Gmail is not just for your personal email, anymore. Read more to find out how you can use the power of Google to power your small business's email, while using your company's domain name! Oh, did I mention that it's FREE?!

What many don't know is that you can use the power of Gmail to power your company's email. Far too often I see cars and commercial vehicles with descriptions on the side that state, "email us at: MyBusiness@gmail.com". Right under that line it will say, "visit us at: www.MyBusiness.com". To me that screams small time and it looks like the company hasn't spent the extra $50 bucks to have their "web guy" update their email. That, or their web guy doesn't care! The easy solution is to combine the two and use the tools that Google provides to give you that more professional big-guy look.

The answer is simple:

Go to the Google Apps for Business website.

Here you can select the standard or the premiere versions of their email service. The premiere service is cheap (currently $50/user/year) and offers more space, no ads, archiving, encryption, and most importantly a 99.9% uptime guarantee (which is better than exchange server, read here).

You can see a side-by-side comparison of the two account types by going to this site. I currently use the standard FREE version.

Click "Get Started"

Google makes it easy from here to set up your domain to work with your Gmail account. The only tricky part is changing your CNAME file which requires admin access to your domain host website....no biggie.

Create email accounts that are "aliases" for you that say "info@MyBusiness.com" or "sales@MyBusiness.com". These go a long way to show your web competence and are easy to remember (much better than john.doe@MyBusiness.com). If you are concerned about not getting email from that old account, just forward it!

If you use a client on your work computer (PC or Mac) then going to this website will show you how to integrate it. This is another easy process and you should have no problem getting it to work with Gmail.

That's it! A lot of the "magic" that your web guy does is just this easy. You probably saw a bunch of different things that Google offers small business...and a lot of these tools have a ton of value. One of the features we use is the Google portal site. You can do a lot of cool things with that, too, but I will save that for another post.

In no time you should be set up with an email account that looks every bit as professional as what the big boys have...and you have done it all for free. If you have any questions, post a comment below.