Sometimes, your family will not understand or like what you are doing as an entrepreneur. You will talk to small business owners who know this from direct experience – it can be a real-life part of being in business for yourself. Your family will ask question and nag you for not having a “real” job or why do you have to work so many hours. They don’t understand this, or other similar issues. It may be difficult emotionally on you to get past their negativity, but once you do and you create some successes, it will all pay off.

Have you decided to become an entrepreneur and break away from having a boss? If you are, then you are not alone. A lot of people recently have decided to work for themselves and own a small business. Starting your own small business will not be as easy as you think!  In this series of blog posts, we will talk about what to expect when you start your small business.

We will start off with you being wrong, unfortunately. This topic is not what we want to hear. Though being in business for yourself has its many joys and perqs, you will be wrong from time to time. So do not beat yourself up for it!  Being wrong is how you learn, you will gain useful experience from your faults and will help you become a stronger and smarter business owner in the future.

Account settings are a tricky area to understand for most people. It can happen that accounts that are connected with each other may share too much personal data. Connections like these can occur without users really knowing exactly what sharing goes on.

Did your Twitter try to attach to your Facebook profile? Have some of your postings showed up in a random place? If either of your answers for these are “yes”, then dig in to your account settings for each of your social applications and make sure that things are getting posted when and were you want. If you don’t pay attention to this problem, privileged information on one account could spill over into another.

Most people do not take into account that a lot of information is shared between companies. These days, “Opt in” and privacy policies are such that you can get spammed with specific ads and information, so keep an eye out for the fine print. Smart surfers and safe surfers. It is not best to ignore policies.

If you are working in a office setting, and co-workers are asking to access accounts on a stable program, it is easy to simply share the password with them with a co-worker by writing it down on a sticky note. It is easy to leave it on a desk for them if they are not around. Don’t forget – it is also easy for prying eyes to glance at stickies that are left out. The most complex situation with passwords isn’t hacking – it is human error and forgetfulness.

Back in the day, hackers did not type long lines of code to get into a system – they simply made prank phone calls. They were able to pose as the IT department and ask for the users’ logins and passwords. In the past, staff who not know any better would hand them the information without hesitation. Today, we hope to be smarter than making these common mistakes.

That being said, hacks and attacks are not great complex programs anymore – they are basic viruses or people able to guess your simple passwords. So keep your passwords changing and don’t leave them on a sticky note on your desk.

Time for a close on our “Password and Security Tips” and hopefully you have learned a lot from what we have said. We will leave a small but very significant tip. When you use you bank app on your phone, other business apps such as Event Lightning, or login to Facebook, people often simply click home button to get out of the application. Well, when you do this click, you keep the program open and logged in, without shutting down the app. This can be a big problem!

Bank apps like Chase have already addressed this and will auto sign out when you hit the home button, but others have not. So next time, make sure you completely shut down the app and log off before you hit that home button.

Once again, thanks for reading our tips and we hope that you keep coming back to see some more tips from our experience.

Do you have a lock on your phone? Most smart phones have a lock mechanism included in the model. They can simple or complex, but the it does work, and is an easy step to safeguard your phone’s apps and your important content. It keeps people from getting into your contacts, and other personal data that you store on your smart phone.

My smart phone is loaded with apps for my bank, social media sites, and document management, and if someone got into my phone, I would be in serious trouble. Haven’t you left your phone somewhere and had to return to get it? It might not be there next time. Don’t let your phone information get in the wrong hands – keep it locked!

Jailbreaking and rooting your cell phone can seem easy and fun to do. However it will open the doors to thousands of other apps that couldn’t make it into the marketplace, and for good reason. A lot of these after-market apps that are available when you jailbreak are programs that steal information and give it to third party companies for money. Most people may not know this fact.

For those who are not familiar with the terms, jailbreaking and rooting are a way to adapt your mobile device so it does not follow the regular rules of operation of the phone. Anyone can change the inner settings of a phone, in order to load unsanctioned programs or do other unauthorized activities. If someone messes up a phone like that, companies like AT&T or Verizon won’t fix it or honor the contract.

If you work for any type of business or have your own company, keep your phone and data safe stay away from jailbreaking and rooting, it will save you from a world of problems.

Your email address is central to almost all of your accounts, including your bank accounts, your social media accounts, and more. Your email address is what allows you to reset your passwords if you forget what it was. With that in mind, do not get lazy when creating your email passwords or it will be your demise. One hack into your email can be very damaging if the intrusion gets access to all of your other accounts.

When you pick a email password, use complex passwords that are completely different from every other account you own, and also change these on a monthly basis. Get into the habit of changing passwords regularly, and this will help it be more secure. Most people aren’t taking advantage of this easy step of safeguarding email address passwords.

As stated in our first blog, most people use the same passwords for all their accounts online. This is one of the most horrible things you could do! Why, you may ask? Well, if a hacker or ex-girlfriend knows your Facebook password or Netflix password, this can mean trouble. If this person wants to back at you, she is now able to get into your bank account because your passwords are the same!

Given, most banks have other levels of security to login, but please heed this tip. I cannot stress the importance of not using the same passwords for everything. So go to your different sites and start changing passwords so they are not all the same. A good password manager or basic software app can help you track these passwords for you.