The Pirates have reportedly fired GM Neal Huntington, who had been in the role since September 2007. President Frank Coonelly and manager Clint Hurdle have also been fired this offseason.
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Most people know they have a personal credit score. Many business owners do not know, however, that they may have a business credit score. This is a score very similar to your personal FICO, but it is related to your business financial transactions only. It is not connected to your personal finances at all. In fact, free business credit reports are not even connected to your social security number.
The problem is, unlike your personal credit reports, it can be difficult to determine what business credit reports have one them. It is easy to get a copy of your FICO report for free. It is not so easy to do the same with business credit reports.
Just as there are credit reporting agencies for your personal credit score, there are also business credit reporting agencies. The largest one, and the one lenders use most often, is Dun & Bradstreet. However, there are actually several others. The other two most common are Experian and Equifax.
They do not just give out credit reports for free however. In fact, the prices for reports directly from the top 3 most commonly used credit reporting agencies are pretty steep. For example:
Hit the jackpot with our best webinar and its trustworthy list of seven vendors who can help you build business credit.
The prices range so broadly due to the varying complexity and detail of the information provided in each report. For example, Dun & Bradstreet has multiple types of scores and a report for each one.
The only real way to get a free copy of your credit report is if you are denied a loan based on your business credit. There are ways to see what is on it, one time, for free however.
Nav is a service that will let you see a summary of your credit reports from all three of the major credit reporting agencies. However, these are only summaries, not full reports. Generally, that means you can see your score, and maybe the accounts you have listed. While this will help you see where you stand, it will not suffice for the purpose of correcting mistakes or even to show you what you need to do to improve your score. You do have the option to pay for more information though.
Credit.net does not offer ongoing free business credit reports, you can access a free trial. There is no credit card required, and after you pull the report, you have 30 days to check it out. This means at least once you can get a totally free look at your report, because there is no fear of missing a cancelation deadline and having to pay anyway.
This is a lesser known credit reporting agency that will let you see your credit report for free before you pay for an ongoing subscription. Unlike Nav or Credit.net, they are actually calculate their own score similar to the big 3 (Experian, Equifax, and Dun & Bradstreet.) They strive to be totally transparent and to make their reports easy to understand.
You do have to pay for an ongoing subscription to CreditSafe, but they will give you a free credit report to get you started. It will only include Dun & Bradstreet, but it is a good taste of what you can see with a full subscription. It is also another option for a free copy of your business credit report. If you do subscribe, they have a number of reports that are unique to them. This means you are getting something that you may not get with the other monitoring services or even the standard reports from the Dun & Bradstreet, Experian, or Equifax.
As mentioned before, you can get a free copy of your business credit reports if a lender denies you for a business loan. This is the less fun way to see your business credit reports for free. After denial, you will receive a letter in the mail from the agency that provided the lender with your report. You will have the opportunity to request a free copy of the report that the lender saw, so that you can see why the result was denial. You have 90 days to submit your request.
Each reporting agency offers different types of reports and information, but they all contain the same general data.
Dun & Bradstreet offers several different types of business credit reports. In fact, there are six different reporting options in all. They all offer different information related to credit worthiness, and it takes all of them to get the whole picture. The price range listed above is dependent on which reports you want to order.
The report most use is the PAYDEX. This is likely because it is the easiest to understand, due to it being the most like the consumer FICO score. It measures how quickly a customer makes payments and ranges from 1 to 100. Scores of 70 or higher is acceptable. For example, a score of 100 shows payments are made in advance, and a score of 1 indicates that they are 120 days late, or more.
Hit the jackpot with our best webinar and its trustworthy list of seven vendors who can help you build business credit.
The delinquency predictor score measures how likely it is that the company will not pay, will be late paying, or will fall into bankruptcy. The scale is 1 to 5, and a 2 is good.
The financial stress score is measures pressure on the balance sheet. It shows how likely the company is to shut down within a year. These scores range from 5 to 1, with a score of 2 being “good.”
This rating ranks the odds of a company surviving 12 months. The minimum score is a 9 and the maximum is 1. A “good” score is 5.
The credit limit recommendation reflects a business’s borrowing capacity. It is a recommendation for how much debt a company can handle. Typically, creditors use this to determine how much credit to extend.
This one ranks overall business risk on a scale of one to four. A score of 2 is good. The rating is given in conjunction with letters, the combination of which indicate a company’s net worth.
Even if there isn’t enough information on a business to assign a regular rating, Dun and Bradstreet will assign what they call a Credit Appraisal Score. This is based on number of employees. Another option is an alternative rating based on what data is actually available.
