email for you. Let me pull it into the screen so you guys can see it here. And it'll just say the title of the page as the subject line and the URL. And so you can just send that off. Again, I use it a lot to send emails to myself or to friends. The other thing that I really like here from these ones is the Buffer app. And Buffer allows you to schedule posts that go to your Twitter account or to your Facebook page. I use it for Twitter. So if I wanted to send a tweet out, instead of copying and pasting it, going to Twitter, loading it up, clicking, you know, the new tweet, I can just highlight this Click on my Buffer app here, and it's going to log me into Buffer. Taking a little bit of time. So you can see I've only connected my Twitter account here, but you can also connect more if you want. It'll pull in the quote and it'll shorten the link, and then I can either share now or add it to my Buffer where it'll be delayed and sent out at whatever time I want in the future. And so that's another great way to send out tweets. If there's something on the page that you really want to share, you just highlight it. It'll take that chunk, and then I can always add my text, you know, love this quote, love this quote, and send it off. So I won't actually send this, but it's great to have it all within the browser instead of having to go to separate tools to do it. The other ones that I use are not consistent, so those ones I'll use a lot. The other ones will be on an as-needed basis. A lot of these are SEO type of tools, so sometimes I'll be in heavy SEO mode and get all these tools and use them, and then a lot of times I won't have a use for it. This one is pretty cool. It's just your site status, and it'll give you a high-level overview of what your Alexa ranking is and what your PageRank is for every page that you're on. You can see this one is 12,000. That's for my whole site. And this specific page has a PageRank of 1. You can go check out links to Whois, availability. And so, this I'll sometimes use when I'm looking at partner websites. If somebody emails me and wants to partner up, I'll just quickly take a look at how authoritative they are. You know, do they have a decent website? Do they have a good Alexa ranking? Do they have some PageRank? If we go to the homepage, you'll see that the Alexa ranking doesn't change, but the PageRank does. So this is PageRank 5. Just a quick way to be able to look at any website and then drill down on more details if you want. So that's, that's called SEO Status. There's also the one that comes from Alexa itself. So this just shows the Alexa tool, and if you want, you can click on it and it'll pop up more details, all from Alexa. And this one is another SEO tool, SEO Site Tools. Again, which will tell you about the PageRank and then also more details about some of the websites if you want, if you want to dig that deep. This one is cool when you're designing your website. Basically, since I always use Chrome, I'm used to using Chrome and that's my kind of day-to-day browser, but most people still use Internet Explorer, or at least a lot of people do. So you want to know that your website is going to look good in Internet Explorer. Explorer. So whenever we're designing the website or making changes or doing a new landing page or any of those things, well, this is a useful tool. Instead of having to load Internet Explorer every time, you can just click on this and it'll load your page as you would see it in Internet Explorer. So you can see if there's any design things that are off. And then this one is YStamp, and what this basically does is edit your signature in Gmail. And so if you use Gmail, you want to have a signature that pulls in your most recent tweet or your most recent YouTube video or your most recent Facebook post. It does that automatically for you. So I can click that and it will edit my signature for Gmail. And those are the basic ones that I use when I'm here at the office. I have some others that I would use at home, but these are my main ones. Again, the most important ones for me would be the LastPass and then the Gmail and then probably the Buffer and then maybe, you know, the SEO status. Those I use almost every day, or every day in case of LastPass and Gmail. And the other ones I use more for SEO and design when we have projects or when I'm working on something that's related to SEO. So hopefully that helps. Thanks for the question. A little peek, I guess, inside my world and what I'm doing with my browser. For those of you watching, if you like the video, please give it a thumbs up below. Makes me want to do more for you. And if you have a comment about this video, I'd love to see it. If you want to leave it in the comment section below, or a question for your own business, I'd love to try to answer it for you. So thank you, and I'll see you on the next episode.