One of every entrepreneur’s earliest lessons is that a good idea is hardly enough to start and run a business. To run a successful business, many factors must come into play.
With everything working over the internet today, almost all businesses have adopted the use of the internet to scale up and be at the forefront of the competition. Cloud storage gives you an efficient way of storing your business data and customer information.
As important as these innovations are, it will be foolhardy to ignore the inherent risk of using the internet today. Estimates have shown that cyberattacks would cost businesses about 10.5 trillion dollars by 2025. If you don’t take adequate measures, your business will not be spared.
Hence, using proxies such as residential IP proxies for your small business is a smart way to shield yourself from the potential risks and attacks associated with running your small business. In this article, we will consider the most effective ways you can maximize proxies for small businesses. But first, let us examine proxies and what they do.
Proxies for Small Business, How Do They Work?
When you interact with the web, it follows a client-server connection model. In this case, your computer is the client, and the website you access is the server.
The client-server relationship is such that the client (you) makes a request to the server (the website), the website receives and processes the request, and sends a response back to the client.
For you (the client) to establish a connection with the server, all you need Is a web address. But the server needs your device’s IP address to send a response back to you. Your IP address uniquely identifies your device. Therefore, the server needs to know which client to address its response.
Exposing your IP address to different servers like this can adversely affect you and your business. This is where you need proxies. Proxies act as an intermediary between the clients and the server. In simpler terms, a proxy is a middleman between your device and the websites you access.
A proxy IP address masks your IP address such that when you access a website, the website sends its response to the proxy as though it was communicating with your device’s IP address.
How You Can Effectively Use Proxies For Your Small Business
Many businesses are going online today. The competition is fast becoming stiffer. There are many ways you can maximize the immense benefit proxies offer for your SME. As you read, you will see how you can use proxies as a competitive edge in your small business.
But first, you shouldn’t use just any proxy for your business. You need proxies that will allow you to select a specific location and access the internet as a real user in that location. Residential IPs are more trustworthy as compared with other types of proxies.
Find out how you can effectively use proxies for your small business below.
- Performing Sensitive Task with Anonymity
Anonymity is one of the most popular uses of proxies. But many don’t understand the significance of such anonymity for businesses.
Proxies can help you secure your clients, partners, and sources from malicious software and hackers.
Proxies can help keep your current research and online tasks anonymous. With proxies, your employees’ online activity will be kept private. This means competitors will find tracking your activities and predicting your next moves challenging.
By ensuring that every sensitive online task is carried out on a proxy, you can be sure of security and anonymity.
Secondly, proxies are essential for your business when you need to make sure of online purchases. For instance, some online stores try to limit purchases per customer. They do these by giving each customer’s IP address a cap.
If you use a proxy to mask your IP, you can make as many purchases as your business needs without being restricted by the vendors.
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- Access GEO Blocked Content
Sometimes, your business might need online services or resources unavailable to your location. You can quickly mitigate this problem using a proxy server located in a country where such a website is accessible.
Suppose you are in Europe and need only an online service or resource made available to America. You do not need to travel to America. From Europe, you can easily connect to an American proxy server and obtain an American IP address to access the resources you need for your business.
- Achieve Faster Internet Connection and Save Bandwidth
Faster connections while saving on bandwidth costs are the aim of every small business that uses the internet today. Proxies can help you achieve this. Proxies improve your internet speeds by compressing web traffic while saving bandwidth consumption costs.
Also, proxies enable data caching. As you use proxies to access web pages, your proxy server caches the web pages. The next time you click the web page, your proxy server will first look into its cached data files. When the server sees that the site has been loaded, it sends the exact file to the user.
Therefore, proxies eliminate the need for the proxy to request the same file repeatedly. This feature is responsible for its faster speeds and reduced bandwidth. Also, this file caching feature of proxies eliminates irritating ads while loading your web page.
- Secure Your Sensitive Business Information
Security is a priority for every business. If your business needs the internet, you are operating in a risky environment, and securing your business data is not an option.
Data breaches and hacking is a big concern in the internet space today. Accessing the internet with an exposed business IP address can make you an easy target for hacking and data breaches.
Using a proxy for your business can help you protect your company, personal, and customer data. The integrity and reputation of your business are at stake if you fall victim to hackers.
However, a proxy acts as a defensive layer that protects your web traffic and business data from unauthorized users.
Proxies help encrypt your business data. It achieves this by creating a secure communication channel between your customers and your business. It also generates another communication channel to facilitate easy data access within your company.
- Manage Multiple Social Media Accounts
Today, it’s common to utilize social media to thrive as a business. So, how can you use proxies to optimize this process? You might need to manage multiple social media accounts like a small business. But this also has its challenges.
Creating and managing many social media accounts without proxies might get you blocked or restricted. When social media companies discover multiple accounts are associated with one IP address, it might trigger a ban on such accounts.
Using a proxy can help you route your multiple accounts via different IPs.
- Competitor Research
Competitor research is essential to business growth and development. Doing competitor research might require you to visit their website regularly to check their latest product offerings, promotions, press releases, and pricing. While doing all this, you need to make yourself anonymous.
Using a proxy can help you achieve the anonymity needed for competitor research. In addition, some automation tools you will need to perform this task require using proxies to restrict from accessing competitors’ websites.
- Conduct SEO Activities
You need a sound SEO strategy to make your business visible on the internet and search engines. Unfortunately, building and implementing an effective SEO strategy is not an easy process. It involves keyword research and web-scraping.
Web-scraping helps you understand what your competitors are doing and helps you become better at your business. But it is impossible to do web scraping without using bots.
Using bots without private proxies is a useless process. The search engines are programmed to block the use of bots rapidly. But proxies can make the bots seem human and won’t be banned.
- Control Employee Access to the Internet and Business
If your business has most of your employees using the internet, you may need to control how they use the internet over your company network.
Proxies allow you to control what sites your employees can access over the network. As a business owner, your most significant resource is your human resource. Therefore, you need to eliminate every form of distraction they may be tempted to entertain during work hours.
Proxies can also help define what aspect of the business your employees can access. This way, using proxies gives you more control over the internal security of your brand.
- Email Protection
Some of the emails you will receive daily will contain malicious links. This URL can bait you or your employees and compromise your business security. A reliable proxy can help you screen all your emails for malicious links or attachments.
- Campaigning and Raising Awareness
Using proxies, you can efficiently run social media campaigns without restrictions. When you need to spread brand awareness through social media, bots can help you streamline this process. Bots can help you send promotions in large numbers.
When social media platforms detect the use of bots from your account, they can relate it to spam and restrict the account. To evade this potential ban, you need a bundle of social media accounts, where proxies come in.
Conclusion
At this point, we have established how using proxies for your business can cause a great forward leap for your business. From data security to raising brand awareness, residential proxies have been proven over time to be a worthy investment you should make for your business.
