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Will Paying off My Debt Improve My Business Credit Score?

Posted: 20 Feb 2019 07:07 AM PST

Credit scores are as important to businesses as they are to individuals. A good business credit score can mean everything, from negotiating payment terms with vendors and suppliers to getting a business line of credit from your bank.

If your business is carrying a lot of debt, it might be impacting your ability to secure funding for your company. Not using business credit at all, however, is also a detriment. There may also be an interplay between your personal credit and your business. Will paying off your debt – both personal and business – increase your business credit score?

 

Editor's note: If you're looking for information on working with a collection agency to collect money for your business, fill out the below questionnaire to have our vendor partners contact you with free information.

 

 

The paradox of personal and business credit scores

Business and personal credit are separate, right? The answer is complicated. If a business is just starting out, or a sole proprietorship, there is a good chance that lenders will check your business and personal credit scores.

Further muddying the waters, if your personal score is good but your business one is poor or nonexistent, you may be asked to sign a personal guarantee for credit. If so, your personal score will absolutely make a difference in your business's ability to get funding with a bank or a line of credit.

In these cases, cleaning up your personal credit, including taking steps to pay down debt, may help your business. Completely paying off your debt may not be your best bet, but improving your score certainly can't hurt. If this sounds like you, get a copy of your personal credit report and work on building better credit.

You might also want to get a copy of your business credit score to check in on where your business stands or verify that you even have a credit score. They aren't free like a personal report can be, but it's worth it to know what it is and how it can improve.

Strategies to improve your business credit score

If your business does have a credit rating but it needs cleaning up, there are some easy ways you can take care of that.

First, make sure you're working with vendors that report payments. You may have a perfect payment record with a local supplier, but if they don't report your payment history to the credit bureaus, it won't help your rating. Ask any of your vendors that you have established payment terms with if they report. If not, consider adding vendors to your roster that do.

Once you have established payment terms with vendors that will report your payments, make sure you pay them on time. Better yet, pay them early. Dun & Bradstreet's widely used business credit scoring system, from 1 to 100, is based on your payment history. Paying on time gets you a decent score, but paying early is the only way to get anywhere near 100.

As with your personal credit report, you should monitor your business report regularly. Errors can happen, and you should work to clear those up as soon as you discover them. The lower interest rate you get from a good score will more than offset the cost of acquiring your credit report.

You should also concentrate on keeping your debt ratio low. The amount you owe versus the amount of credit you can use impacts your score. Paying down your debt is good, but in lieu of that, consider opening another line of credit. Although it might seem counterintuitive, it can help your business's credit score.

Lastly, if you haven't established credit with vendors or gotten a business credit card, do so, even if early on you need to personally secure the loan or line. The more of a credit history you can establish for your business, the less your personal finances will affect your business's ability to get financing.

How Link Building Can Benefit Your E-Commerce Business

Posted: 20 Feb 2019 07:00 AM PST

Link building revolves around increasing the search engine rankings of your website by increasing the amount of valuable inbound links to your webpages. It's a marketing tactic that can help your e-commerce store catch more attention.

With users searching almost 5 billion Google queries a day, there's definitely potential for your store to get the awareness and conversions you want. Link building takes time, because continuously curating quality content and gaining backlinks through popular sites don't just happen overnight. You need to stick to it, and soon you'll see the traffic spill in.

Let's dive into a few different benefits your e-commerce business gets when you integrate link building into your growth strategy.

Establishes domain authority

If your e-commerce business is going to grow its audience, your website needs to improve its domain authority. This is a ranking score that Moz assigns to your site that determines how well it'll rank in SERPs, and ranges from 1 to 100. The higher the score, the stronger your domain authority, the better results your website will receive.

Here are best practices for link building to establish domain authority:

  • Create valuable, linkable content. If you're producing thin content that gives nothing to readers or doesn't teach them anything, it's considered useless and Google will not like you for it.
  • Optimize your internal linking strategy. An internal link is a hyperlink that directs to another webpage on the same domain, allowing users to explore more of your content and improve engagement. It also helps Google index the entirety of your site and showcases more of your valuable content to readers.
  • Refrain from unnatural links. This can include purchasing links, linking to thin content, paid links, participating in link schemes, and more bad practices. Only use natural links that add value.

Boosts visibility

When a link trails back to your website on an authoritative site, users are likely to click it because they already trust that site. They're looking for relevant content, and clicking a hyperlink back to your site means boosted visibility.