Experian’s uses what it calls Intelliscore as its credit ranking. There are more than 800 different factors that they use to predict a company’s credit risk. With Intelliscore, a score of 76 or higher indicates a low risk of default or late payment. If a score falls between 51 to 75, it indicates a low to medium risk. Scores from 26 to 50 are medium risk, and from 25 down to 1 is medium high to high risk.
Here is where Experian gets tricky. Intelliscore is a blended score of both the business and business owner’s personal information. That means it offers insights into a business’s public record findings, collections, and payment trends, as well as overall business background. Experian is also unique in that it does not ask businesses to self-report. Instead, they collect all the information themselves. You will have to give permission for a lender to view this report, due to it containing personal information.
Equifax collects information similar to Dun and Bradstreet, including: information from public records, financial data from the business, and payment history from creditors. Credit utilization is also a factor, which accounts for how much credit you are using versus the amount of credit you have available to use.
The information is used to calculate various scores, including the business credit risk score and the business failure score. The first measures how likely it is that a business will become 90 days or more delinquent on bills over the next year. The score ranges from 101 to 992. The second ranges from 1,000 to 1610 and predicts how likely it is that the business will file for bankruptcy over the next 12-month period. A lower score indicates higher risk.
They also calculate what they call the business payment index. This is the Equifax version of Dun & Bradstreet’s PAYDEX. It even runs on the same scale of 0 to 100. This is an indicator payment history over the past year. It is different from the PAYDEX, however, in that you must to reach a score of 90 or higher for it to be a “good” score.
In addition, Equifax offers business identity reports to confirm a company actually exists. It verifies details such as the company’s tax ID, number of employees, and yearly sales.
Equifax does not allow business owners to request reports on their own company. They decide themselves when to start a credit file on a specific company.
CreditSafe offers reporting options based on your Dun & Bradstreet score. They offer 3 packages, Standard, Plus, and Premier. The problem is, they do not list their prices on their website. You have to request a quote to determine what your pricing would be, as they also allow you to purchase individual products as well.
Since their reporting is based on information from Dun & Bradstreet, they are not technically a credit reporting agency themselves. However, since they do have their own reports, they are a little different from a straightforward credit monitoring company as well. They are quickly growing in popularity. No doubt that is partly due to the subscription service it offers, which allows easy insight into your own company’s credit report. The free trial allows for test driving, which sweetens the deal even more.
Their main score, the CreditSafe rating, works on a scale of 1-100. It predicts the likelihood that payment performance will become 90 plus days beyond terms within the next 12 months or that the business will go bankrupt. They offer a variety of other scores and reports that provide a ton of information however.
This score is derived from the Creditsafe rating. It allows for a comparison of credit risk between companies that are registered in different countries.
The Creditsafe recommended credit limit uses information from the business payment records and those of similar companies to calculate a dollar amount recommendation of the maximum amount of credit a company should receive at any one time.
Compares how many days late a business pays its bills in comparison to other companies in the industry.
This is a report on the number and value of tax liens and judgements that have been filed in the past 6 years and 9 months. It also includes bankruptcies filed in the last 9 years and 9 months
A report designed to highlight at a glance substantial changes in how a company is paying its bills.
Let’s you know whether the total annual business spending is going up or down when compared to the previous year.
Subscription packages come in levels, and the prices are dependent completely on your business’s individual needs. You will have to speak to a consultant to get a quote.
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It’s true, a solid business credit score does not always indicate a healthy bottom line. What it does indicate, however, is the propensity for growth. If your business credit reports don’t look so hot, you are going to have a hard time getting funding to expand and grow. Stagnant businesses are doomed to die, meaning your business credit reports could very likely be your lifeline. Knowing how to access them for free is important. However, it is important enough to know what is on your business credit reports that for most, they are actually worth paying for.
The post How to Get and Read Your FREE Business Credit Reports and Understand Your Score appeared first on Credit Suite.
And How to Understand Your Score Most people know they have a personal credit score. Many business owners do not know, however, that they may have a business credit score. This is a score very similar to your personal FICO, but it is related to your business financial transactions only. It is not connected to … Continue reading How to Get and Read Your FREE Business Credit Reports and Understand Your Score
What You Should Know About Consumer Credit Reports
Customer credit scores records are commonly made use of by organisations to aid them determine whether to provide cash or offer various other kinds of advantages to a specific customer. Credit scores bureaus give credit score record details on customers to interested events, to allow them to evaluate an individual’s danger degrees or viability for a finance or various other objective. These customer credit history records reveal the standing of your credit report rating consisting of judgments, tax obligation liens, and also various other credit scores relevant info.
