Set Up Google Apps Email (Gmail) Address For Your Domain

I always encourage people to use custom email addresses for their blogs/brands, it is pretty important for Branding and Professionalism. You can use your regular Gmail address for your Social Media profiles, but when you are emailing someone, I would prefer a custom email address. It clearly says that you represent a particular brand. These email addresses are nothing but the ones integrated with your domain name, say hellboundbloggers.com. So the custom email address will be like pradeep@hellboundbloggers.com, which apparently means ‘Pradeep’ is someone from ‘HellBound Bloggers (HBB).’ I use this for speaking with clients and advertisers.

People often ask me why “Google Apps” and why not free services like Zoho or default cPanel mail server. I think the answer is, it’s from Google. Also, it’s Gmail we are talking about. I can use this email address for my Google Drive, Docs, Keep, Android, Photos and almost everything a normal Gmail address does. So this is my current preference and also, my permanent preference I hope.

Set Up Google Apps Email For Your Domain Name

Go to the Google Apps for Work link and click the “Start free trial” button. You can sign up for a free trial account and then complete your payment details if you want to use this regularly. At the end of this article, I’ll share some exclusive Google Apps coupon codes for you to use. You can save around INR 300 (per year) for a single user account. So let’s get started.

I decided to share my experience of setting up Google Apps Gmail address for my personal email address (me@pradeepkumars.com); I took all the necessary screenshots for this as well.

Now enter your First & Last name, current Email address, your Business name & no. of Employees. These are just formality questions, but make sure you enter your active Email address.

If you have already purchased a domain name then, you can mention that, or if you want to register a new domain name then you can directly buy from Google or use popular domain registrars like GoDaddy.

Here is another important part, you are going to set up Google Apps for your domain name, here I picked “me@pradeepkumars.com” for my personal email address, where ‘me’ is the username and ‘pradeepkumars.com’ is the domain name. So if you want to configure Gmail email address for your name, then pick something like name@example.com.

That’s it. Now you can check out the basic information provided by Google for your Google Apps account. After reading, go ahead and click “I accept. Continue to my account.” button.

Suppose if you are running a company and you need more users then you can use this section to create them. Say pradeep@example.com, kumar@example.com, etc. You can add more users here, probably employees working in your business organization or something like that.

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Google Apps – Domain Name Verification

Now it’s time to verify your domain name in this Google Apps setup. If you have purchased the domain name from Google itself, then this step won’t be available, but if you added any other external domain name, you’d get this. This is necessary to tell Google that you are the owner of this domain name.

There are three ways to verify the domain ownership:

1. HTML Verification File

2. <meta> Tag Verification

3. Domain Host Record (TXT or CNAME)

We picked the ‘HTML Verification File’ thing because we don’t have an active blog yet. We downloaded the file and uploaded it for verification. You can use an FTP client like FileZilla for this, or you can directly do this via cPanel.

We now need to configure some MX Records which is essential for sending and receiving emails on your Google Apps Gmail email account. Open your domain name registrar account or your web hosting account for the configuration.

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Google Apps – MX Records Configuration

These are the MX records we should be adding to our domain name. Make sure you add them in this particular order.

I logged into my web hosting account, went to the cPanel section, then MX Entry. Here you can add Google’s MX Records for setting up Google Apps.

Make sure you delete all the other old MX records as well. It shouldn’t collide with Google’s MX Records. Below you can see the list of things we did for our Google Apps integration. Now click the “Verify Domain and Set Up Email” button.

If you have configured everything correctly, then your domain name ownership will be verified correctly. If you are getting any ‘Failed’ errors, then do check whether you did the domain verification correctly. You might have made a small mistake with the HTML file, Meta tag or CNAME record. If you have changed the nameservers in between while configuring Google Apps then there might be a delay in this, so wait for some time and click the verify button later.

We did everything carefully from the beginning, so the domain name got verified for us easily, and we are successfully entering the Google Apps dashboard. But before that…

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Google Apps – Promotional Coupon Codes

You can make the payment or add your card if you want to use Google Apps full-fledged. We have nine exclusive coupon codes for Google Apps, you can use only one and save ₹300 RUP for your first year as a customer.

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A9HRXKUANVDNP7

They have two types of plans – Flexible and Annual – We picked the latter because we’ll be using it for minimum one year, and it’s also cheap that way.

You can enter the promo code and complete the whole process. Now, we have completely configured everything; it is now like a Gmail account for us with a custom domain name and some extra features.

We also sent and received few emails from different accounts to see whether everything is properly working or not. So far so good. The custom email address is now ready to use!

I guess it’s as simple as signing up for a Gmail account? Maybe a little bit? Don’t worry we are here to guide you to set up Google Apps email address. Do sign up for Google Apps and enjoy the Email experience.

If you need any coupon codes for Google Apps or if you have any issues with the configuration, do comment below and let us know your queries, we’ll surely help you to fix the problem.