5 FREE Tools For Business and HOW To Use Them To Speed Up Productivity!

Hello, I want to welcome you to the Inner Circle Call. My name is Lawrence Tam. I'm your host and we got a really cool call today. We'll be going over some tools that you can use for your business and organizing your life, your personal life. These are completely free tools I've been using for a very long time.

Even on a shoestring budget, they're free. So let me break down some of these products. Let me show you what I've been using with them, how you should use them. So if you're driving, you're probably going to have to – or you're running on a treadmill, you're probably going to have to come back and reference this again and by all means, take some good notes. All right, let's get to it.

One of the things that holds people back in organization or streamlining their business is not knowing how to physically do it. So here's a couple of products that will organize the things that you should be organizing and it's completely free. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to go over. Here are the top five tools that you probably might have heard or probably have seen some of the features of them. Just didn't really understand how it would work with your own business or your own personal life.

So these are all actually five products from Google. Now, everyone knows who Google is. Everyone uses them and they're on your phone. They're on your computer. You search for things.

But there's a couple of tools that they have that – if you use them properly, they will make you more efficient, make you move faster, make you build your business quicker, help you drive more traffic and track more sales. So here's the tip number one. The tool number one is Google Drive, D-R-I-V-E, Drive, like you're driving. So Google Drive is a collection of Office products. So if you're very familiar with, say, Microsoft Office or Open Office, Microsoft Office is something people have been using forever.

Lotus Notes. I don't know if people even use Lotus Notes anymore. But Google Drive is definitely the one-stop shop I would go with and use in Office products. Now, if you want something that's a little more on your computer without the internet, now, you would need an internet with Google Drive. If you don't have the internet or it's unstable or for whatever reason, maybe it's dial-up, you'll probably want to use something like Open Office, which is completely free.

I just like the flexibility of Google Drive and there's a couple of reasons why. Google Drive: if you put on one computer, you look up to another computer, log in, you can use the same file. On your phone, if you're taking notes or taking pictures, you can actually embed them into files on your phone while you're mobile. It's really handy if you're taking – like I'm taking photos of price quotes or I'm looking at a TV or something.

I can take a picture of it or a car, stats. I can take a picture of it in a brochure and then send it back to Google Drive. So Google Drive, in a nutshell, is a giant storage.

It's on the cloud somewhere or Google's really quick servers. But on top of that, they actually have a couple of programs in there that works like an office suite of products. Like they have something called Document. Document is just like Microsoft Word. It's a word processing piece of software that will allow you to type up a letter, a resume.

So in the document, you can do the bold, the italics, the header. It's just like Word. So if you're hesitant on getting a new computer and having to repurchase Microsoft Office, Google Drive with Document will help you type out all your articles, whatever reports you need to type out. If your kids need to type out a book report, Document will be where you want to go. Now, presentation in Google Drive is just like PowerPoint.

It has a couple of themes. It has the ability to do slides and actually do a physical presentation. It will actually convert PowerPoints or actually export PowerPoints too. So you can definitely use PowerPoint presentations with Google Drive, but they're called presentations. PowerPoint or Keynote inside of Mac, there are more flexibility in terms of like styling and things like that.

But if you have your own theme, you can import that into presentation. The main things you want in a presentation is being able to write off to build slides in slide format, have headers, import images, size it onto the image, and then being able to export it. So when you do a presentation, you can export it. You don't need internet. Totally doable with presentation.

Now, Google Drive also has something called Spreadsheet. With that, if you're familiar with Excel, it's the same thing. It has cells. It does formulas. It does sums.

It's really handy. So like if you have multiple people working on a document, say I have an assistant, I can actually have an Excel document open, and then my assistant will come on, and I will see her changing cells. It's important. It's important because if we're building a database or new customers, we're adding phone numbers and their emails, I can see her working while I'm working on something, adding notes. Now, this is for any product inside of Google Drive.

You can have multiple people log in as long as you give it to them. By default, it's locked down. No one can have access to your Google Drive. It's very secure. Now, if you share it with someone who has a Google account with Google Drive, you can then work on – multiple people can work on the same document at the same time online.

And they'll have their own document. They'll have their own color, and it's pretty cool. You'll see them typing out words, removing cells, adding colors, importing images. It's all on there. So if you're like – you're building like a customer data sheet or maybe you're tracking your traffic results like how much you paid, when you paid for, what's your cost per lead, whatever that is in terms of your paid traffic, you can definitely do that and have your assistant come on with the same document and access it at the same time.

