Nicolas Hamilton says the achievements of his older brother Lewis are proof that any dream can be achieved and any record broken.
The post Nicolas Hamilton: Lewis' 91 wins show dreams can come true appeared first on Buy It At A Bargain – Deals And Reviews.
A roundup of the best and worst of F1’s bumper esports weekend, which featured three virtual races and a host of names from the world of sport and motor racing. The post Lando steals the show: The best and worst of F1's esports weekend appeared first on Buy It At A Bargain – Deals And … Continue reading Lando steals the show: The best and worst of F1's esports weekend
ESPN FC’s Gab Marcotti claims the attraction of Champions League football could be sufficient to have Paul Pogba taking a look at various other clubs to bet following period.
ESPN FC'’s Steve Nicol provides his take on possible Liverpool summer season transfer relocations, seeing Neil Etheridge as a qualified back-up for Alisson.
While Man United, Man City, Liverpool, Arsenal, Chelsea as well as to a lower level Spurs, are generally costly buyers, this period all 6 would certainly invite a deal buy or 2. The Premier League transfer area is an excellent area to begin, as among the garbage, Nick Miller composes there is actual prize to be located.
The post 5 delegated gamers that can show deal purchases for Premier … appeared first on Buy It At A Bargain – Deals And Reviews.
If you have a business credit card, you probably think it isn’t affecting your personal credit profile. While ideally this would absolutely be the case, the fact it, it could be. There are ways to keep your business debt off your personal credit report, but it isn’t something that happens automatically. There is a very specific process that actually takes some time.
It also has to be intentional. A business owner must be active about building business credit. It doesn’t happen passively. The idea is to set up your business in a way that it easily exists in the eyes of credit reporting agencies (CRAs) and lenders as an entity separate from yourself. How do you do that? After you do, how do you get accounts that will report to the CRAs before you have a business credit score?
We can answer all these questions and more. We can walk you through the process and show you not only how to establish business credit that will not show up on your personal credit profile, but how to build it so that it is strong enough to qualify for any financing you may need.
One major misunderstanding when it comes to business credit is that if you have a business credit card, it isn’t on your personal credit profile. While this can be true, if you haven’t actively built business credit and you did not apply for the credit card with your business information, it likely is not true. The fact is, that card is a personal credit card that has a few extra perks due to its business designation. It is not actually a credit card that is based on the merits of your business credit profile. If a business credit card is in the owner’s name, it is on the owner’s personal credit profile.
Share our foolproof business credit building checklist and tell your friends about how you’re building business credit the quick and easy way.
The question then becomes how do you separate your business from yourself. Many new small business owners operate as a sole proprietorship because it is just easier. They simply use their own contact information as their business contact information, and business finances mingle with personal finances.
When it comes to establishing business credit however, this just will not work. Here is what you need to do.
The first step is to incorporate. There are three options for this.
The option you choose will depend on your specific tax and liability needs, as they each offer different levels of protection and expenses.
You need to apply for an EIN. Stop using your Social Security Number as the identifying number for your business. Your SSN is a direct link to you personally. It is virtually guaranteed that anything connected to it credit wise will end up on your personal credit reports.
In fact, even if you follow all the other steps for establishing business credit but skip this one, accounts could end up on both reports. You don’t want that.
The process of applying for and EIN is easy. The IRS has an online form, and as soon as they verify all the information, you receive your number. It typically happens almost immediately.
Dun and Bradstreet (D&B) is the most widely used business credit reporting agency. They issue each business on file a 9-digit D-U-N-S number. Application is easy and free, and once you have that number, you will be even closer to establishing credit for your business separate from your own.
Your business needs its own phone number and address. This way, when you apply for credit, you can enter contact information that is separate from your own. When information is reported to agencies, sometimes the phone number and address are used as identifying factors. If you and your business share a number and address, that just decreases the level of separation.
Be sure you get your contact information listed in the directory under your business name.
If you don’t have one already, you need a dedicated business bank account in the business name. Make sure all business expenses run through this account. Not only does this help separate you from your business, but it will keep business expenses separate from personal expenses for tax purposes as well.
A lot of business owners do not realize how important this is. Truly, these days if you do not have a website, you do not exist. However, your business website needs to be professionally built and hosted on a paid service such as GoDaddy. The email address needs to have the same URL as the website. Free web hosting and free email services such as Gmail and Yahoo do not work well.
