What It Takes to Thrive

By show of hands, how many of you have had your life handed to you on a platter?

Not that many, I see.

To get what you want from life, you have to take life by the throat and choke it into submission to give you what you want. You have to create your own opportunities, your own successes, or somebody else will.

Napoleon Hill, in his amazing book Think and Grow Rich, gives a 13-step formula for turning desires into reality. Point by point, he describes how to acquire success.

Burning desire, backed by clarity of vision and persistent action, will put you on target every time.

No Man is an Island

Henry Ford, Christopher Columbus, Samuel Adams, and others are highlighted in the book as men who had a burning desire to accomplish, to discover, and to liberate,

Thanks to their clarity of purpose and persistence, we now have:

• Unlimited choice of automobile styles
• A rich country full of resources and opportunity
• Freedom to pursue our happiness as we see fit

But none of those men accomplished anything of significance without the involvement of other people!

These great men attracted forces to themselves to help them achieve their vision, invited intelligent people to get involved, and relied upon those people to enhance their own knowledge.

Henry Ford once sued a Chicago newspaper for libel, after they labeled him “an ignorant pacifist.” When asked a particularly insulting question designed to highlight this “ignorance,” he angrily replied:

“If I should really WANT to answer the foolish question you have just asked…let me remind you that I have a row of electric push-buttons on my desk, and by pushing the right button, I can summon to my aid men who can answer ANY question I desire!”

Henry Ford understood that he couldn’t possess all the knowledge required to run his company. He understood that he needed the minds of other people to supply the knowledge he lacked.

In short, Henry Ford created the Ford Motor Company, not by himself, but through the aid of his Mastermind Group. Each of those men at the end of the electric push-buttons supported Ford and filled in the gaps in his knowledge.

How to Get Your Very Own ‘Electric Push-Buttons’

As illustrated above and in much greater detail in Think and Grow Rich, great success requires that you surround yourself with capable, intelligent people, and that you have humility enough to take their experience to heart.

Since you are reading this blog, you must be interested in doing great things with your online business. If so, then there is a ready-made group of talented, intelligent men and women focused on that same desire.

Welcome to the Internet Business Mastery Academy, or the IBMA for short.

A thriving and active community of entrepreneurs, the IBMA provides A-Z courses on internet business so you can learn the necessary skills and strategies–the basics! These are tested methods you will learn from seasoned internet entrepreneurs, Sterling and Jay.

But even more valuable than the home study course is the “Mastermind Forum,” where you can submit your projects and ideas for feedback from the other members.

You have a group of entrepreneurs from all walks of life who are there to help your dreams grow legs and learn to run. These enterprising people are united in the goal of helping each other succeed in online business, and there is powerful mojo in so many people united for a common cause.

You do not have to be Henry Ford to have your very own electric push-buttons with smart people at your beck and call!

All you have to do is understand that the Academy and its Masterminds can shortcut your journey to wealth and success, then click on over to find out more.

Related posts

• Four Things to Look for in a Web Host, and Why You Should Care (2)
• Command and Conquer Your Home Business Projects with Mind Maps (12)
• 5 Ways to Leverage StumbleUpon for Small Business Owners (10)

Choose Your Web Host Wisely

Who you choose to host your website could have a profound effect upon whether your business efforts online succeed or fail. Consider the benefits your web host delivers:

• Gives search engines and information-hungry people a place to find you
• Delivers your content to your world-wide audience
• Represents you around the clock, day after day
• Connects you to your market, and them to you

In this day and age, your website going down is a huge problem! It’s at least as bad as a phone or power outage, and perhaps worse in some cases, because you are alienating people who might otherwise want your product or service.

We call them “Customers.”

Your Silent Partner

Consider your web host as a silent partner in business. You depend upon continued, reliable service, because downtime costs you customers and revenue.

So while web hosting is not as sexy or trendy as Facebook or Twitter, you must pause and carefully choose who you partner with.

Here are some examples of how I learned this lesson.

1. A company serving small businesses caused a bottleneck when I needed to administer my websites, because they provided weak, incomplete administration tools.
2. A domain-name registrar slash hosting company that was more concerned with selling domain names than answering my frantic emails.
3. The company that hosted the websites for the US Army and other major clients was great until they “upgraded” their back end. When each one of my websites started flaking out, they must have been focused on getting the military’s site back up and running, because I couldn’t get them to reply for over two weeks!

