Category: Tools and Information

Demystifying the Bitcoin | The Startup Magazine

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Bitcoin is one the most fascinating innovation since Internet, capturing the imagination of developers, entrepreneurs, investors, governments and consumers. It is still made up of several complex pieces.

If you would like to be an active actor in the growth of Bitcoin future, you need to understand each piece of the puzzle as possible as you can to find the role you will be playing in this progress. Demystifying bitcoin is not an easy exercise due to the complexity behind it but providing some basic understandings can be useful for potential learners.

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Budgeting: Can You Afford (Or Afford Not To) Add Staff? | Forbes

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Budgeting for new staff is the ultimate game of chicken and egg. Can you take on the right amount of business to justify staffing? Can you take on the right new team members to support new business? And in both cases, will the returns justify the investment?

When it comes to staffing, there are many risks to weigh—and many costs to consider—as the face of your business changes. The pay-off for adding an employee when there are 3 of you, and the pay-off for adding an employee when there are 50 are tremendously different. Continuing to stay deliberate and analyze your health as a business is always important.

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5 Common Hiring Myths Debunked | Business News Daily

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Hiring a new employee is a big decision for businesses of any size. Whether it’s your first hire or your hundredth, there are numerous factors that need to be considered before sending a job offer to a candidate.

This monumental task is made even more difficult by the conflicting advice hiring managers receive. Are job hoppers bad hires because they’re disloyal, or should they be hired for their well-roundedness? Should you ignore résumés without any direct industry experience, or give those individuals the chance to start their careers? Do you set aside a decent candidate in the hope that your perfect employee will apply for the job?

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5 Things to Do to Fight Business Security Risks | Getentrepreneurial

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Business security has come into the spotlight in the past few years, mainly due to high profile security breaches like the ones at Sony, Ashley Madison and Kaspersky Lab. Small businesses are routinely targeted by cyber criminals, due to the unsophisticated security systems that they have in place, making it easy for the attackers to steal money, data, and other business information.

Security breach compromises sensitive business data and, in many instances, lead to complete destruction of data. When credit card or financial information is stolen, it makes millions of your users or customers highly vulnerable to fraud. Digital natives place a lot of importance on how companies deal with cyber security, and prefer to do business with brands that will value and protect their personal information.

C-suite executives need to be aware of the cyber security risks that businesses face, and should have a sound plan to tackle them.

Here are a few of the top business security risks, and the ways in which you can deal with them.

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The Importance of Manual Link Building: Why It Can’t Be Automated | HigherVisibility

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There are certain goals that always seem to stay on the priority lists of brands and businesses. Drive traffic? Definitely. Grow the brand? A must. Develop relationships with consumers and other businesses? Absolutely. All of these factors are crucial to any given brand’s success and long-term achievement, and finding ways to address all of these goals is a necessity.

One of the most fundamental and widely performed strategies used to work on such goals is link building. A practice known to fuel site traffic, link building tends to be used by brands and businesses to leave a trail of bread crumbs across the internet leading back to their own page. While that’s not necessarily a bad way of looking at the SEO practice, it does take away from the emphasis that should be placed on the importance of manual link building with quality in mind.

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The Importance of Logistic Efficiency for Startups | Cool Business Ideas

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Starting up a business is difficult, and there are enormous challenges that any new entrepreneur faces. There’s competition from other businesses, learning how to manage growth, finding and vetting the right talent, and keeping up with ever changing markets. To be successful, one must also avoid common traps like failing to define a focus, not having enough funding, getting outmaneuvered by rivals, falling victim to internal company politics, being overly dependent on one specialization, not managing expectations, and an inability to bounce back from setbacks. It’s important to capitalize on any and every available advantage you have for your company to stay ahead.

We’ve previously talked about how reinvesting profits can be a good idea. Did you know that improving logistical efficiency is another great practice that can put your start-up in a more advantageous position? If you didn’t already know, marketing logistics, which concerns the movements of vital information and products, is a key to customer satisfaction that has implications across all facets of a business. How can it improve yours?

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3 Ways Emerging Entrepreneurs Run Financially Sound Businesses | Entrepreneur

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Securing funding is a major feat for any brand and requires a great deal of planning and expertise. However, the real value comes from turning that initial support into long-term growth — transforming a spark into a sustainable fire. Without financial stability, eCommerce brands lack the foundation to tackle key business endeavors like evolving product lines, expanding geographic storefronts or making new investments into shipping and packaging that enhance the customer experience.

This is particularly true for emerging businesses transitioning from angel or first-round funding sources into companies with verified equity. These brands are no longer simply selling an idea but must be able to back their entire business model with a concrete financial plan.

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Do You Know the 3 Rs of Financial Reporting? | All Business

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I’m going to let you in on a secret: The best businesses—those that really boost the wealth and happiness of the business owner—are not built on intuition or luck.

As much as we would like to think that great entrepreneurs have some kind of special gift, the best among us simply know how to create and use meaningful financial reporting, and use it to make decisions that improve our businesses. With a good eye on the numbers and some careful analysis, any business owner can see what is going right and what is going wrong.

But running a business “by the numbers” means that your financial reports needs be built on the 3 R’s: Reliability, Readability, and Regularity:

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7 Reasons Smart, Hardworking People Struggle To Find Success | Lifehack

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Think back to when you were in high school, when things were simpler. Do you remember that person who stood out amongst the class? That person everyone thought would change the world one day? They got straight A’s on their report card and were praised all the time. People would talk about the things that person would go on to do one day.

Fast forward a decade or two to the present day. You haven’t seen anything spectacular the person has done. In fact, you haven’t heard anything at all.

What happened?

Maybe you know someone like this. Or…maybe you are that person.

I used to think that intelligence and a strong work ethic were all you needed to be successful. But it turns out that’s not always true. Both are important, but they aren’t a guarantee for success in life. A number of other factors come into play.

Here are seven reasons smart, hardworking people can’t find success:

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