It’s a collection of online google tools such as gmail, google docs, and google talk which you can setup for your small business own use by associating it with your registered domain, separate from the public google area.
The standard google apps is free and most of the time you don’t need the pay editions.

The easiest way to explain it is to look at gmail first. Say you own company XYZ, and you have already registered for the XYZ.com domain. Now you would normally get a hosting site for your website and then configure emails from the hosting site.  You can, however, choose to use gmail as your interface to your small business emails.

After doing some setups, you can then create @XYZ.com email accounts from gmail, and read and write emails to and from that @XYZ.com account from there. You would then create @XYZ email accounts for your whole team, as well as any special email accounts you need. Thus, what you get is your own email accounts (not gmail), but you are using gmail to manage emails.

Once  you have email accounts setup, you can start collaborating with your colleagues or employees using the google apps associated with your small business.

Information regarding google apps is quite scarce and kind of hard to find.  You can first visit the google apps for business site to get more information about this, and to sign up.

I found it a little hard to sign up for the standard edition.  It’s not quite apparent that it is available and it is buried under different sections.  Well, I’ve found it, so I’ll save you the hassle of looking for it: Click here to get to the sign up page for the standard edition.

Here is the page that explains how to setup gmail to manage your domain’s email account.  Please note that you will actually use gmail for all your emails after you set this up.  The email management at your hosting site will no longer be used (including the email account creation).

The other google apps are self explanatory and have nothing to do with your hosting site, unlike gmail, so it’s pretty straightforward.

I’ve used google apps for one domain and am pretty happy with it so far.  Hope you’ll like it too…

1. Download the google analytics plugins from http://www.semiologic.com/software/marketing/google-analytics/
2. Unzip the file and install the resulting folder into your wp-content/plugins folder where you installed wordpress
3. Go to your wordpress admin page and select plugins.
4. The google analytics plugin should now be available there.
5. Activate it.
6. Next, sign up for a google analytics account at http://www.google.com/analytics/
7. Copy the legacy script code that is given to you when you setup the account
8. Go back to your wordpress admin site and choose settings-google analytics.
9. Paste the copied script in the provided area.
10. Click Update Options.
11. Go back to you google analytics account and you should see your account updating to start retrieving data from your blog.

Happy Tracking….

If man were designed to think rationally, I wouldn’t have been as compelled to sign up. After all, virtually all hosting companies offered somewhere around 500GB of storage for the same price.  500GB… How on earth am I going to use up all this storage ?

But no….. “Unlimited Lifetime Free Storage” seemed much much better than 500GB. Thus I let my guard down and signed up.

A great book on exactly this type of behavior is “Predictably Irrational” by Dan Ariely.