The Holy Grail of Web Hosting

I was starting to think that the entire web hosting industry just sucked, and that I shouldn’t expect any better service. I was completely fed up, so I came up with some criteria for an ideal web hosting partner.

1. They have to provide straightforward tools to manage your websites
2. Must be at least as reliable as the power company
3. Gotta be available when things go wrong or when you need guidance
4. Actually help you solve your problems and deliver on promises they make

I had faith that I would find such a company, and with some diligent research, I finally did find what I like to call the “Holy Grail of Web Hosting.”

Here’s is why I love them:

• Since I’ve been using them, not one of my websites have experienced any downtime
• I never have to wait on hold for their Live Chat feature (compared to interminable hold times on the phone AND chat with previous two companies)
• They provide user-friendly site set-up and management through cPanel web-based software
• 1-click install and upgrade of WordPress, the free publishing software beloved by bloggers and small business owners everywhere
• When I dug a big hole for myself migrating a website to one of their servers, they went way beyond the expected level of service and rescued me! They took my problem out of my hands solved it, then sent me on my way. At no additional cost.

When you combine such a track record of uptime, amazing customer service, easy-to-use tools, and real help available via chat, you have a real gem of a partner!

If you want a web hosting partner that will just keep rendering fantastic, invisible service for years to come, do yourself a favor, and migrate on over to Bluehost.

Related posts

• Series: Google Liberates the Home Office, Part 1-Gmail (9)
• Embrace the Digital Home Office (4)
• 5 Ways to Leverage StumbleUpon for Small Business Owners (10)
• What Henry Ford Can Teach You About Internet Business (8)
• Series: Google Liberates the (Shared) Home Office, Part 2-Google Calendar (2)

The Comments Must Flow

I recently implemented the Disqus system on HomeOfficeWebTools.com to manage and track blog comments, as you can see below this article. Checking the Disqus blog for updates, I posted a reply to a note on the Disqus blog and got a reply within 30 minutes via email from Daniel Ha, addressing my concerns. At 10:30 pm.

The time of day and the response time caught my attention. Excellent customer service, for which I commend both Daniel and Disqus.

The thing that really caught my attention was a little note at the bottom of his email that said,

You may reply to this email to post your response.

Intrigued, I replied to the email, then decided to click the breadcrumb link back to the original comment on the Disqus blog. Lo and behold, guess what I found! That’s right! The entire conversation was posted with threaded comments on the original blog post!

Three things immediately came to mind:

• The method of contact no longer matters.
• The conversation is accessible from both the website and your inbox.
• The comments flow in both directions!

I know that this is just a simple example of RSS in action, but I’ve never seen it packaged so perfectly nor work so seamlessly.

Why This Matters

The point is, using Disqus removes several steps from the process of responding to blog comments, making it that much easier to dialog with your customers and fans. All you have to do is post a note to your blog then let the conversation unfold in the one place you already use as the central hub of your business: email.

Your customer service dialogs become valuable blog content, giving you more fodder for humans and search engines alike.

Bonuses

• You can eliminate your site’s contact form and exclusively use your blog for customer contact.
• Your comments follow you around online, freed from the blog to which you originally replied
• Your Disqus community page generates a link back to your website. Great for search engine rankings!

My existing WordPress comments imported with no difficulty, but your mileage may vary if you have a huge database with thousands of comments and posts to import.

Comments do stay synchronized on Disqus and your WordPress blog, so even if the service goes down, your database is still intact and site visitors can still comment without interruption.

What’s not to like?

What You Need to Do

Take action on this right now. Do not wait to do more research or read other people’s opinions. Click on over to Disqus, create your account and install the plugins or code as directed. Take some time to fill out your profile and tweak the various settings to your liking.

Man, I love technology, and you are going to love the various ways you can now use comments to deliver great customer service.

Related posts

• Whither Problem Customers? (4)

Here’s one for you that will help you sift through the barrage of gar-bage websites out there: StumbleUpon.

From the website:

StumbleUpon discovers web sites based on your interests. Whether it’s a web page, photo or video, our personalized recommendation engine learns what you like, and brings you more.

After you register, complete your profile by telling StumbleUpon your interests. Install the StumbleUpon toolbar in either Firefox or (blech) Internet Explorer, and hit the “Stumble!” button. The service will deliver a page in its system that someone with similar interests as you has blessed as good.

The Benefits

In order of increasing value, here are 5 ways you, the small business owner, can leverage this powerful social networking tool to help your business.

