I just can’t stop telling people how great Gmail is.  I know there are people who don’t like it, but I don’t think they’ve tried hard enough.  Who really cares about folders?  Colored labels are the hotness.

I just finished doing a roundup of all the domains that I manage where I have a seperate email address, and I took the time to converge them all on my gmail address – now I receive all 9 important accounts in 1, and I can reply as though I was in that account.  Simple, but amazing.  I knew gmail had the capability to do it, but I still can’t believe how easy it truly is.

First of all, let’s itemize the things I need to organize with the calendar:

• Personal Meetings and placeholder times – reminding myself that the wife and I have a date scheduled so that I don’t schedule over it
• Church Events
• Masonic Lodge Events
• Republican Events
• Birthdays & Anniversaries
• Monthly Bill Due Dates
• Holidays
• Work Events

So, this is where the ability to have multiple calendars in one comes in handy, and where you’re ultimately going to maintain your sanity. When you look at my calendar with all of the individual calendars selected and visible, it looks like I never have a free moment – but being able to filter out things like Birthdays, Holidays, the church calendar of events, and I see the real deal.

I established the UMT calendar online through our Google Apps, so I can turn ALL church events on and off. I am running the Masonic Lodge website, so I have separated it out and made it public. Birthdays & Anniversaries don’t affect my scheduling, so they need to be able to be turned off to avoid visual clutter. All in all, I have 9 calendars active right now, but I see everything I need to see.

I highly suggest taking the time to set up and color code your individual calendars. Take the time to identify the different pulls on your time and give them their own calendar.

Also, did you know about the gCalendar component for Joomla? Now you can integrate your Google calendar into your Joomla site instead of managing two calendars!

One of the major obstacles that I think I’m going to come up against is the downplay on a “catalog” style site that so many of our competitors do. We are a premium lab. It’s like the difference between going to Linens-N-Things and buying a piece of art or having someone paint something for you. You pay more for having someone paint a new item, but there is a certain value to it.

So, with all that in mind, my semi-weekly newsletter from Web Marketing Today arrived this morning telling me about keyword search tools – and specifically the free service offered by Google itself! It’s amazing to me already the services that Google offers, but the fact that they freely offer up not only the keywords you suggest, but related terms, and then tell you how much your competitors are using of each term. They’re practically handing you market niches. Amazing.

Here’s the tool. Check for yourself.

Google AdWords: Keyword Tool

Currently I am testing this on v5webmarketing.com.  With my host, I can not use this service to modify the main page and on down using Google Page Creator, but I could start a mypages.domain.com or something to make it work for users.

I am very excited about applying this in conjunction with some other tools to at least 3 new domains…

• courseyblog
• fullerblog
• logan county republican page

This is an exciting tool that allows for more decentralization of efforts while increasing functionality and efficiency.

More later…