All right. Now, the last one, which I haven't used too much. I've used it once or twice, and I didn't realize what it was called until I looked it up. It's called Form, F-O-R-M.

It allows you to do surveys, event planning, feedback, replace basically paper forms. So if someone were to come in, you can set aside a form so people can put in their name, their email, their address, comments. It's kind of like an opt-in sheet that will then send that data to an Excel spreadsheet that you'll then begin to track. Okay. All right.

Just like a form should be. So it's a really cool way, and Google Drive also integrates with a lot of different forms that you can use. Like I have it with Hello Sign for signatures. There's a lot of different signature platforms that I'll integrate with, and I'll pull it in, because it's a storage platform, so it'll store a lot of different things in there.

So in a nutshell, Google Drive is just a really awesome free tool that anyone can use, and it's especially awesome because it's free, you can access it in multiple, multiple times, multiple locations, and there's no real barrier to entry into it. So as long as it's all online, you access it, you can build your forms, you can build your PowerPoints, you can build your headers, you can build a ton of different things inside of Google Drive. Okay. Now let's move on to the second free product, and that is Google Voice.

Now, Google Voice is, I believe, only available to USA residents, and I've been using Google Voice since the very beginning. And the main reason was because I didn't want people, when I was running my business, to have my personal cell phone number. And primarily because I don't want people to call me at weird hours of the night or texting me at weird times or people I didn't even know contact me. I wanted them to go through a process of opting in, reading my emails, and then applying to speak with me.

But before they do that, they need to write me an email, fill out a form, take an action versus just going straight to texting me on my personal cell phone. And it would be much harder to remove or replace my personal cell phone, change the numbers, be such a drag because my family and my friends have my personal cell phone number. So what you do is you separate that and get another cell phone number just for business. Cool thing is completely free in the USA. All you need to do is go lock down a cell phone number that's in your area.

So I wanted people to know that I'm in Houston in the 281 area code. So I would do, well, Houston is 713, but I knew outside was 281. So if anyone who saw 281 knew I was local versus having some weird number out of state or whatever like that. So I took out a 281 number completely free and I just found the digits that I wanted. They'll keep asking, you know, is this the phone number you want?

Is this the phone number you want? The crazy thing is it's completely free. I've literally had this number since like 2008. I think 2008 is when I got Google Voice, 2009. I think it was actually 2008.

And it has so many cool features on Google Voice. If you're not using it completely, just stop what you're doing. Well, except if you're driving or running on a treadmill or taking a bath and listening to me. So you want to go ahead and take this product, write it down. Remember Google Voice, Google Voice, Google Voice.

Go download it. Download it on your phone and download it on your PC or your Mac and link up to it. So here's a couple of things what it does. You can call people from your laptop.

Now, why is this important? Well, you know, in my office at times, it's very hard to get cell reception. So instead of having people call me and pick up my phone, I'll pick up on my computer. Only thing you need to have is your, you know, your Gmail open and your Google Chat is there. Your voice will pop up and it'll tell you someone's ringing you.

So I'll actually be calling and receiving people on my laptop because I have high speed internet. Now, this is cool because if some of you who don't have a cell phone or maybe some of you don't have the ability to, you know, just have good cell reception, use Google Voice. And, you know, it works on iPhone and Android. I don't know if it works on tablets.

You might look into that. And the other cool thing is you can have it linked up to your house phone. So you can have it linked up so when someone calls that number, it rings your house landline just in case, you know, you have dial-up or something. You can have them dial into your house phone. And it will.

It will connect to you through your house phone. So you can actually dial on your computer. Say you're – maybe, you know, your cell phone reception is bad and maybe you don't like using your laptop because you want to walk around, right? It's kind of weird to walk around with a laptop. So what you can do is you can have it dial your house phone if you're on like, you know, if you just have a regular phone like a cordless phone.

I'll have it dial myself, my actual landline house phone, and it will ring and it will tell me, hey, I'm about to connect to you. And then I'll use the phone and walk around. I'm going to have a conversation with somebody. This is how I did all the inner circle calls, someone calling my Google Voice number, but I picked it up on my actual house phone. Also, a couple of things.

Some phones, smartphones and cell phone services are still not unlimited. Now, they're not unlimited text. So what happens? Or maybe you're not unlimited minutes and you only have minutes at night. Use Google Voice.