1. Discover interesting websites, photos, videos, etc as inspiration for blogging or writing topics. As you Stumble! and rate sites, StumbleUpon will learn about your preferences over time and send you more and more relevant content.
2. Bookmark your Stumbling history for later perusal. StumbleUpon will keep track of what you like and don’t like, and allow you to drill deeper into topics that interest you. Use this for future reference when writing blog posts.
3. Network with resourceful people online. Being that it is a social network, StumbleUpon is great for finding other people who share your passions and can provide solutions to your problems. You can find and follow people whose opinions you have grown to trust.
4. Create a resource of useful websites and tools for your clients, patients, or customers. You can provide your constituents value by getting them to become a fan of yours on StumbleUpon and regularly sending them content you think will interest them. Great way to keep yourself relevant to them.
5. Promote your own blog or website, increasing your online exposure. You can add your own content to the StumbleUpon database to benefit from some of that social networking mojo. As long as you push your own stuff in proportion to your other Stumbling activity, you can see develop consistent traffic from the service.

More Strategies and Tactics

I’ve been taking a course put together by Caroline Middlebrooke called StumbleRush. It’s a free, multi-part e-course that I recommend you take a look at, because it details several strategies for using StumbleUpon to promote your blog and website online.

In fact, it was Caroline’s gentle guidance that inspired me to experiment with StumbleUpon and sold me on its value to my online marketing efforts.

Take a look at the course, start Stumbling, and let me know how you make out in the comments.

Related posts

• Four Things to Look for in a Web Host, and Why You Should Care (2)
• Embrace the Digital Home Office (4)
• What Henry Ford Can Teach You About Internet Business (8)
• Series: Google Liberates the Home Office, Part 1-Gmail (9)
• Series: Google Liberates the (Shared) Home Office, Part 2-Google Calendar (2)

• Read Google Liberates the Home Office, Part 1-Gmail
• Google Calendar to manage scheduled actions and commitments
• Staying current with Google Reader
• Research and note-taking with Google Notebook
• Google Docs as THE alternative to Microsoft Office

Google Calendar is the single most useful tool for any home business owner, and gives specific advantages to husband and wife teams. Here is how I arrived at that opinion.

My wife and I were running 3 separate businesses between us. I also held a part-time job with a wildly varying schedule, which I wrote down on tiny slips of paper and brought home. We were also busy parenting a toddler and a baby.

Needless to say, scheduling our life was just ridiculous!

I used my little slips of paper, she used her Palm Pilot and sometimes iCal on her Mac. Pretty primitive setup, I’ll admit, and it did not allow us to manage our lives in any meaningful way.

We needed a solution that would:

• Show different colors for each individual (and grouping) in the family
• Allow both of us to view and edit the schedule without a bunch of B.S.
• Send reminders when and where we can best use them
• Display the most current version of the ever-changing family/office schedule

Google Calendar Delivers the Goods!

After way too much research into desktop software packages that would satisfy these goals, I decided to give Google Calendar a whirl. And boy, am I glad I did!

Google Calendar has a simple interface that displays all your events with colors assigned to each person or group. Adding an appointment is as easy as clicking any open space on the calendar or using the “Quick Add” feature.

Check.

Sharing a calender with a coworker or partner is simple yet sophisticated. As you create a new calendar, edit the calendar settings and type in the email address of the person with whom you want to share. Make sure you enable “Make changes AND manage sharing” if you trust the other parties. If not, either fire them or set a more appropriate access level from the four options. Your choice.

Share your calendars and set your permissions correctly, and it will be like your personal calendar software is installed on every computer in the world. Access and edit anywhere. I love this!

Double-check.

Of course, what good would your calendar be if you had to constantly remember to look at it? Google Calendar’s killer feature is SMS text reminders so you can relax your mind and focus on taking action in your business.

You can also do this by email, but SMS is the most convenient and useful because it delivers me the reminder wherever I am on a device that I always have on me: my phone.

Triple-check.

And the fourth requirement in the list above—always having the most up-to-date schedule information—is handled readily by the fact that all of this calendar mumbo-jumbo resides on the Internet.

Check. Check. Check. Check. All requirements met!

Google Calender is a robust, convenient solution for any business you run out of your home, and liberates the home office family from a nightmare of schedule management.

