Running a business email account through your Gmail

Note: This post is a tiny bit technical in orientation - but don't be afraid, its going to be ok:)

The first thing you do when you saunter into the office of your start up for the first time is open a gmail account. I'm not pushing this as a fan, but for free email, productivity tools, SEO monster and databasing hub. But lets not move too fast, what exactly am I selling - functionality.

Day 1. You buy a domain name. In our case AD360.eu from Godaddy.com, 2 years for 10 euros. Next you decide which website platform you'd like to build with.  We went with "Webnode," even though its current incarnation is low spec. Our plan costs a fiver a month - paid in advance, so 60 euros a year, with free domain transfer and email address. Total cost - all in, 70 euros.

Our plan came with 1 email address - in our case we decided to go with don@ad360.eu  

We want to use Gmail instead of this very basic webmail interface.

The process itself is straightforward, if a little daunting the first time.  This video is good.

You need three pieces of information, all available to you in your email inbox or from your hosting provider support team. Your email account name, your password (for the business account) and the POP/SMTP server details (sent to you when you set up the business email).

Once done, you get this (without the red boxes) ...

The benefits - a world class email platform, increased storage, better spam filters. All that nice Google functionality and interoperabilty between devices, inbox, site, analytics + you're not paying squidzillions for microsoft office.

Pro Tip: You're now well set to add webmaster tools, adwords and google analytics ... more on those at a later date.