To buy a duplicate of your non-mortgage consumer debt record there are a variety of get in touch with information that you can make use of:
Equifax phone call: (800) 997-2493
Create: Equifax Information Service
P.O. Box 740241
Atlanta, GA 30374-0241
Experian (Formerly TRW) phone call: (888) 397-3742
Compose: Experian National Consumer Assistance
P.O. Box 2104
Allen, TX 75013-2104.
Trans Union phone call: (800) 888-4213
compose: Trans Union Corp. Customer Disclosure
P.O. Box 390
Springfield, 19064-0390.
You can likewise obtain a cost-free duplicate of your customer credit scores record if you have actually been transformed down for credit scores in the last 2 months. If you do have an issue with your customer credit score record you can fix it. If there is inaccurate info on your customer credit score record you must recognize the following:
1. You can typically have actually unreliable details gotten rid of from your credit score record at little or no charge by calling the relevent credit rating bureau.
2. Credit history repair service frauds that entail “data partition” or concealing negative credit rating are usually prohibited.
3. Credit history repair service business are called for to supply customers with total info concerning the solutions they will certainly supply. They need to not bill a cost till after solutions have actually been supplied.
If you are ever before asked to make up a credit score repair work solution prior to they have actually efficiently fixed your customer credit rating record, it is prohibited and also you ought to not pay them. Make sure to obtain a breakdown of what they will certainly do to assist you and also understand your legal rights.
Customer debt records are typically utilized by services to aid them choose whether to provide cash or supply various other kinds of advantages to a specific customer. Credit report bureaus give credit rating record info on customers to interested celebrations, to allow them to analyze an individual’s threat degrees or viability for a financing or various other objective. These customer credit score records reveal the standing of your credit scores rating consisting of judgments, tax obligation liens, as well as various other credit rating relevant info. You can likewise obtain a totally free duplicate of your customer credit rating record if you have actually been transformed down for credit history in the last 2 months. If there is inaccurate details on your customer debt record you need to understand the following:
The post What You Should Know About Consumer Credit Reports appeared first on ROI Credit Builders.
What You Should Know About Consumer Credit Reports
Customer credit scores records are commonly made use of by organisations to aid them determine whether to provide cash or offer various other kinds of advantages to a specific customer. Credit scores bureaus give credit score record details on customers to interested events, to allow them to evaluate an individual’s danger degrees or viability for a finance or various other objective. These customer credit history records reveal the standing of your credit report rating consisting of judgments, tax obligation liens, and also various other credit scores relevant info.
To buy a duplicate of your non-mortgage consumer debt record there are a variety of get in touch with information that you can make use of:
Equifax phone call: (800) 997-2493
Create: Equifax Information Service
P.O. Box 740241
Atlanta, GA 30374-0241
Experian (Formerly TRW) phone call: (888) 397-3742
Compose: Experian National Consumer Assistance
P.O. Box 2104
Allen, TX 75013-2104.
Trans Union phone call: (800) 888-4213
compose: Trans Union Corp. Customer Disclosure
P.O. Box 390
Springfield, 19064-0390.
You can likewise obtain a cost-free duplicate of your customer credit scores record if you have actually been transformed down for credit scores in the last 2 months. If you do have an issue with your customer credit score record you can fix it. If there is inaccurate info on your customer credit score record you must recognize the following:
1. You can typically have actually unreliable details gotten rid of from your credit score record at little or no charge by calling the relevent credit rating bureau.
2. Credit history repair service frauds that entail “data partition” or concealing negative credit rating are usually prohibited.
3. Credit history repair service business are called for to supply customers with total info concerning the solutions they will certainly supply. They need to not bill a cost till after solutions have actually been supplied.
If you are ever before asked to make up a credit score repair work solution prior to they have actually efficiently fixed your customer credit rating record, it is prohibited and also you ought to not pay them. Make sure to obtain a breakdown of what they will certainly do to assist you and also understand your legal rights.
Customer debt records are typically utilized by services to aid them choose whether to provide cash or supply various other kinds of advantages to a specific customer. Credit report bureaus give credit rating record info on customers to interested celebrations, to allow them to analyze an individual’s threat degrees or viability for a financing or various other objective. These customer credit score records reveal the standing of your credit scores rating consisting of judgments, tax obligation liens, as well as various other credit rating relevant info. You can likewise obtain a totally free duplicate of your customer credit rating record if you have actually been transformed down for credit history in the last 2 months. If there is inaccurate details on your customer debt record you need to understand the following:
The post What You Should Know About Consumer Credit Reports appeared first on ROI Credit Builders.
When you log into Google Analytics, what do you look at?