I actually use it for Google text until I got unlimited text. But if you don't have unlimited text, you can use Google Voice. You can text from Google Voice on your computer and on your cell phone, as long as you have internet, it'll go through. Crazy awesome deal because if something you don't like, I don't want to spend 10 cents per text. Use your Google Voice and make sure it goes through your Google Voice line, not talking to your phone's text.

So you're not being billed on your text line. Now, if you're unlimited, it doesn't matter, right? I just think it's really cool to be able to call from Gmail. So you can be writing an email or checking email in your Gmail and someone can call you. And you can pick it up from there.

But wait, there's more. You can actually screen. So a lot of you don't have like assistants or secretaries. And when I say screen, someone will call the phone and they'll have to say their name. It'll say, hey, Google Voice, you're trying to contact Lawrence.

Please say your name. Now, when they say their name, it's like John Smith. I'll pick it up and I can screen it, but they don't know I'm on the phone. And when John Smith comes on, I'll go, you know what? John Smith's probably not a person I want to talk to right now.

I'll talk to him later. So I can then hang up and then they'll just leave a voicemail. But let's say it's John Smith and I knew he emailed me. He's like, hey, look, I'm about to buy a $3,000 product from you. Can you please pick up the phone?

Because I need to make sure that I have the right address or whatever. Something really small. And you do want to pick up the phone. You can, on the fly, while they're talking to you, leaving you a message. It could be like John Smith's like, hey, Lawrence, I'm about to spend $3,000.

I have some questions. The bank wants me to do X, Y, and Z. Can you please? And then I'll push a number on my dial pad and then it'll switch. Oh, sorry, John.

Sorry. I was busy, but I saw that you're actually calling in about your bank situation. In call, on the fly, you can be screening people. You can hear their name and actually hear their message. So you can actually screen people out.

Because what happens is you'll have people who call you just to see if your phone number's real. Now, you have a voice message there, but they just want to see if you pick up or not. And that's cool. But the people who leave me a message, that's the person who takes it a step further, right?

And sometimes you're just like, you're driving. Don't pick up. Maybe you're hands-free, but I prefer if you don't pick up, just do hands-free and say, you know what? I'll listen to it. Just don't talk to them.

And you can definitely take notes now, mentally. I mean, taking notes mentally. Now, here's what else is cool. When they leave a message on Google Voice, it is automatically recorded.

Let me just repeat that again. When someone leaves you a Google Voice message, it is automatically recorded. And know what you can do with that? You can download that as a voice file. You can email it to somebody.

You can embed it on your website. They give you the HTML to do that. Think about this. Now, I actually had this save my butt. Someone from a company was telling me, you know, some back story about, you know, blah, blah, blah, blah.

You know, you're not in trouble, blah, blah, blah, blah, even though someone says you're in trouble. But we're part of the compliance department and you're not in trouble. This is from a voicemail. Now, rumors say that I was in trouble for something. And then when they call, I was like, well, I actually have.

I have documented proof that your compliance department, your actual company, called and left me a message that I am not at fault at that issue. And so I was actually able to clear up some rumors and whatnot just from a voicemail that was automatically recorded. Now, if you had that phone number sent to your standard voicemail, right, how would you get that and forward that to somebody? I don't even know how you even forward a voicemail to, like, your wife or something.

I don't know how to do that. But with Google Voice, I was able to actually take the voicemail and send it to somebody to comply and say, look, I'm cleared. Are we good? Oh, we're cleared now. That's fantastic.

It would be so much more difficult to get that voicemail to someone. And that one instant of Google Voice, like, to me, saved me thousands of dollars because I was able to capture a voicemail and be able to clear my name. This is some silly stuff. But being able to capture information and capture data on the fly is awesome.

It's awesome. Okay, next thing. Let's say you're in a really noisy area and someone was going to leave you a voicemail, right, and say you're at a club or a party, and it's just way too loud to listen. It'll actually transcribe the voicemail into text, and you can either log in to read it or it can text you the transcript. Now, if the person has a thick accent or speaks too fast, it gets kind of jumbled.

But if someone were to speak clearly and just tell you what they wanted on the voicemail and what their name was and what they're leaving, you know, the information, what it's for, it'll actually text it to your phone if you want it to, or they'll just leave it on the Google Voice where you can log in with your phone or log in the computer. Awesome way to quickly screen people if you just can't hear or listen to something, right? Okay. So numbers are free with Google Voice.

