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Business

5 Questions You Need To Answer Before Starting An Online Home Business

By Jon Allo

Pay no attention to the over-blown advertisements you see telling you that you can earn millions online by just pushing a few buttons on your computer. If it was that quick and simple, everyone one would be doing it. Let’s take a look at 5 important questions you need to answer before starting an online home business.

1. Are You Prepared To Devote Time To It?

When you start an online home business it will require time. You don’t have to cut yourself off from your family and friends, but you’ll need to manage your time. To put in the work on your business may mean watching less TV, getting up a little earlier and working a few hours at the weekend.

2. Are You Ready To Learn New Skills?

It’s surprising how so many people jump head first into starting an online home business without any real idea what they’re selling or who they’re trying to sell it to. You don’t have to be a business expert but you’ll have more success if you take the time to learn how to run your own internet business computer the most effective way.

3. Do You Have Some Financial Capital?

The set up costs for an online home business are a lot less than the set up costs for a traditional offline business, but you’ll need to pay for website domain name and hosting and some have funds for marketing. If you put nothing into your business, you can’t expect to get anything out.

4. Have You Got Somewhere To Work?

Set aside an area of your home where you can work and establish your working hours. Choose an area where you won’t be disturbed. If possible try to have a business computer and not use your family computer. This means you won’t have to worry about your children needing the computer while you are working. If you don’t have somewhere at home, is there a local internet cafe that you can use? All you need is a computer and access to the internet.

5. Are You In For The Long-Term?

Every entrepreneur encounters set backs at one time or another with their business. You have to be willing to accept unexpected set backs as part of your ongoing business journey. Not everything will go to plan with your online home business. But if you regard any mistakes you make as part of a learning process and you understand what went wrong, it will help you to progress forward.

If you’re new to the world of online business it can be bit overwhelming. You might feel that you’re too old, too young or too inexperienced for the business world and now you’re trying to start an online home business! If you’re not sure where to begin, here are the 5 steps every online entrepreneur takes when creating a home based business on the internet: http://jonallo.com/start-a-home-business-online/

Article Source: 5 Questions You Need To Answer Before Starting An Online Home Business

Categories
Computers

Protecting Your Business Website From Malwares

By Prince N

With ecommerce sites on the rise and over a million new stains of malware developed every day, protecting your business site from attacks from viruses and malware has become a priority now. Hackers are continually creating various new means to gather credit card details and other personal information from their online transactions. Adopting the best security practices has now become very crucial for merchants. It has become essential to install the proper website protection to stop various attacks and today, there are several programs that can be used to protect your computer from such malware attacks.

It is seen that attackers are not actually developing new means to penetrate sites, but they are taking the advantage of poor passwords, unpatched vulnerabilities, weak permission settings and ownership in the file system. Small to medium sized enterprises are the largest targets of cyber-attacks and about 30,000 SMEs are targeted every day. Don’t allow your business to be the victim of expensive cyber-attack damages, instead, be proactive and take essential steps to prevent security threats. So, to ensure the highest levels of security, here are some means to protect your site from malwares.

Patches and updates: If your website is running on a Content management system like WordPress, then make sure that your website security is tight. Though a CMS is an easy and cost effective means to update your website content, but they are also to a large extent large target of cyber-crimes. There are many CMS platforms and extensions or plugins that are easy targets for the hackers and often allow access to your server and personal or vital data. Ensure that your plugins, themes and systems are always up to date. There are CMS solutions that automatically update the files for your site.

Firewalls: Continuously removing the existing website threats is a good idea, but it is also important to stop them from coming back again and again. With over 1 million fresh malwares created, your business site has a chance to get infected by a new virus every day. Using a web application firewall can help to prevent cyber criminals from attacking your site. The firewall will act as a filter and will only allow legitimate traffic to access your site while blocking malicious traffic.

Comply with PCI standards: The PCI or the Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard is a security standard that online businesses should adhere to if they are involved in online payment transactions and accept major credit cards. This will help to ensure that your customers are protected from any cyber threats and frauds. Businesses that fail to comply with the standards can result in financial damages, government fines and also ruin brand reputation.

Create a strong password: Good and strong passwords always help to protect your files. Your password should always contain over 8 characters, a mixture of uppercase and lowercase letters, include digits and special characters and etc. Unfortunately, most people are not careful while choosing their passwords and this allows brute force hacking techniques to access website easily and gather private data. Since hackers use various decoding programs to attack your site, the more unique your password is, the more protected is your site from cyber criminals.

Cyber criminals always tend to target small or medium sized business as they don’t have very high security measures. To protect your site from malwares, proper and effective measures should be adopted so that the site is always free and secured from harmful damage.

Article Source: Protecting Your Business Website From Malwares

Categories
Computers

Using The Print Screen Function on a Mac

By Satvik Mittal

Are you a Mac OS X user? If so, you know that Mac OS doesn’t work the same way as the Windows operating systems. For instance, the method of taking screenshots is different on both the operating systems. If you have been struggling to find a way to use this feature on your Mac machine, read this guide till the end.

First off, you will be happy to know that taking a screenshot on a Mac is easier than taking one on Windows. A Mac doesn’t feature a Print Screen button. But there are many simple ways to perform this function on this machine. Let’s see how you can get this task done with a few clicks of the mouse or trackpad.

How To Take A Screenshot On a Mac: Shortcut Keys

  • Taking the “photo” or screenshot of your computer screen is easy with the following shortcuts:
  • Press and hold both Cmd and Shift keys and then hit 4
  • Now, drag the crosshairs across the desired area on your computer screen, and then release the mouse button.
  • That’s it. The screenshot will show up on the desktop of your machine. The file will be saved as PNG file with the time and date.

Another method:

Here is another method: All you have to do is press and hold both Shift and the ‘Apple key” and then hit 3. It will grab the screenshot right away saving the image on the desktop. Here it’s important to note that this method will take the screenshot of the whole area of the desktop.

Taking a screenshot with this method has a limitation. The resulting file will be in the PNG format, and you may not be comfortable working with this format. The most common file formats for pictures are JPG and JPEG. You can convert your PNG screenshots into JPG files to suit your needs. You can use any image editing app for this purpose.

Taking A Screenshot With Or Without The Shadow Effect

You may beautify a screenshot with the shadow effect. How can you do it? It’s quite simple. Follow the previous method, but when you see the crosshairs on the screen, hit Space. As soon as you hit the button, you will see a camera icon in place of the crosshairs, and the color of the window will change into blue. Now, you should click in order to take the screenshot of the blue window. You will see the image has a beautiful shadow effect.

But what if you want a screenshot without the shadow effect? You can get rid of this shadow without a problem. All you need to do is hit the Alt or Option key, and the shadow effect will go away. It sounds odd, but it does work.

As said earlier, working on a Mac is different from working on Windows, as both of the operating systems work slightly differently. However, with a little bit of practice and reading, you can easily perform all the function on your Mac as well. There are many helpful sites and blogs out there. And hopefully, this one also helped you with your problem.

For using Print Screen function on Mac or Shortcut keys, you can also check out this guide.

Article Source: Using The Print Screen Function on a Mac