Chances are you see something like the image above that shows you how many people are currently on your blog.
Well, that was easy to guess because that’s the report Google Analytics gives you once you log in. 😉
But which reports do you look at on a regular basis?
I bet you look at two main reports…
The “Audience Overview” report and the “Acquisition Overview” report.
Sure, every once in a while, you may dive into your top pages or the specific organic keywords that drive your traffic. But even if you do that, what are you actually doing with the data?
Nothing, right?
Don’t beat yourself up over it because most content marketers just look at reports and numbers and do little to nothing with the data.
If you want to figure out how to grow your blog and, more importantly, your revenue from your blog, there are 7 reports that you need to start looking at on a regular basis.
Here they are and here is how you use them…
What do you think is easier to accomplish… get new visitors to your blog or getting your visitors to come back?
It’s easier to get people to come back to your blog, yet everyone focuses on new visitors.
I bet less than 99% of your blog readers turn into customers or revenue, so why not focus on getting those people back and eventually converting them?
Before we get into how to get people back to your blog, let’s look at how many people are returning to your blog.
Within the Google Analytics navigation, click on “Audience” and then “Cohort Analysis”.
Once you land on that report, you’ll see a graph that looks similar to this:
Under the “Cohort Size” drop-down menu, select “by week”. Under “Date Range”, select “Last 12 weeks”.
Once the data loads, you’ll see a table that looks something like this:
What this table shows is the percentage of your visitors that come back each week.
On the very left it will always show 100%. Then in the columns to the right, you’ll see week 1, week 2, week 3, etc.
This shows the percentage of people who come back to your blog each and every week after their first visit.
For example, if this week you had 100 people visit your blog and in the week 1 column, it shows 17%. That means of the initial 100 people, 17 came back. Under week 2 if you see 8%, that means of the initial 100 people, 8 people came back in week 2.
Naturally, this number will keep getting smaller, but the goal is to get people back as often as possible. That increases trust, social shares, potential people linking to you, and it even increases the odds that the visitor will convert into a customer.
The average blog reader needs to come back 3.15 times before they turn into a customer. That means that you need to retain readers.
Just think of it this way: If you get thousands of new people to your blog each and every single day but none of them ever come back, what do you think is going to happen to your sales?
Chances are, not much.
You need to look at your Cohort Report and continually try to improve the numbers and get people coming back.
So the real question is, how do you get people to come back?
There are 2 simple ways you can do this:
These 2 strategies are simple and they work. Just look at how many people I continually get back to my blog through emails and push notifications.
Ever wonder how you are doing compared to your competition?
Sure, you can use tools like Ubersuggest, type in your competitors URL, and see all of the search terms they are generating traffic from.
But what if you want more? Such as knowing what percentage of traffic your competitors are getting from each channel. What’s your bounce rate, average session duration, or even pageviews per channel?
Within Google Analytics navigation, click on “Audiences” then “Benchmarking” then “Channels”.
Once you do that, you’ll see a report that looks like the one above.
Although you won’t have specific data on a competing URL, Google Analytics will show you how you stack up to everyone else within your industry.
I love this report because it shows you where to focus your time.
If all of your competitors get way more social traffic or email traffic, it means that’s probably the lowest hanging fruit for you to go after.
On the flipside, if you have 10 times more search traffic than your competition, you’ll want to focus your efforts on where you are losing as that is what’ll probably drive your biggest gains.
The other reason you’ll want to look at the Benchmarking Report is that marketers tend to focus their efforts on channels that drive the most financial gain.
So, if all of your competition is generating the majority of their traffic from a specific channel, you can bet that channel is probably responsible for a good portion of their revenue, which means you should focus on it too.
Have you noticed that my blog is available in a handful of languages?
Well, there is a reason for that.
I continually look at the location report. To get to it, click on “Audience” then “Geo” and then “Location”.
This report will tell you where the biggest growth opportunities are for your blog.
Now with your blog, you’ll naturally see the most popular countries being the ones where their primary language is the one you use on your blog.
For example, if you write in English, then countries like the United Kingdom and the United States will be some of your top countries.
What I want you to do with this report is look at the countries that are growing in popularity but the majority of their population speak a different language than what you are blogging on.
For me, Brazil was one of those countries. Eventually, I translated my content into Portuguese and now Brazil is the second most popular region where I get traffic from.
This strategy has helped me get from 1 million visitors a month to over 4 million. If you want step-by-step instructions on how to expand your blog content internationally, follow this guide.
Have you heard marketers talk about how blog readers don’t convert into customers?
It’s actually the opposite.
Those visitors may not directly convert into a customer, but over time they will.