So, step two in your journey to liberate yourself from your home office may be to migrate to Google Calendar. You can start here by creating a Google Account. Also take a look at Google’s Getting Started Guide.

Let’s dig deeper!

What is your favorite Google Calendar feature? Let me know in the comments below.

Related posts

• Series: Google Liberates the Home Office, Part 1-Gmail (9)
• Mindset Series: The Best Way to Make Sure Your Home Business Makes Enough Money to Survive (and Keep You From Going Back to Work for Someone Else) (0)
• Embrace the Digital Home Office (4)
• Whither Problem Customers? (4)
• Four Things to Look for in a Web Host, and Why You Should Care (2)

There’s an interesting comparison to be drawn between how entrepreneurs handle this idea and how managers or employees address it.

At a restaurant where I once worked, we received abusive complaints from time to time. The manager would shuck and jive, eventually comping food for the complainant in the hopes of keeping their business. (Like averting negative feedback on eBay in the hopes of maintaining a pristine rating).

His response was predictably consistent—make the customer happy at all costs. Even known complainers and problem customers got the same treatment. I remember a placard on the wall that read

“Every unhappy customer will result in 12 others who won’t show up or come back.”

This is why excellent guest service or customer service is a critical part of any business interested in success. Of course it’s necessary to do my absolute utmost to ensure client / guest / customer satisfaction. But there’s a point beyond which I have to look at what’s going on and assess whether or not MORE is actually better.

I encouraged my boss to run the numbers to determine if the complainers were WORTH the time they took to please.

If you know how much your time is worth per minute, and can figure out an average amount of time each problem customer takes, you can objectively see how much money you’re losing by keeping that customer around.

Just figure out how much of your time they waste and compare it to how much income they generate for you. Don’t forget to factor in the emotional stress that long-term problem clients can cause. The disruption. The constant and ever-increasing demands. We’re talking about the quality of your working life here!

Of course my boss never ran those numbers - he subscribed to “The Customer is Always Right” mentality, fed to him by the higher-ups. He consistently taught our customers that they could walk all over us for the honor of keeping them as customers.

I think it pays to be selective, in business and in all other relationships. The clients and friends that I choose to surround myself with all support me in some way or another. They wouldn’t be in my life otherwise.

The great thing about flying solo is that I get to choose whom and how I influence, and vice versa. Life is too short to suffer fools gladly.

Related posts

• Mindset Series: The Best Way to Make Sure Your Home Business Makes Enough Money to Survive (and Keep You From Going Back to Work for Someone Else) (0)
• Series: Google Liberates the Home Office, Part 1-Gmail (9)
• Series: Google Liberates the (Shared) Home Office, Part 2-Google Calendar (2)
• Can You Really Deliver Customer Service This Great From Your Home Office? (3)
• About (0)

Truth is, I can’t do it all, and I can really only do a few things really well.

Maybe you’re in the same boat. Have you started using virtual assistants yet? This blog will eventually dive in to outsourcing at some point, but for now I’m going to suggest that when you are finally ready to hire some virtual assistants to help share your hatload, the following strategy will help you keep it organized.

“Now what was I just doing?”

Managing a print shop, mail room, and fleet of copiers for a busy hospital for almost two years, I interacted with 900 or so people daily. It took me too long to come to grips with the fact that “INTERRUPTION” was the nature of the job. How frustrating!

So I had this idea of creating a personal bookmarking system where I could just push a button to pause what I was working on, switch hats, and pick up from there. Like a “Life Tivo” or something like that. The idea was that I could just hit the chapter marker and resume work as soon as I dealt with the current interruption.

But since I didn’t really know how to hard wire functioning electronics into my cerebral cortex, I fiddle-farted with dozens of tools and techniques that might approximate this idea of personal task bookmarking.

From simple to-do lists to complicated GTD programs, I never found that perfect tool to get me back on track when I derail for one reason or another.

But in my quest to find this über-tool, I started playing with a concept I picked up from Sterling and Jay from Internet Business Mastery. It’s called Mind Mapping, and it will forever change the way you run your home office.

What Mind Mapping Is

A mind map is a simple galaxy-shaped diagram used to display words, ideas, tasks, or other items in branches radiating around a central thought or phrase. You start with a main thought, then hit a shortcut key to create a subtopic branching off from the original. Hit the shortcut key again and add information about that subtopic. You can add unlimited branches and sub-branches to fully develop the main idea, then go back and organize your work via drag-and-drop.

It’s like an outline, only visual.