It's completely free to actually use Google Voice, yet automatic downloads will save your butt for all types of craziness, right? And another thing is once you start building a business and you start getting your name out there, people are probably going to call you, and some are probably going to be a little crazy. For whatever reason, maybe they butt dial you or maybe they call you and they're drunk. For whatever reason, or maybe someone's harassing you. Maybe.

Google Voice can actually block and spam the number so they can't contact you again. Now, think about that. If you had your own cell phone number, you have to download some of these weird apps or pay for an app to, like, screen people out or block them from bothering you. Google Voice does it all in one to protect you, all in one.

Another thing is let's say you have a conversation with somebody and you can actually take notes, right, on a voicemail. So if someone sent you a text or a voicemail, you can take a note on it. It's like, you know, this person was supposed to buy — this is a $100 product, and he's supposed to buy it on May 31st, you know, whatever.

Now, this person calls again and leaves a message. What you can do in Google Voice is search for the cell phone number or the number, and it will pull up every instance of when this person has called you. So let's say someone keeps trying to pitch you something. You're like, man, this guy keeps pitching me. You do a search.

You'll see every time this person is calling you. So I had a guy call me, and I answered the phone, right, and say, how are you doing? And he pitched me the same exact thing. And I go, hey, you know what? Three months earlier, you pitched me the same thing.

Did you know that? He's like, I did not know that. But Google Voice is a search engine in itself, and you can be able to search names and phone numbers and keywords in there. So when people forget the conversation, it allows you not to forget, right? Another thing about Google Voice is in the USA, the majority of USA and Canada is free.

And I say some majority because Canada has, like, a lot of different stuff in there. There's a couple small territories, I guess, that aren't free, but the majority of Canada and, like, USA is free. So back in the day, you have a cell phone or a phone that's local, you'd have to sign up for long-distance calling.

It is no longer needed right now with Google Voice. Now, a lot of cell phone carriers have USA for free, but they don't have Canada for free. So I'll call a lot of my leads, my prospects, or my customers, and I'll call them. And I know they're from Canada. I'll do a search.

And they're from Canada, and you can call them for free from your computer or your cell phone, totally free. And the rates are actually pretty good. I mean, like, some of them, like, it's, like, 15 cents a minute to Mexico on a mobile line, which is really cheap, right? And rates always change.

You should double-check and make sure what the rates are. It's all over the world. You can get these rates. Some of the rates might be better than a calling card, or in a pinch if someone calls you and you know you have a business associate, and you're like, you know what?

It's probably best I pick up this line versus having to go get a calling card. It might cost me $5, but, you know, it's not bad. I mean, it's not as bad as, like, cell phone companies that really charge you, right? So you can go ahead and get rates. Just go to the Google search and just type in Google rates, and they'll tell you all the different countries and what their rates are.

But they're very competitive in their rates. Okay, that was a mouthful for Google Voice. Now, let's get to Gmail, which is the email program from Google. I actually don't know when I signed up for Gmail. It's probably 2008.

I was using Hotmail for a long time and then Yahoo and then Hotmail turned into MSN. A lot of spam. What I noticed with Google and Gmail, it actually filters spam a lot better, and the filtering systems in there are actually a lot better. Now, the handicap is they actually have to display ads on your site. Literally, to this day, since 2009.

I don't know, five or six, whenever I got a Gmail account, I have never clicked on any of those ads. So just say it's not a bother. It's not that intrusive. I'm sure you can get an app to block them, but it's not that bad, okay? So with the Gmail account, I just looked recently.

The free accounts come with 15 gigs across your Google Photos, Google Drive, and Gmail, right? I'm currently at about six gigs, and I've been using it, like, literally forever. Google, back in the day when they launched, it was only invite-only, so you had to get it from a friend. You had, like, three or ten invites or whatever. And it was, like, I think one gig at the time or maybe half a gig.

And back then, I was like, that was a huge email box. One gig for free? That's crazy. It's 15 gigs now. Totally free for the drive and storage of photos and Gmail.

Now, if you need more, you can get 100 gigs for two bucks a month. Now, let's see. Let's just say, you know, you want to use your storage a lot. Like, you're storing a lot of photos. Maybe it's a team site or maybe it's a corporation you're running through.