Guest posting on leading websites in your industry is a surefire way to further your brand's reach and increase visitors. Always produce high-quality content that is relevant to your niche and solves a problem. Regularly comment on other industry blog posts, offering insight or asking questions.

Create a resource page that can be used as a go-to for statistics, studies, and other valuable information users can cite for reference, which will grow your backlinks. These webpages garner significant shares and interactions because they provide evidence for other blogs and sites to use in their posts. When you're citing references on your website, you also want to make sure they lead to trusted sources.

Builds brand authority

You want to be your target market's go-to source for useful information and quality products. It's important to establish your e-commerce site as the hub of grade A products in your industry so your business can continue to grow.

Link building ranks you higher in SERPs when Google sees that authoritative sites are providing your website with backlinks. With the right strategy, you can establish yourself as a thought leader and authority in your niche.

Forming connections with leaders in your industry always goes a long way in achieving business growth. There's always something you can learn from your competitors, and doing so can set you up for valuable link building that grows your audience.

Earns credibility

You want to show users that you're a business they can trust. Consumers don't buy from just anyone; you need to build rapport with your audience and show them your main objective is to give them what they want and solve their problems.

The best way to achieve this is to give visitors something they'll enjoy. Show visitors you care how they feel about your brand and you want them to give you a chance. Encourage them to sign up to your email list so they can receive a discount or coupon code on their first purchase. Create a newsletter offering them valuable insight, tips, or stories that will benefit them in their buyer journey.

Be active on social media, and search for your target audience's questions and concerns. Visit question-and-answer sites like Quora and Reddit and respond to queries there to build a reputation as a thought leader in your industry. Guest-post on blogs you admire so readers can discover your shop and its products.

If you want to see your e-commerce business get the attention and revenue it deserves, you need to integrate link building into your conversion strategy. Doing so helps you earn credibility when you need to build trust, build your brand authority to prove yourself in your industry, boost your visibility, and get a high domain authority.

How will you use link building for your e-commerce site?

4 Tips for Creating Catchy Blog Titles That Get More Clicks

Posted: 20 Feb 2019 06:00 AM PST

Creating a blog is one of the most challenging and rewarding experiences a person can have. It takes a ton of work, but once you start to notice spikes in your traffic the feeling is pure exhilaration.

Due to a crowded blog market, it's harder than ever before to create a high-quality blog. According to CopyBlogger, 80 percent of the people who see your blog post will never make it past the headline. The study concluded that 8 in 10 readers would read the headline, then skip right past the article.

The suggestion here is that the title to a blog post is far more important than we once thought. So how do we improve our headlines and get more clicks?

1. Clarify the content of the post.

Staying accurate when writing a blog post and title. However, when we pick a title with a little flash, sometimes we have to clarify the content of the post in the title.

As an example, you could say, "How One Website Increased Revenue by 398 Percent." A better option would be "How One Website Increased Revenue by 398 Percent [Case Study]."

According to a Hubspot case study of 3.3 million paid link headlines, ones that had the clarification in brackets performed 38 percent better than titles without the bracket clarification. There is certainly an argument to be made for clarifying your articles in the headline.

2. Open your options.

Sometimes we come up with a great idea and roll with it. It turns out that might not be the best method for creating catchy blog posts. Instead of instinctively going for the first title that comes to your mind, work around it for a few days or even a few weeks.

One of the best ways to experiment with your title is to come up with at least 25 different titles you could use that would deliver the same message. Don't be shy about taking a survey among peers and co-workers to see which one rolls off their tongue. Sometimes a second opinion and having some options can be the difference between catchy and bland.

3. Research your competition.

Coming up with great, catchy, blog titles means being willing to research your competition. There's undoubtedly someone else in or close to your niche that you follow. You can check their posts as they upload to see if they are covering breaking news or publishing something that you have more knowledge on, or just to get a gist of the kind of content their readers enjoy.

You should couple that information with a website like BuzzSumo, which allows you to search for topics or keywords and get all of the most popular, shareable, and relevant blog posts in that niche. This will give you a grand scale of the niche and undoubtedly provide you with some ideas that will eventually become clickable titles of your own.

4. Use trending phrases.

A study revealed some of the top phrases used in blog headlines on Facebook with the most engagement. It's obvious that people are drawn to certain key phrases. It's your job to figure out how to implement these words into your blog title.