You can think of mind mapping as a brainstorming tool that visually connects ideas together, showing you how different concepts relate to each other. Ever see a crime movie where the detective is pouring over a chart with pictures, news clippings, notes, etc connected by strings? That’s mind mapping, and it really works to help you solve problems.

But let’s use that illustration as a jumping off point for what we can do with mind mapping. Here’s a short list of what I’m currently using mind maps to accomplish:

• Taking notes during a presentation or online course
• Breaking down tasks into GTD-style next actions
• To-do list and task management
• Writing blog posts
• Project management

And I’m just scratching the surface with this list! Any project that requires me to plan and execute anything will eventually reside within a mind map.

There are several desktop mind mapping applications, including MindJet, FreeMind, and NovaMind, each of which are each fine programs, but two problems make them undesirable:

1. Each of the programs is desktop-based rather than online, meaning they are totally useless to you if you are away from your computer. (does that ever happen?)
2. They focus so much on whiz-bang tricks you can do to pretty-up your mind map that it is easy to waste time playing instead of just doing what you need to do—outline, plan, organize, and write.

Now, what would HomeOfficeWebTools.com be without an online solution? Contradictory at best, and quite possibly hypocritical!

The best online mind mapping app I’ve found is called Mindmeister. It offers a streamlined feature set geared more towards getting ideas on “paper” as it were, than in beautifying what’s already there.

In fact, I exclusively use Mindmeister for writing content and then sometimes import into NovaMind for polishing. The interface is minimalist (in the good, non-Microsoft Word way), and the keyboard shortcuts work pretty well. Useful Features:

• Remote Brainstorming: Share any mind map with colleagues and collaborate in real-time online.
• Status icons are visual badges you can apply to individual branches for quick reference.
• Export your content in a variety of ways, the most useful of which is PDF. (This feature is only available to paid subscribers, and was the main reason I chose to pay rather than leach.)
• Offline Mode, using Google Gears technology, means I don’t need an Internet connection to continue to do my work. Because of this, I can build my business systems and checklists around mind maps and access them at any time from my desktop.
• “Get Related Info” in the information tab allows me to highlight a word in the map, click on one of three buttons for del.ico.us, wikipedia, or Google, and gives me all sorts of related content to help article research and brainstorming ideas. Awesome!

Introducing the Project Dashboard

Here is where Mindmeister earns its chops—the killer highlights that a home business owner can leverage for organizational bliss! Use these features together to create a self-contained management document that I call the Project Dashboard:

• File Management: You can upload relevant project materials, like MS Word files, PDFs, images of all sorts, Excel spreadsheets, etc, so everything is accessible within a single click
• Clickable Links: You can add live email addresses, URLs, and links to other Mindmeister maps, tying in all resources for your project
• Lightweight Task Management: Assign priority, track task completion, due dates, and delegation from within that document.
• Shared Mind Maps: The final cog is that you can share and edit your maps with anyone across the globe, even if they’re not a Mindmeister user.

Put this all together, and you have a single, entirely self-contained document that tracks your projects, encourages non-linear thinking and brainstorming, and centralizes all the resources for your business or for individual projects. Guess what I’m using to manage virtual assistants and outsourced projects?

You guessed it! The Project Dashboard.

Mind mapping really has changed the way I manage my businesses and my projects, and I know you can benefit by using this valuable tool.

There are indeed some quirks to the system, and we will talk about those at a later date. For now, check out the resources below to further your knowledge about mind mapping, and sign up for an account with Mindmeister.

Once you get the hang of it, you may find the free version anemic—the six-map limit and the inability to export into other formats is limiting. I’m using the Premium package, which costs $49 or so for the year, or roughly $4.00 per month, and I’m getting much more than my money’s worth.

What uses of mind maps have I missed? Have you already done what I’ve suggested here and mind mapped your business?

Let me know in the comments below this post.

(In the interest of transparency, the link to Mindmeister is referral link, so signing up that way will help this blog…and possibly your karma. Enjoy!)

• Check out Sterling and Jay’s video Getting Things Done With Mind Maps from Internet Business Mastery.
• Learn more about mind mapping software at the Mindmapping Software Blog.