Ten bucks a month will get you a terabyte. Now, if you really want to use Gmail as your main source because it's very flexible, it's easy to search within the Gmail. You can use it on your cell phones. It's really easy.

It's really refined as a way to do business or just personal. You can actually go and use Google Business Apps. So, in a nutshell, I pay five bucks, right, per month. I get a custom domain. I don't have to use my hosting provider.

I don't have to use a domain provider's email because those, they act weird. I just never really — I've tried a couple of them. I just never really like the way they do email. I like the way Gmail does email. So, you can have Gmail be the email of your custom domain.

So, if your custom domain is abc.com, you can have abc.com or at abc.com be your email address and it will be using Gmail as its software. So, you're going to be able to know how to use it, how to write, how to compose messages and also searching it. It's a really cool way to use the Gmail email address but use it for business by using your own domain. Now, this is really critical when you start using autoresponders.

A lot of them recommend, like Aweber included, a lot of them recommend you have your own domain when you send out emails because it's more customized. It looks more like a business. It's more professional. Now, I've been using Gmail to send out emails for the longest time. I just recently switched in the last two years to a domain customized and it literally only cost me five bucks.

Now, I had my assistant come on so she can manage it. So, I gave her an email address and it cost her five bucks a month and we're all using Gmail. Fantastic way to still be able to use Drive, YouTube, store documents. It's all built on there. So, it doubles it up for five bucks.

You'll still be able to have access to your video chats, your calendar, your documents. All the cool thing with the Google Business app is that it's a 24-7 support because they understand everyone on here is using it for business and they guarantee a 99.9% uptime. Now, that's critical. One of the reasons why I don't use — like, I think I was using GoDaddy email at the time. It kept going down.

Like really. Unacceptable for business. I couldn't access my emails. I couldn't send it. I was like, forget that.

So, this is why I've been using Gmail almost exclusively. I have multiple Gmail accounts for different accounts and the one business account, I have a custom domain for it. Now, it has unlimited users and they tout a business security. I would think if they have business clients, they want to take care of them a little more than the free clients considering they have an uptime guarantee, which uptime means not going down or crashing when you can't access it and having 24-7 support.

So, the Google Business app, go ahead and search that out. I'm serious. Pretty cool. Next thing is YouTube.

Yeah, YouTube was acquired by Google and there's a couple of things that it actually does that's pretty cool and I want to — it's a ton of different ways to do it. One of the main things that YouTube does really well is live hangouts. Being able to get on live and have 10 people total on a panel at the bottom and when someone speaks, they instantly get popped up on the screen. So, if you have 10 people who are quiet and each person will come on at a time, they will pop their screen out as a full screen so people who are watching this feed can see 10 people have a conversation.

There's no limit that I know of how many people can pipe in and see this live feed. And the cool thing is it actually gets broadcast to your Google Plus account automatically. You can do screen shares. What it means is normally the Google Hangout, it's your onboard camera will kick in and it will see you in your surroundings. But what if you're doing like a how-to, like a how-to exercise or training and you want to show your computer screen?

You can do that with the YouTube Hangout and you can show your screen. Next thing is when you hit broadcast, it automatically starts to record. Here's a cool thing. It records, compresses and uploads. What that means is after you've actually finished your Hangout or your live Hangout with your guests and you hit stop, stop recording, it will automatically compress it and it's like the fastest compression, right?

So, normally, if you do like a video compression, it will take you, like, if you had an hour video, it might take you 30 minutes to an hour to compress the video because it's so big. You're talking about gigabytes of information that if you were to send it, normally, it would take you forever to upload to YouTube. So, normally, what you do is you'll shoot a video, compress it and then upload it to YouTube. But the YouTube live Hangouts is automatic. Like you skip that step completely.

You don't even have to worry about compressing anything, right? And it uploads it automatically. And I've seen some where I'll be done with it and literally like less than five minutes later, probably even faster than that, the actual recording is live. Now, the amount of time you save in compressing and uploading is mind-blowing if you have really long ones. Now, YouTube has an eight-hour max now.

Eight-hour max. Can you imagine having to compress and then upload that file? It would take you forever. So, YouTube being able to do live Hangouts and do compression and upload and recording all at the same time is a really, really cool thing that you can do. And just the fact that YouTube is so popular is a pretty cool format.