These things make your business look fundable to lenders. This is the first step to building business credit.
If you are a new business and just starting with vendors, look for those that will extend credit and report to the top credit agencies. We call this the vendor credit tier.
Share our foolproof business credit building checklist and tell your friends about how you’re building business credit the quick and easy way.
If you have been around for a while and do not have credit with your existing vendors, ask for it. If they comply, ask if they currently report to the credit agencies, or if they will. Not all vendors do because it is not required. Not all are willing either. If your current vendors do not want to cooperate in this endeavor, consider switching to vendors that will.
Here are some of the starter vendors that are the easiest to get started with.
o Use Quill to order supplies you use every day, including pens, pencils, folders, printer ink, copy paper, and even cleaning supplies.
o Order shipping supplies, janitorial equipment, and more through Uline.
o Grainger offers industrial supplies as well as tools that you will need in the course of regular business.
It may be necessary to place a few initial orders with each of these before you can get net terms. There is no need to order anything you do not need however. They each sell things that business owners need in the everyday operations of a business. Once you make your on-time invoice payments and they begin reporting those payments to the credit agencies, your credit score will start to grow.
Sometimes utility companies are willing to report payments to credit agencies. However, you almost always have to ask. The worst they can do is refuse. If they do, no damage is done. If they agree, you will only establish your business credit faster.
Talk to them all, including telephone, electric, gas, and even internet. Before you do this, be certain that all of these utilities are in your business name with your business contact information.
Taking these steps will help you establish separate credit for your business. That means your business credit cards and other business credit accounts will not show up on your personal credit profile. However, it is virtually impossible for the reverse of this to hold true all the time.
It’s true, your personal credit accounts will not show up on your business credit report. However, your personal credit can still affect your ability to get a loan even if you are using business credit. It doesn’t always, but it can. Here’s how.
First, some lenders insist on checking personal credit even if you have business credit. The thing is, if your personal credit isn’t up to par but you have strong business credit, you are more likely to get the loan anyway. That not so great personal credit score can affect your terms and rates however.
The other way that your personal credit profile can affect your business credit is this. Some CRAs actually use your personal credit in the calculation of your business credit score. While not all of them do this, there is really no way to know which of the CRAs your lender will choose to use.
The moral of this story is that you cannot ignore your personal credit profile while you are building business credit. You have to stay on top of your complete credit history.
You may be wondering why it matters. If your personal credit can affect things anyway, wouldn’t it be easier to just have everything in one place? The answer is a resounding no. In the long term, not having separate business credit is a bad idea.
The thing is, even if you make all your payments on time, your personal credit cannot handle the level of spending that running a business requires. Business credit cards that you get on your business credit have higher spending limits. These higher limits are designed to handle the larger spending amounts necessary to run a business.
Why does that matter? Well, when you carry balances at or near your credit limit, your debt-to-credit ratio goes up. A high debt-to-credit ratio has a negative impact on your personal credit score. With the level of monthly spending that most businesses require regularly, it is all but impossible to keep a low debt-to-credit ratio with business accounts on your personal credit profile, even with an immaculate credit history. This can impede your ability to get personal financing for things such as houses, home renovation, automobiles, and more.
Share our foolproof business credit building checklist and tell your friends about how you’re building business credit the quick and easy way.
How can you know if your business cards are affecting your personal credit? Well, if you have not taken the steps necessary to separate your business credit from your personal credit, you can bet for sure this is happening. To know for certain, get a free copy of your personal credit report from each of the main personal credit CRAs. These include Experian, Equifax, and Transunion. You should be able to see them on there.
If you have strong business credit, call the credit card company and inquire about shutting down the card on your personal account and switching to a card on your business credit. If you do not yet have strong business credit, start building it now. When you have a high enough business credit score, take the steps necessary to remove the card that is on your personal credit and open new ones using your business credit.
If you aren’t sure if this is happening to you, or if you didn’t even know it was possible, find out now. Get copies of your personal credit profile and see what is on there. At the same time, start building business credit if you do not have it already. Then you can access all the funding you need to ensure your business is able to continue to grow and thrive.
The post Does Your Business Credit Card Show on Your Personal Credit Profile? It Might! appeared first on Credit Suite.
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.