Going Online:
Keeping Your Home Business Protected

We’ve said it before and we’re saying it again. Your business needs to get online. It doesn’t matter what you do. Even if you’re just running a small corner store, a strong online presence will help.

If you’re running a business from home, then that can trigger a few warning flags in your mind. When work and home come together in this fashion, you may worry about your privacy and online safety. You are absolutely right to be concerned. But you want your business to find more success, right? So the need to build a website and establish a presence on social media is unavoidable.

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When you’re setting up your business website you’ll probably want to include a business address. This is pretty standard for business ‘about us’ pages. But if your business address is your home address, we’d recommend you give it some thought. Would you put your address online if it wasn’t business related? You wouldn’t. And the reason you wouldn’t are for reasons of privacy and safety that aren’t negated by the fact you’re now running a business. If you want to provide website visitors with an address, use a virtual business address for your home business.

Consider limiting your use of your personal social media accounts. You need to keep a strong divide between your personal and your business accounts. Of course, if you’re the owner of a business, then your personal Twitter account sort of does become your business account. Everything you say on that Twitter page will now be seen in relation to your business. Be extremely careful what you say.

With this in mind, you also need to be careful of any images you upload onto sites like Twitter or Facebook. This goes for business owners of any size, really. But when your home life is also your work life, and the personal mingles with the work, it can be easy to forget. The image you project online will reflect directly on your business. So think twice before uploading those photos of your hedonistic, drunken night out. (Which we would probably recommend not uploading even if you weren’t a business owner. Seriously, does Facebook need any more of those kinds of photos?)

Something else that will help divide your personal life and your business is to get another mobile phone. Your personal smartphone is probably already hooked up to several social media accounts through apps. Trying to juggle both personal and business using these mobile apps is going to be tricky on the same phone. This comes with another benefit: additional privacy. As with the virtual address, a business phone will allow you to use a specific number for business purposes. You don’t want to be handing out your personal phone number to anyone except other employees and the most important of clients.

The key is to keep your business life and your home life as separate as possible. This is very tricky, yet still it’s important. Otherwise, your personal life gets swallowed by your work, or your personal life will do damage to your business image.