They found that these are the top five phrases:

  • "Will make you"
  • "This is why"
  • "Can we guess"
  • "Only X in"
  • "The reason is"

As time goes on, trends will sway in different directions. Keep your eye on the content regularly being published all over the internet and see if there is a pattern. Obviously, it's not worth consuming all your free time, but simply paying attention can give you some much-needed inspiration for your next blog title.

Conclusion

Crafting blog content and titles is no easy feat. There are plenty of ways you can use technology to your advantage when you want to figure out what titles are going to be clickable and which ones are going to be forgettable.

Your title should be a big part of your content marketing strategy. Once you start publishing great content with catchy headlines, you'll begin to notice patterns within your own business. Some titles will stick, some won't. We hope these tips give you some insight as to what you can do to increase your success and grow your business through a vibrant, eye-catching blog.

How to Use Customer Reviews to Your Advantage

Posted: 20 Feb 2019 05:00 AM PST

E-commerce sites do better with customer reviews than without. In one study, increasing customer reviews from 0 to 50 increased conversion rates from 2 percent to 4 percent. 

But simply adding the ability to leave reviews is only the first step. To make the most of your reviews, you need to decide how you want your review platform to function in order to offer the most benefit to your business.

Here are three important factors to consider as you choose or develop your customer review strategy.

1. Decide which reviews to display where.

It might seem obvious that maximizing product sales would require you to list the most positive reviews first, or otherwise skew the way the reviews are presented to make the product look better, but this is not necessarily the case.

The research demonstrates that customers need some assurance that the reviews are genuine in order to actually commit to buying the product. This means a stream of perfect 5-star rating ultimately seems too good to be true and may end up hurting sales. This is why Amazon sorts reviews by "most helpful" rather than by star rating.

A surprising study by Reevoo found that the existence of bad reviews caused 68 percent of customers to trust the reviews more, and that 30 percent suspect fraud or censorship when they don't see any negative reviews. Even more surprising, the study found that shoppers who went out of their way to see the negative reviews were 67 percent more likely to buy the product.

Unfortunately, sorting by "most helpful" isn't always an option, especially for smaller brands where collecting ratings on reviews isn't always possible. Sorting by most recent reviews isn't generally a good idea, since these are rarely the best reviews to display. A manual review selection process is the best alternative, if possible.

When it isn't, sentiment analysis and grammar check are good alternatives. For example, including a review near the top with the positive sentiment but a relatively low score can alleviate shopper concerns about trustworthiness, while offering a relatively positive take on the product. Grammar check can help surface the most trustworthy reviews based on how well written they are.

2. Weigh the pros and cons of in-depth reviews.

An important consideration is how much depth you want your customer reviews to convey. Do you want customers to simply give a star rating in certain areas (ease of use, functionality, customer support, value and likelihood to recommend), or do you want them to write a certain number of sentences about your product? Neither of these types of reviews is inherently better or worse than the other; it all depends on what you are trying to convey to potential buyers and how you wish to do that.

Remember, the easier it is to leave a review, the more reviews you will receive. More in-depth reviews require more work to leave, and fewer reviews can hurt the chances of additional reviews. Consider these inherent trade-offs when you are developing or choosing your review system.

3. Ask for reviews at the right time.

Most businesses will need to ask their customers to leave a review in order to earn a significant number of them. Customers are unlikely to think of it otherwise, and those who do are usually frustrated with the product or your customer service for one reason or another.

A more representative sample of reviews demands that you automate the process of asking for reviews and incorporate it into the purchasing process. Here are a few different times you can ask for a review:

  • After checkout: If you are selling a digital product that the customer can access instantly, you also have the option of asking them for a review as soon as they buy the product. This may be a little early for most products, but if the usefulness and performance of the product are easily grasped shortly after beginning use, it isn't a bad idea to ask for a review as soon as the product is purchased.

  • After delivery: Including a card with your product that shows your customers where and how to leave a review reminds them to leave a review when the product is still new and exciting to them, before it becomes a part of their daily lives and they forget to think of it. You can also send an email when the product completes the delivery.

  • After a specified use time: Some products take more time to get used to than others, and it doesn't always make sense to ask for a review as soon as delivery takes place. Even when it does, following up again after the customer has had some time to use the product is still a good idea. The amount of time to wait depends on the product, but you can automate an email to remind customers to leave a review at this specified time.

Allowing customers to leave reviews has proven time and again to boost sales. But making the most of those reviews demands some investment in your customer review strategy. Consider how you want to display your reviews, how much detail you want to extract from them, and when to automatically ask for reviews to get the most benefit out of this strategy.
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