5 Reasons Why Google Rocks My Freelance Writing World

November 10, 2010

I love Apple. I love Microsoft. I love Google.

I’m probably what you’d call a corporate…ahem, right?

Don’t get me wrong, I do my bit to support smaller organisations and I steer clear of any company that I truly believe isn’t providing a benefit to their customers or is in some way impacting in a particularly negative way on others, but when the big guys make things so easy, it’s difficult to not get sucked in — and to a certain extent, be in awe of them.

Of all of the large organisations that I use, Google is arguably the one I spend most time with.

Most people know Google as simply being the world’s most popular search engine, but the truth is that they offer over four dozen primary products, all of which are available for free — and that’s without looking at their more specialist ones.

The reason why I love Google is that ever since I discovered that they are so much more than a search engine, my freelance writing career has gone from strength to strength. It might just be a strange coincidence, but I like to put some of my success to date down to the following five products that are offered by Google.

1. Gmail / Googlemail

Simply put, I don’t think I’d be able to work without my Gmail account.

It might sound like a bit of a melodramatic statement, but I organise my whole day, week, month and year through Gmail, including both my personal and work lives.

What I like most about Gmail, aside from the fact it seamlessly integrates with a lot of the other products I use, is that I can set it up so that it retrieves my e-mails from my other accounts and allows me to view and reply to them from my Gmail inbox.

Some might think this isn’t a major selling point, but for someone who has three or four different e-mail accounts with various providers, I can safely say that the fact I can check them all in one place is a massive plus for me.

2. Calendar

To be a success as a freelance writer — or in fact in any vocation — I strongly believe that you need to have your working life in some type of order and for me, Google calendar meets my needs exactly.

I know plenty of people who live out of their paper calendars / diaries, but it just never works for me, largely because it means I have to carry around a diary with me wherever I go, along with everything else.

With the online calendar, I can schedule things whilst I’m actually at my computer, sync it to my iPhone and keep up-to-date with what I should be doing wherever I am.

3. Reader

I love reading blogs and getting involved in discussions and whilst I’ve got a small number that I visit regularly, there are dozens that I like to check in with when I get the opportunity.

To keep on track of all of the blogs that I follow, I use Google Reader, a service that not only allows me to see which blogs I’m subscribed to, but which gives me the title and a snippet of the text every time a new post goes live from the blogs that I’m subscribed to.

Plus, it gives me recommendations of blogs that I should follow, which is a fantastic feature and one that’s allowed me to discover some particularly useful and interesting blogs.

4. Alerts

The Alerts service that Google offers is one of the most recent ones that I’ve come to use — I didn’t even know it existed until I read Dana’s post here on Get Paid To Write Online about how Google Alerts is a great freelance writing tool.

The way the Alerts service works is by allowing you to setup an alert for a specific phrase and receive an e-mail every time that phrase is mentioned online.

Some people use it to track their own name and others to see if any of their work is being plagiarized. Whilst both are great ideas, I use it primarily to help me with ideas for articles and blog posts, as one of the clients I work for sees me deliver pieces each month on roughly the same topics.

It’s easy to think up a new idea or two by yourself, but when you’ve got to deliver two dozen different pieces, using a service like Google Alerts makes the whole process that extra bit easier by providing you with the one thing you need first and foremost — inspiration.

5. Images

I like to use images in most of my blog posts. Whether it’s for my own blog or a client’s, the use of the right image can enhance the post and compliment it perfectly.

Whilst in some instances it does require for a stock image to be purchased, more often than not there are suitable royalty free images available to use online — it’s just finding them that’s often the problem.

Fortunately, Google Images makes the process so simple that you can be presented with a screen of suitable images in a matter of seconds and all you have to do is go to the ‘Images’ section of Google’s search engine, click on the ‘Advanced Image Search’ link and then choose ‘labeled for reuse’ from the ‘Usage Rights’ dropdown box.

Enter your search terms, hit ‘Google Search’ and every image that’s returned has been marked by the author as being suitable for reuse (as long as you give credit to the author in the piece in which the image is used).

There’s no doubt that the above five Google products are the ones I use first and foremost — perhaps even more so than the search engine itself — but whilst writing this post I’ve realised that I actually utilize more of Google’s products than I first thought and Docs, Picasa, Trends, Translate, Earth and iGoogle are all used on somewhat of a regular basis.

And I can’t go without mentioning Chrome, my browser of choice, either.

I know it’s not particularly the right thing to do, declaring your love for such a major organisation, especially when companies of this type appear to be trying to dominate various industries, but am I the only one who relies so heavily on the wonder that is Google?