When you’re focusing on selling your crafts online it’s easy to overlook perhaps the internet’s greatest asset - the availability of free information.

We can use this information for the benefit of our craft business. We can keep an eye on new advances that might help our blog or website, or how we market and sell our crafts. We can keep up to date with new information from our suppliers.

We can even keep an eye on what our competitors are doing!

Of course this does mean that it’s easy to get information overload. Emails from who knows where and the dreaded spam. This, that and the other blog we want to keep an eye on…

It’s easy to fall into the trap of spending so much time looking for and reading information that we don’t actually get any work done - I’m one of the worst, but at least I have the excuse that it’s part of what I do for a living!

In order to manage all this “stuff” I use Google’s free services quite extensively. Now I’m not an employee or being paid by them, so trust me, I’m saying this simply because it works for me.

For a start I run all my emails through a Gmail account simply because it offers the best free spam protection I know of. With a Gmail account you can add other email addresses so you can control them all in one place.

Then I use Google Reader (you just log in using your Gmail address) for all my RSS subscriptions. If you don’t know what RSS is it’s just a way of getting all your blogs in one easily digestible chunk. You subscribe to your favorite blogs by clicking their RSS button and then add them to Reader. Every time you log in you’ll find lists of the most recent blog articles automatically imported.

You can do a quick scan or read in depth - without having to visit all the individual blogs.

The other thing I use a lot is Google’s Notebook which, once installed, shows up as a little icon in the bottom right of my screen. Not only can I open it any time I like to make notes (it saves automatically), I can also add “clips” from any web page I visit.

There are lots of other facets to Google that I don’t use but which might be appropriate to your craft business. It’s well worth exploring.

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