Now, I do suggest that, understand, since YouTube is not friendly to affiliates, people who really want to make some money on YouTube. They only want to make money the way they want to make money, not the way you want to make money. So, if you're in affiliate marketing and you're selling a product that they don't like or maybe some people are watching your video and they don't like your video and they hit flag, they can physically take down your video. So, make sure you use YouTube properly. Make sure you don't get enemies on YouTube or people who dislike the way you market for whatever reason.

Maybe you're a comparison marketer and you're marketing Coke versus Pepsi. And you're siding with Coke and then all these Pepsi fans come in and flag your video. They'll take it down. And YouTube, since there are so many videos being updated and uploaded, a lot of times, even if you're not at fault, it might take you months to get that account back. And they'll have different guidelines in YouTube and they won't completely ban your account but maybe they'll strip out your ability to do live Hangouts.

I've seen this happen. They'll strip it out while they figure out if you're in compliance or not. Yeah. I understand. YouTube is a free platform for the most part and there's not much support.

So, if you're doing a lot of business videos and you know it's on a capture page or a sales page and you can't ever have it go down or you don't want ads on it because YouTube throws ads on it, go to another service that actually has video hosting. Not YouTube — video hosting. Empower has video hosting in it and they're not going to block you or spam you for that stuff. So, if you have a critical video you want to use.

That's where you should be putting it, right? And there's a lot of different services out there. But just know, if it's free, there's a very good chance that they can pull your video down. Now, if it's paid, you have a much better chance because they can protect it from people trying to spam it so much. The only times people can see it is if it's on hosted and embedded on your own website.

Okay? Now, a couple of things about YouTube before I go on to the last one. You can actually embed and have it automatically go HD and you can embed and actually make it auto play. Now, by default, it doesn't do that.

Just go ahead and go to Google and then do a search for like YouTube embed HD or YouTube embed automatic play or auto play. And it will give you a little bit of HTML code that you'll put into your YouTube embed and it will automatically make it play. Really cool if you're doing like a training or like a blog post and you want it to automatically play when it loads. You can definitely do that. And it's just a simple tweak for HTML.

It's a small copy paste code. Now, that brings me to the fifth and final of our five Google products that you should be using that are completely free. The fifth and final one is search. Like literally you can search how to embed an HD YouTube or auto play YouTube embed.

You can do it with Google search. But that's not all. Google search does so much that people just flat out forget, right? So Google search on average does 100 billion search queries a month.

And it's the number one search engine in the world. A hundred billion. Trust me when I tell you it's built pretty good.

Okay. In terms of end user, like us searching, right, on the internet. Here's a couple of things you can do.

Right? It has auto search where auto complete. So let's say you're typing in like how do I build and it'll start auto completing things for you. So sometimes you're like, you know what's that thing on the tip of your tongue, is like, I can't remember that person's name.

You know, when I talk about Tom Cruise and his, and you type that in, it'll physically auto complete what other people are trending. Other people are typing to help you. This is crazy. I use this all the time for two ways. As a customer of Google, I forget something like how to spell something.

It'll spell it automatically for me and correct it for me. Number two, I use it as a promoter or as a marketer. I want to know what other people are doing. So I'll type that in and see what other people are searching right now, right?

Next thing is I use it to search my own website. Now normally you can put a search engine on your website as a little box. I take it a step further. Think about it this way. Let's say you opened your computer and you go, you know what was that article I wrote about how to market in the jungle.

I have an article about marketing in the jungle. But I don't remember what the link is because a friend on Facebook is looking to read it. So the normal way people would do this, there were just two ways: they would go to their blog and search it, and find it another way would be they would log into their blog or their website, search it, grab the link and then find it. Here's what I do.

I open a browser or a website — excuse me, open a website — and in the Google search, I type in my actual website name and then what I'm searching for and then I hit enter, and since my websites are indexed by Google, right?

Right? So it automatically knows what I'm looking for, so it saves me a step of having to go into my own website and having to search — an example, you know, you can do like Lawrence Tam dot net and then I can go and search how to make a birthday cake — like, I knew I had, you know, I'm not saying I have one like that, but I'm just saying, example, how to make a birthday cake, and I hit that into a search, it'll go and search my blog automatically and then pull out the article and then I can get it out of there, like instantly. Really cool way to just grab and index stuff using the Google search versus having to go through all their search engines, right, or your search engine on your own website. I've used it to do math. So instead of busting out a calculator, I'll go, you know, what is 48 times 3, hit enter, it'll physically do the math problem for you. Or let's say you have someone who emails you and it's like in a different language, like Spanish or Russian.