Related posts

• Embrace the Digital Home Office (4)
• What Henry Ford Can Teach You About Internet Business (8)
• Series: Google Liberates the Home Office, Part 1-Gmail (9)
• Series: Google Liberates the (Shared) Home Office, Part 2-Google Calendar (2)
• Four Things to Look for in a Web Host, and Why You Should Care (2)

• How to market your expertise to generate new profit centers in your business
• How to recession-proof your business by developing a loyal following of raving fans who buy from you again and again
• How to migrate your business to a new model using the Internet as distribution channel

Fear is the Mind Killer

The home business owner’s biggest fear is not having enough money to keep the business going. You ask yourself, “What if the business fails? What if it all falls down and I’m left with nothing?”

This fear is what drives you, motivates you to continue plugging along. While anyone who works for himself does so for his own reasons and motivations, the common thread among the self-employed is an overarching desire to control your own time, tasks, and income. The threat of losing it all and going back to work for someone else should scare the living daylights out of you!

Consider, then, what most threatens your autonomy. How have you structured your business?

• Is your cash flow dependent upon one or two key clients, without whom you’d find yourself homeless?
• Do you have enough time to add more clients and more work to make more money?
• Are you busying yourself in the day-to-day activities of your business, or are you planning and executing strategies that guarantee inevitable success and eventual liberation from your business?

If any of these circumstances reflects how you see your life and your business, please read on.

What I am about to reveal took me a surprisingly long time to figure out. I wish I could say that I came to it by myself, but one of my mentors actually clued me in to this fact:

I was leaving money on the table if I omitted the following strategy from my arsenal.

Your Business is Your Expertise

Ponder the following questions:

1. How long did it take for you to get really good at what you do? What big mistakes did you make along the way?
2. Of all the abilities you’ve learned and talents you’ve developed to do your business, which are the most valuable?
3. Can you imagine for a moment that there are other people somewhere in the world who would like to know what you know without all the trial and error it took to acquire them?

In the “doing of” your business, you’ve learned the ropes, made mistakes, made more mistakes, and got past them to enjoy success.

Think about this for a moment.

Wouldn’t you pay a boatload to bypass all the years at Hard Knocks University and know all the juicy, insider tricks you now know? These are the tasks and techniques that you now do by instinct and second nature —skills that are useful and transferable to any type of business.

If you will observe and catalog these so-called “transferable skills,” you’ll begin to see that you really are an expert in many different areas, not just in your chosen profession. You must embrace the idea that there is profit in your accumulated expertise!

The Missing Piece

Here, then, is the much-ballyhooed strategy:

Find those people who desperately want to learn what you know how to do, then sell them information products that show them how to do it.

Yes, you can make money doing whatever it is that you do for other people. But there is a world of personal satisfaction and abundant profit margins in showing people how to help themselves succeed.

Certainly you’ve heard the old, misguided axiom: “Those who can’t—teach!” The new idea you need to embrace is:

Those who can teach will profit in the information age.

Your business will shift gears when you add valuable training products that teach people new skills or strategies. Selling info products online will open up a whole new set of markets and give you more opportunities to serve those markets.

We know that creating a diverse stock portfolio is the safest way to protect your investments. I say that selling a diverse mix of products is the surest way to ensure that your home business makes enough to survive and keep you self-employed.

Thanks for reading! In the coming installments of the Mindset Series, we’ll discuss some different types of information products you might consider adding to your mix, and how you can use the Internet to sell and distribute your original content.

Give Me Some Input

I’m especially interested in hearing from small business owners who have added info products to their businesses. How much work did it take? How has your life and your business changed as a result? Please let me know what you think in the comments below.

Related posts

• Series: Google Liberates the Home Office, Part 1-Gmail (9)
• Series: Google Liberates the (Shared) Home Office, Part 2-Google Calendar (2)
• Whither Problem Customers? (4)
• Embrace the Digital Home Office (4)
• About (0)

• Using Gmail as the first step towards getting my home office out of my home and accessible anywhere.
• Google Calendar to manage scheduled actions and commitments.
• Staying current with Google Reader
• Research and note-taking with Google Notebook
• Google Docs as THE alternative to Microsoft Office.

So let’s start with Gmail. For years, I held onto my beloved desktop email software: Mail.app on Mac OS X. The usual Apple polish combined with incomparable integration with the computer operating system itself was enough for me to overlook some of the limitations not shared by other programs.

So I kept using Mail.app until I began to be continually frustrated because I couldn’t get to my mail while out of the office. Since my iMac resides comfortably within the confines of my home office, I had to physically be in front of the machine to access my email, and frustration ensued whenever I was out and about.

