We recently helped an asbestos removal company improve their digital presence by getting them off their hotmail email address and onto their own branded email using Google G Suite.

You can create a branded email address by getting your own domain name and connecting it to Google G Suite, which you can do directly through Google or by purchasing your domain name separately through a domain registrar like Net Registry, MelbourneIT, Crazy Domains, GoDaddy and many more. This is something we cover in our Digital and Social Media Marketing Courses.

Domain names cost under $30 a year

Depending on the type of domain name you’d like to register, they can cost you as little as ten or eleven dollars a year, or as much as thirty. If you decide to register your domain with a company like Net Registry, an Australian owned and operated registrar owned by Melbourne IT, you can also sign up for extra services to help you run your business.

Purchasing a domain name from a registrar directly may be preferable if you’d like to connect it to a WordPress website, but you can also buy it directly from Google when you sign up for a G Suite account. This may be preferable, as Google will handle to renewal of your domain at the same time as your G Suite account.

G Suite provides free business tools

A basic G Suite account costs just $5 a month, and comes with a raft of business tools you can use to make your business more professional and efficient. Aside from the free word processing apps you get access to (also available for free Gmail accounts), you also get free cloud storage so you can share documents with team members remotely, and access to Google calendar.

Because the Google calendar app is in the cloud, you can share access to it with your virtual assistant, so you can both schedule meetings and appointments without any clashes. Tradies can also share it with clients when they’re trying to organise a time to commence a new job, rather than going back and forth with different times and dates.

Beware domain name scams

If you choose to register your domain name separately — it does offer more flexibility, particularly if you ever want to move your email account from Google (who knows, something better and easier may come along in the future) — you do need to be wary of scams that often circulate to businesses.

The Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC) recently fined a company $2.3 million for sending unsolicited notices to businesses that looked like renewal notices, but were really registration notices for other domain names often costing upwards of $250.

Remember: a domain name shouldn’t cost much more than $30 a year, and certainly not more than $100. Check the fine print, and make sure you’re using a reputable domain name registrar.

To learn how to set up a Google G Suite account and start using a branded email address to increase your digital presence and make your business more professional, enrol in our Digital and Social Media Marketing Course, which covers Google G Suite and much more.