Google Drive Tutorial for Business

Hi, I'm Evan Carmichael. Welcome to another edition of Entrepreneur Tools. I'm a little sick today, so excuse me if I'm a little nasal in my talking. Today I want to talk about one of my favorite tools that I use to run my business called Google Docs, which has been upgraded to Google Drive. And what I use it for is to collaborate with my team, run surveys, and do mail merges with Gmail. So I'm going to quickly touch on all of them, and hopefully you get a few ideas to help grow your business as well. So I'm on my page here of my favorite tools. I'm going to go find Docs, and this is it here, the link. Click Learn More. Now it used to be called Google Docs, and now it's called Google Drive, and this is my drive here. And basically what it is, is you can think of it as an external hard drive for your files, and a lot of people will use this to store files. Here I've got kind of like Excel files, I've got Word documents, I've got PDFs in here, and it's an external drive so you can access it from any computer that you're on, and it's also easy to share individual files. If I wanted to share some of these, I could easily, and I can also set permissions so other people can edit them. So you can see here that Adis, who's on my team, has edited this file, so it's been modified by someone else other than me. Now I don't really use it for having an external hard drive. I like using Dropbox instead. But what I do use it for, the biggest reason why I signed up for it, is I needed a way to collaborate with my team who is remote. So, you know, everybody on my team almost does not work with me in my office. They're spread out across the world. I needed a way to run our projects in a way that was really easy to do. And I looked at a number of different programs like Basecamp and a few other ones that were project management systems. I just found them to be too cumbersome. There are too many steps to add a task, and it might make sense for really long or huge projects that involve a lot of people, but for, you know, if you're just an entrepreneur and you have individual people that you need to deal with, I found it easier just to run a simple Google Doc file or Google Drive file, and it basically looks like an Excel file that lists all the different tasks that are coming up. So I'm going to show you a couple that I use. One is with Jo Mar and Gretchen, which is a husband and wife team that I have in the Philippines, and Adis is my programmer who is currently in Holland. So we'll load both of these and we can see what we're doing here. So this is the Jo Mar list, and they do a lot of marketing, admin stuff, personal assistant stuff for me. And so it looks like an Excel file, so it's called Jo Mar To Do. It's something we both share. I can edit it, they can edit it, and it'll show basically lists of tasks I have to get done. Things with Pinterest, Picture of the Day, weekend updates. So they're finding, you know, they're telling me the weather and movies and events to do in my city of Toronto every weekend. And just like Excel, you can have lots of different spreadsheets and there's a whole bunch of different things you can add, you know, whatever you want. So if I click on my Facebook schedule, these are some of the things that they're responsible for posting onto the Facebook page. And great, great way to be able to share information and both be able to update it. This was also really helpful when we were training because I've never actually met them in person, only over the phone and online. And it's great to be able to have everything documented, written down in a file that you can both edit and share and update. And whenever something needs to be changed, we can both log in here and make that change. So it's— this basically runs our relationship, and it's been a great tool to be able to quickly typically use. Why I like this over a Dropbox, you could just Dropbox an Excel file as an example and you could both modify it. The challenge is you can't both edit it at the same time. So if you're using the same file at the same time, you're going to have conflicted copies where here I can edit it at the same time that Gilmar and Gretchen are editing it and it's easy to be able to have those changes and keep them updated. I'll show you another one. This is Adis, who's my programmer. So this is slightly different things. So we are always updating new tasks. So with Joma and Gretchen, it's more habitual things, certain processes that have to be done every day or every week, every month. And with Adis, my programmer, we're looking at new things that have to be done on an ongoing basis as we're developing new features for our website. So what happens here is I'll make a list, and this goes on and on and on. We all have the to-dos that we want to get done for our website, and then we have to kind of prioritize them. And so basically what Addis does every day is he logs into the Google Drive here and looks at what's number 1 on the list, and he'll start working his way through. So I will add these projects to the list, and then when he's done, he'll click on— he'll add done here. So I know that it's done and I can take a look, and I will be responsible for removing things from the list. So we have it set that I'm the only one who adds to the list and also removes from the list. And so, you know, he'll click done, and so I can always check it out before it gets removed. And if we have any comments