I had a Spanish person email me — like, I don't have a clue what you're saying — Google will translate it for you. I think there's an app for that inside of Gmail, but let's say you don't have that, or let's say it's on Facebook or YouTube or whatever, someone sends you like a different language, you can copy it and then just paste it into the search engine and just say translate, it'll physically go find a translation for you. It's a really handy tool to do translations. Next thing is I'm awful at spelling, so you can actually type in the wrong way you spell the word — like receive, or, you know, hippopotamus or something — you put that into Google search and it will auto tell — it'll tell you, look, did you mean this, because you're close enough, you're just wrong, right — it'll give you the definitions of what that word is. So I've been using this with my daughter a lot. Like we'll have a word and she doesn't know what it is and I'm like, okay, this is the way you pronounce it, right, and, like, let's just say Tyrannosaurus Rex, right, Tyrannosaurus, like, how do you pronounce that, Daddy? Okay, look.

I'll type it in, I butchered the spelling, I hit enter, it says did you mean this, I said yes, it then pops up a definition, but then in the Google search it actually has a little sound icon, if you click it, it'll audibly display, or audibly show you how it's supposed to be pronounced, Tyrannosaurus — like, it'll physically say it on your phone or on your computer. So this is pretty handy. We'll get a word that my daughter doesn't know, I'll type it in, and instead of me butchering the word because sometimes I mispronounce words all the time, like pamphlet or pamphlet — like, how do you, which one is it, is it pamphlet or pamphlet — I'll type it in and it'll put the search in and then it'll announce it, you know, to my kids, like, this is the way you say it. And this happens for me too. Like sometimes there's a word I don't know what it is, right, like Totskis — I think I learned that from Tony Rush — like, what is a Totski, I don't know if I'm pronouncing it right, so I typed in the word and it means like little trinkets and things. I don't know how to actually pronounce it, but Google search helped me learn English. I mean, come on, there's a lot of words in English, so it's okay, type it in the search, don't blame yourself, just do it and then you'll find out how to actually pronounce it, what it means, and it'll do it for you. So these five Google tools, completely free, from documents to videos to email to storage to search, it can all be done for free, it helps you organize.

It helps you replace products you no longer need. It's built for people, but I believe built especially for business people, to get their stuff done, so it's no longer about, oh my goodness, I got to type this thing in an old school text document, you know, that has nothing, no powerful tools like embedding images or word count. It does all of that, and especially if you start collaborating with your outsourcers or being able to work with your assistants and working on a project at the same time. Completely doable, these five products: Google Drive, Google Voice, Gmail, YouTube and Google search. Using a combination of all five and being able to search will let you just produce faster and getting your time more on the things that make you money versus the things like, how do I make this bold, how do I make this presentation, totally easy, totally user friendly. And the last tip, the last tip.

Both YouTube and Google are the most powerful search engines in the world for how to use — what I mean is, how do I change my brakes, type that into Google. If you want, like, articles and other forms of content, maybe some videos, but if it's something that's visual, how do I bake a cake that's moist, put that into YouTube, it will give you so many like queries back, so many searches back, that are exactly what you're looking for, right, because the how-to, especially in the video format, you should be living on YouTube. So if your example was, you know, how to set up your Google Voice for your phone, I don't know how to do that, go to YouTube, go how to set up Google Voice on your phone, type it in, there's going to be someone who's already done it, if not Google themselves, because they put all their how-to's on YouTube. Think about it — they own YouTube, they're going to put all their how-to's on YouTube. So if you ever have like these simple, like questions, like how do I make this bold, or you know, how do I embed an image, or you know, how do I answer text on my Google Voice, whatever it is in a Google Voice product, or in just regular everyday life, what type of weed is this, what type of tree grows 20 feet tall, you put these questions inside of Google search. But if it's a how-to, how do I bake a cake that's moist, or you know how to.

How do I remove a refrigerator, whatever it is, it's not too big, not too small, use Google Voice, or Google search, and Google YouTube with video, you can find what you're looking for completely free, and probably one of the fastest search engines on planet Earth. So my name is Lawrence Tam, I appreciate you, thank you for listening to this Inner Circle, and by all means, continue listening to all the Inner Circles in the past and in the future. Thanks, my name is Lawrence Tam, have fun with your Google Voice products, bye.