But hey, if you have a boss or you are spending your own money on content marketing, you’re not going to trust some stats and charts that you can read around the web. Especially if they only talk about long-term returns when you are spending money today.
You want hard facts. In other words, if you can’t experience it yourself, you won’t believe it.
That’s why I love the Assisted Conversions Report in Google Analytics.
In the navigation bar click on “Conversions” then “Multi-Channel Funnels” and then “Assisted Conversions”.
It’ll load up a report that looks like this:
This report shows you all of the channels that help drive conversions. They weren’t the final channel in which someone came from but they did visit your blog from one of these channels.
In other words, if they didn’t visit or even find your blog from one of these sources, they may not have converted at all.
Now when your boss asks you if content marketing is worth it, you can show the Assisted Conversions Report to show how much revenue your blog helps drive.
The other beautiful part about this report is that it tells you where to focus your marketing efforts. You want to focus your efforts on all channels that drive conversions, both first and last touch.
What’s the number one action you want your blog readers to take?
I learned this concept from Facebook. One of the ways they grew so fast is they figured out the most important action that they want people to take and then they focused most of their efforts on that.
For you, it could be someone buying a product.
For me, it’s collecting a lead and that starts with a URL.
But I found that people interact with my blog differently based on the country they are coming from.
In other words, if I show the same page to a United States visitor and from someone in India or even the United Kingdom, they interact differently.
How did I figure that out?
I ran some heatmap tests, but, beyond that, I used the Users Flow Report in Google Analytics.
In your navigation click on “Audience” and then “Users Flow”.
Within the report, it will break down how people from each country interact with your blog and the flow they take.
I then used it to adjust certain pages on my blog. For example, here is the homepage that people in the United States see:
And here is the homepage that people from the United Kingdom see:
The United Kingdom homepage is much shorter and doesn’t contain as much content and that’s helped me improve my conversions there.
And of course, in the United States, my audience prefers something else, hence the homepages are different.
The Users Flow Report is a great way to see how you should adjust your site based on each geographical region.
Blog content can be read anywhere and on any device. From desktop devices to tablets to even mobile phones.
The way you know you have a loyal audience isn’t just by seeing how many of your readers continually come back, but how often are they reading your blog from multiple devices.
For example, you ideally want people to read your blog from their iPhone and laptop.
The more ways you can get people to consume your content, the stronger brand loyalty you’ll build, which will increase conversion.
Within the navigation, click on “Audience” then “Cross Device” and then “Device Overlap”.
I’m in the B2B sector so my mobile traffic isn’t as high as most industries but it is climbing over time.
And what I’ve been doing is continually improving my mobile load times as well as my mobile experience to improve my adoption rates.
I’m also working on a mobile app.
By doing all of these things, people can consume content from NeilPatel.com anywhere, which builds stickiness, brand loyalty, and then causes more assisted conversions.
A good rule of thumb is if you can get the overlap to be over 6%, you’ll have a very sticky audience that is much easier to convert.
That’s at least what I can see with all of the Google Analytics accounts I have access to.
To really understand what makes your blog readers tick, you need to get inside their mind and figure out what their goals are and how you can help them achieve each of those goals.
A great way to do this is through the User Explorer Report.
Click on “Audience” and then “User Explorer”. You’ll see a screen that looks like this:
This shows you every user who visits your site and what they did. You can click on a client id to drill down and see what actions each user performed on your blog.
From there, you can click on a time to see exactly what they did each time they visited:
What I like to do with this report is to see how the most popular users engage with my blog. What are they reading? What pages are they spending the majority of their time on? What makes them continually come back? How did they first learn about my blog?
By comparing the most popular blog readers with the least popular, I am typically able to find patterns. For example, my most loyal blog readers typically find my site through organic traffic and then subscribe to my email list.
Then they keep coming back, but the key is to get them to opt into my email list.
That’s why I am so aggressive with my email captures. I know some people don’t like it, but I’ve found it to work well.
So I focus a lot of my efforts on building up my organic traffic over referral traffic and then collecting emails.
Look at the patterns that get your most popular users to keep coming back and then adjust your blog flow so that you can create that pattern more often.
Yes, you should look at your visitor count. But staring at that number doesn’t do much.
The 7 reports I describe above, on the other hand, will help you boost your brand loyalty, your repeat visits, and your revenue.
I know it can be overwhelming, so that’s why I tried to keep it to just 7 reports. And if you can continually improve your numbers in each of those reports, your blog will continually grow and eventually thrive.
So what Google Analytics reports do you look at on a regular basis?
The post 7 Google Analytics Reports That Show How Your Blog is Really Performing appeared first on Neil Patel.