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New Year, New Beginnings and New Businesses

January 11, 2016
By Nancy Jeng

Google-New-Years-2016-blogEach new year brings the dream of new beginnings and, for many, that includes the dream of starting a new business. In fact, Google Trends data shows us that interest in “starting a business” peaks every January. To support the millions of businesses that are created each year, we’re sharing some of the ways you can use the web (and Google) to launch your new business:

Use Google Trends to size up your market opportunity. Before you launch a business, you want to make sure there is a viable market for your product or service. You can use Google Trends to help gauge your market potential. For example, if you’re looking to open a pet store, see when searches for ‘pet supplies’ peak or which geographic regions clocks in the most searches for pet supplies.

Find a domain, create a site and get custom email. Picking out the right domain name is often the starting point to building a successful online presence. With new domain endings like .pizza and .photography, there are now more options to choose that fit your new business. Google Domains helps you get started with registering a domain, building a site with trusted partners and setting up custom email.  (more…)

Dashboards to Stay on Top of Your Business

January 4, 2016

If you’re running a business online, chances are you’re using a lot of different vendors to handle your email marketing, payments, web hosting, etc. When you’re using so many vendors, checking up on the health of your business can become a huge burden on your time because you have to log in to a lot of different sites to get the reports you need.

Luckily, there are companies that provide great online dashboards that bring together the data from many of the most commonly used vendors. Here is my review of two of these services: Cyfe and Leftronic.

Probably the biggest deciding factor when choosing a dashboard is whether it offers an integration with the services you need to monitor. The number of integrations are increasing all the time, but to give you an example of what’s possible, here are some of the things I monitor using Cyfe’s dashboards:

• Google Analytics to see how many visitors my site has and how many conversions I got
• SEOMoz to see how my site’s SEO is doing
• Twitter to see how many followers I have and who’s engaging with my tweets
• YouTube to see how many people are watching the videos I’ve posted
• Bit.ly to see how actively people are sharing links I’ve posted on social media
• AdWords to see how much I’m spending on search ads
• Google Webmaster Tools to get notifications about issues with my site

Here are some highlights of these services.  (more…)

5 Common Small Business Cyber Security Myths

December 21, 2015
computerBy Hanna Burmeister, Michigan SBDC 

It’d be difficult to find a business today that doesn’t use at least one computer-based or online system.  With online cloud-based services available for anything from accounting to file sharing, it’s no wonder that small businesses are adopting (and inventing) these new technologies.  However, as technology gets smarter, so do hackers.

Though cyber attacks on large companies like Target or Home Depot may make headlines, hackers are increasingly targeting small businesses.  Unfortunately, most small businesses are unaware of cyber security threats, leaving them especially vulnerable.

In order to better understand small business cyber security, let’s start by investigating five common cyber security myths:

1. Hackers only target large companies.
Unfortunately, small businesses make excellent targets for hackers. Most small businesses don’t have the resources to invest in heavy-duty security measures, but still possess valuable information.  Additionally, many small businesses are simply unaware of cyber security risks and how to mitigate them. Hackers are a real threat to small businesses, and developing a cyber security strategy is incredibly important no matter a business’ size.  (more…)

Password Managers: Protect Your Business Online

November 23, 2015
By Scott Gerlach

padlockPasswords are broken.

OK, now that we’ve cleared that up, let’s talk about why, and some ways to help protect your business online.

To make passwords hard for computers to guess, you have to make passwords hard to remember. To prevent one compromised account from destroying the security of all of your online services, you should use different, hard-to-remember passwords. This predicament leads people to use one easy-to-remember password for everything. Which wouldn’t be bad except you don’t want your Facebook password to cough up your online banking credentials. Nor would you want to lose your domain names and hosting sites to a slip of a Twitter credential. (more…)

What Small Businesses Should Know about the EMV Fraud Liability Shift on Oct. 1, 2015

October 5, 2015
By Mary Hughes

credit-card-with-chipThe U.S. is the last developed country to migrate from magnetic-stripe (“mag-stripe”) cards to EMV¹ or chip cards.  This migration will affect credit, debit and prepaid cards issued by U.S. financial institutions.

The biggest benefit of chip card technology is the potential reduction in card fraud due to counterfeit and lost and stolen cards for card-present transactions (where the card is physically present at the point-of-sale).  Chip card transactions offer enhanced functionality in card authentication, cardholder verification, and transaction authorization, thus providing better security than magnetic-stripe cards.  A chip card has an embedded microprocessor chip (it looks like a small, metallic square on the front of the card) that stores information securely and performs cryptographic processing during the payment transaction.

When a financial institution issues a chip card, the chip is encoded with security credentials that are extremely difficult to counterfeit.  Plus, chip cards create dynamic data that are unique for each transaction and cannot be used again.  Because of these security features, countries that have implemented chip cards have seen a reduction in card-present fraud rates.  (more…)