here, we can add it in and we can easily talk about it together. So I'll try to explain what I want, and hopefully that makes sense. And if it doesn't, then he can add some comments in as well. And he slowly starts working through that list task by task. And so I found this to be just so much easier than using something like Basecamp because you just add to the file and we could put it in priority, and he just starts hammering away on these every day when he logs into his computer. So that's the first reason I signed up for Google Drive, and it's basically an easy way to be able to collaborate with your team if they're not, especially if they're not in the same city as you. There's a couple other really cool ways to be able to use it that I discovered later on. The next one is with surveys. So if you ever have to run a survey, instead of having to use external software, you can just use Google Drive as well. So through my newsletter, I run a survey. So I'll click on here for some results. And we'll ask questions to the survey and people will answer it. Not a lot of questions, but you can add as many or as few as you want. And this goes on and on and on and on and on. And basically people will add their information and they'll answer the question. You can see when they added it in. And it's a great way to be able to collect information and have it all in a file that is basically like an Excel file that you can export if you want to and then play around with the data if you need to as well. And it's really easy to set up a form. If we click here, go form, I can click go to live form. And this is what the survey looks like. So at the end of my newsletter, I always say, "Please fill out our form. We'd really appreciate your feedback." And these are some of the questions that come up. So not that many questions, just a little bit to learn about our audience and what they're looking for. And it's really easy to set this up and Google gives you templates that you can use. And if you're curious to set this up for yourself, on the page here where I talk about my favorite tools, There's a link here about running surveys that goes to an eHow page that basically explains how to set up the survey page automatically, and it's all free. So magic word for entrepreneurs. So this is what the form creates, and when somebody fills this in, it will go here, and you can then, you know, analyze the data, do whatever you want with it. So it's awesome to be able to run the surveys and have the data easily accessible. And then the third way I use it is to create mail merges. And I've switched over from Outlook to Gmail, and one of the things I really loved about Outlook was the ability to do mail merges. So if you want to send a customized email to a group of people, you could easily mail merge a Word document with Outlook and it'll customize each message to them. So it looks like it's being personalized instead of having, you know, 500 people in BCC and saying, "Dear friend," you know, not really personalized. So the good news is I found a way to be able to do a mail merge between Google Drive and Gmail. And it was a free tool that's created by Digital Inspiration. And I'll load it up here so you guys can take a look. And basically what this does is it'll connect to your Google contacts. So through Gmail, whatever contacts you have, you can send up to 476 emails in a day. And I don't ever go over that, but it's a great way to be able to send it out. What you do is you put in your email subject, whatever salutation, whatever message you want, your name, your email. And then if you click Mail Merge and go Import Google Contacts, it'll get a prompt that will then say, what's your Google Contacts group name? So you just create a group on your Google Contacts and it can import all those guys for you automatically. And then you just go Mail Merge and Start Mail Merge, and it'll send it off to all of these people that I've put in here. So I put their first name, so it'll just say, hi, first name. When it sends the actual message, and it looks like it's a customized email going out to everybody. So I used to love that feature about Outlook and was sad that I couldn't do it in Gmail, and it was great to be able to find this way to quickly be able to do that mail merge automatically from your Google Contacts. If you just have a spreadsheet, you can also just pop it in here with their name and their email, and that's another way instead of importing from Google Contacts if you're saving your data somewhere else. So that's a quick overview about My Drive, the Google Drive program, and how I use it. Again, I use it mainly to collaborate with my team. I found it really super easy to share files and edit them together, much easier than other project management tools. I use it to run surveys with my audience to find out what they're interested in, and I use it to run mail merges when I have important emails I want to send out that can be customized. So hopefully that was interesting and gives you a few ideas of things that you might be able to do with your business. If you guys like the video and you want to see more, please give it a thumbs up below. It makes me want to do more of these videos for you. And if you have a question about Google Drive or another tool or anything else about your business, feel free to leave it in the comments below. I always read those and I look forward to hearing from you. So we'll see you on the next episode. Cheers.