Category: Financial

As a small business owner or manager, you are responsible for your customers’ email addresses, phone numbers and billing addresses the second they type the information into a form on your website. This type of data — known as personally identifiable information (PII) — is in high demand among hackers, which is why it’s important to implement webform security best practices on your small business website.

What do hackers do with PII?

Hackers don’t usually have a direct interest in your customers’ PII. Instead, they profit when they sell the data on the dark web (also known as the online black market) for a median price of $21.35 per record.

For example, a hacker can tap into a rental property manager’s database to extract credit card information. The going rate to destroy someone’s credit or steal their identity is less than $25.

Cyber thieves then mine the information … Read more

Business owners are accustomed to wearing several hats and having control over every aspect of their company, dispensing with any delegation tactics. Recent research from Salesforce found that small business owners are personally responsible for an average of 4.2 roles in their business. While that much work can be exhausting, for those who enjoy entrepreneurship, it’s also gratifying. There aren’t any outside factors, you’re in the driver seat, and success or failure solely depends on your efforts. However, if you’d like to scale your business (or finally take some time off), you need to learn delegation tactics and use them.

Why do you need delegation tactics?

Many leaders struggle with delegation. A psychological study offered two reasons why business owners are reluctant to delegate:

1. A faith in supervision effect, which reflects the tendency of observers to see work performed under the control of a supervisor as better than identical work

When the COVID-19 crisis hit, Jim Masterson had to figure out how to massage a horse online.

For more than a decade, Masterson and his wife, Conley, have been the go-to experts for equine performance bodywork.

If your show horse got sore after a jumping competition, you could attend a workshop with a Masterson instructor to learn how to release the horse’s muscle tension through the unique Masterson Method.

The pandemic put a stop to the instructor visits and forced the Mastersons to think creatively about their business model and the horses they’ve dedicated their lives to helping.

Fortunately, they had access to an entire community of creative and like-minded entrepreneurs.

Based in the Corn Belt city of Fairfield, Iowa, the Mastersons are part of an entrepreneurial Shangri-La. The 10,425-person city, about 115 miles southeast of Des Moines, is home to a large number of small, internet-based micro-businesses that are … Read more

As the U.S. rides out the COVID-19 pandemic’s economic storm, one often overlooked group has emerged as critical ballast for local communities: online micro-businesses.

As stay-at-home orders crippled economies, 44{2a3e680f1439d15db2efa1f6e7ed882a5847e72ec9baddde754e69dd847cc2fd} of these micro-businesses moved more of their business to the internet, ramping up their e-commerce efforts and other digital offerings. By the end of July, less than 2{2a3e680f1439d15db2efa1f6e7ed882a5847e72ec9baddde754e69dd847cc2fd} of them had closed permanently. It’s little surprise then that communities with more micro-businesses lost fewer low-income jobs at the peak of the crisis

These results come from the Venture Forward initiative, a multiyear research project that looks at the economic impact of the 20 million websites with domain names registered with GoDaddy. Three-quarters of these ventures are commerce-driven micro-businesses. The rest are community, civic or hobby-based sites.

Working with academic partners, Venture Forward has found:

• Micro-businesses create jobs. Economists at UCLA Anderson Forecast determined that there’s a causal impact between

Like any business, the key to success in selling your products in an ecommerce business is building relationships. If you have been looking for a way to connect with more customers, it might be a good idea to host virtual parties to generate interest and excitement in your business.

In this post, we’ll explore how and why you should implement virtual parties for ecommerce businesses into your strategy so you can make more money and build your fanbase.

Getting started with a successful virtual party

Virtual parties have become a popular sales method thanks to social media platforms, like Facebook and Instagram. Anyone can do a Facebook Live and invite people from around the world to get together and sell products. It’s the modern version of the classic Tupperware party.

But hosting a virtual party for your ecommerce business requires more than a sales pitch. Including games and prizes, … Read more