I did a little dance with Yahoo! Mail several years prior and got burned in a mystical lost-password-lost-email-account situation. It was an endless loop on which I wasted many hours, trying in vain to recover data locked up within Yahoo’s merciless servers.

Enter Gmail.

When Yahoo! trashed my email account, I was just using it as a throwaway email address to sign up for websites that required such things. I thought Gmail would serve the same purpose, but as I began to use it, several features stood out as quite usable:

• Emails are stored in a conversation-like display by default, meaning I could easily follow ongoing email discussions and refer back to them effortlessly.
• Tons of storage: almost 7 gigabytes of email storage available, growing all the time.
• Integrated instant messaging lets me talk to my friends with Google accounts from within Gmail.
• Amazing spam filtering: I NEVER get spam in my Gmail inbox. Never.
• Google Search built-in: this allows me to search through both emails and archived chats with lightning speed.

So Gmail began to grow on me–very quickly, in fact–so I decided to make the jump to an all-web-based-email. Gmail is my killer web app because it works, simply and elegantly, consistently, and from whatever computer I can put my hands on.

Of course there are some limitations and less-than-desirable interface elements. As a Mac aficionado, I prefer the elegant, aesthetically pleasing interaction with technology that Apple delivers. So the circa-1998, flat, HTML-ish look and feel of Gmail was a little off-putting at first, and seemed out of place in my glass+aluminum polished Apple world.

But what Gmail lacks in elegance and polish, it makes up for with usability. The web app gets out of my way and let’s me do what I need to do. I don’t have to roam around, wondering where in my folder structure I placed that all-important registration email with all the passwords. Now, I can find it faster by searching for it.

A few other things to be aware of:

• As is Google’s usual modus operandi, Adsense ads are served along the right side of the screen, relevant to whatever information is contained within the email. They’re unobtrusive, but they’re there. If this bothers you, a desktop app may be your best bet. I don’t have a problem with it, and some of the ads are actually useful.
• I have some misgivings knowing that Google has indexed my “private” email, but I’m willing to trade that off for the usefulness of Gmail. This is one of those leaps of faith that we all have to take from time to time, and Google’s history of trustworthiness allays my fears to the extent that I can use their fantastic service without any difficulty.

So, step one in your journey to liberate yourself from your home office may be to migrate to Gmail. You can start here by creating a Google Account. Also take a look at Google’s Getting Started Guide, then print out the cheat sheet of Gmail shortcuts.

These actions will take you one step closer to freedom from your home office shackles. Please let me know in the comments how you use Gmail in your day-to-day operations.

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• Embrace the Digital Home Office (4)
• Mindset Series: The Best Way to Make Sure Your Home Business Makes Enough Money to Survive (and Keep You From Going Back to Work for Someone Else) (0)
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In my search for ways to manage my various past businesses 100% digitally, the wealth of resources available simply confused my preoccupied mind. I had enough to do without experimenting with yet another untried, untested online service.

Mustering the time and focus necessary to discover reliable, authoritative forums and reviews proved too challenging to balance with family responsibilities, a day job, etc. and it occurred to me that other home business owners probably had similar problems.

Which is why we are here. I plan to share with you my discoveries and techniques for both managing and marketing a small home business online. Along the way, we will explore such topics as:

• Outsourcing—the single most powerful tool available to the Bartholomew Cubbins-like home office worker. Learn the value of sharing all those hats with capable virtual assistants.
• Business Automation—let he who wants to continually waste time doing repetitive work avoid this section. Anything that can be automated, should be automated.
• Podcasting—how to get inside the ears and minds of the people who can most benefit from your services, expertise, and message.
• Social Networking Sites and the relationship marketing model. Crowdsource your way to better products and services by working with your audience!
• Web-based applications that enable your virtual home office to exist anywhere within range of a hi-speed internet connection
• The iPhone—the essential piece of technology for your journey of liberation from your business.

Look for regular blog updates and an upcoming weekly podcast, where we will discuss these online tools and how to best use them to accomplish our personal and professional goals.

Looking forward to serving you…

Devin Best

Related posts

• Series: Google Liberates the Home Office, Part 1-Gmail (9)
• Series: Google Liberates the (Shared) Home Office, Part 2-Google Calendar (2)
• Four Things to Look for in a Web Host, and Why You Should Care (2)
• Command and Conquer Your Home Business Projects with Mind Maps (12)
• About (0)