One of our clients, employment tax specialist Brenda Hague, sent me an email today offering some advice to those of you that are employing people and how you could save money on tax and national insurance:

It’s been announced (to be confirmed in the Pre-Budget speech in November) that anyone entering into a childcare voucher scheme after April 2011 will not receive tax or national insurance relief as they do now, so there is a window of opportunity for employers who are thinking of entering into these schemes (usually via a salary sacrifice scheme, which quite simply can save both employer and employee money) to do so prior to this date.

Employers with existing schemes will not lose this tax and national insurance relief until April 2015

For further advice about setting up a childcare salary sacrifice scheme call Brenda on 0800 917 9176

If you are unsure about what our Internet Marketing Training can do for your business, just watch this testimonial from TwinsUK.com owner Delyth:

Do You want to set your online sales alight?

For the last time this year, I am holding a special two day Internet Marketing Clinic on 5th and 6th November in Manchester.

There are only six spots available, and it’s first-come, first served.

I am giving a special £1000 discount to members of the Inner Circle, and £500 off to attendees of Ken McCarthy’s System UK Intensive (if you’re not a member of the Inner Circle).

To apply, please use THIS FORM BELOW only. To get full details on what one of my clinics can do for your business and to see a ton of video testimonials, go to my Internet Marketing Course page (but don’t sign up there, sign up below):

I’ll be closing the doors to this as soon as it’s full. If you miss out, you’ll have to go on the waiting list (although we don’t know when we’ll have time to do another at the moment). I can promise you that we will be having some special guests at this clinic, and the promise of a big bonfire complete with sticky toffee apples!

I’m rethinking my twitter strategy. I put up some autofollows thanking people for the follow and pointing them to my offers like the free DVD, but Maine Copywriter Julie Eason told me on Saturday night how much my auto tweet annoyed her when she followed me. So, I’m going to change all that today..

Also, I keep getting these tweets which are really starting to piss me off:

“Hey, I just added you to my Mafia family. You should accept my invitation! :) Click here: “

Why are you adding me to your mafia family? Who are you? Why haven’t you got a life? Stop bothering me all you dickhead pretend mafiosa’s and get on with some work will ya?

What’s your most annoying auto-twet?

I’m not a big believer that signing petitions will ever make a difference to much, but one of my lovely subscribers Suzie asked me to blog about this, so here I am.

There’s a petition on the Downing Street website that states:

“We would like the government to intervene to end the ongoing dispute betweeen Royal Mail and CWU. This is now affecting thousands of small businesses, as they cannot guarentee their items are delivered or payments received. The government should step in and act as arbitrator to end the striking farly for both sides, and ensure that the backlog of mail does not result in thousands of small businesses going bankrupt -which will happen if this strike continues through Christmas.”

I signed it. You can too here.

Did you enjoy? Leave a comment.

If it’s not working properly, view it here

This is a new service shown to me by Mark Pocock this evening. I love it, but had a few problems embedding it. Social bookmark it and rate it if you like it.

I’m speaking live at Ken McCarthy’s “The System” UK Intensive!

Here are some shots.

This is me getting everyone to shout “We Love The System”. Twice, in fact.

This is Ken addressing the audience.

I got mobbed at lunchtime with questions from some really bright entrepreneurs from all around the world: mainly UK, but lots of US, Danish, Irish, Hungarian, French. A truly international event.

At 1.30pm there was a great surprise when the unadvertised Drayton Bird turned up to do an hour’s presentation. Great value info from the Daddy of the UK DM industry.

Just watching Karl and Ben doing their conversion stuff, although I’m flagging from the combination of being adrenalin burnt from talking this morning and sleeping in a terrible bed. That’s the problem with airport hotels – they’re designed for people “passing through” so the level of care (i.e. a pillow that you can actually sleep on) is way down the scale.

Had a lovely dinner (because of the company, not the food) in a Heathrow Chinese with super web designers Ben and Lizzie Hunt. It was Lizzies birthday n’all!

Day Two:

Enjoying Ben Moskel’s talk on affiliate marketing. Some great insights. Every internet marketer should have a go at affiliate marketing. It’s a lot of fun.

Here’s Ben in action:

NEWS: We got a lot of people in the bar last night asking us how we get such great results with Face Book advertising, so in the spirit of DM we’ve decided to put a guide together. We’re calling it the FaceBook Marketing System. Sign up for priority notification of when we put this together over the next few weeks here. This will help you build demographically targeted lists fast and very low cost compared to PPC or seo:

Here’s Steve and Vince at the Show. Make sure you say hello to Steve, and avoid Vince at all costs. He’ll meet you, then assume he owns part of your business and then try to ruin your reputation when you tell him what a deluded, egotistical, fantasist he is:

Here’s Robert McDemus, he’s a thermo spray expert:

Here’s the legendary Derek Dearden (he’s been to almost every System Seminar):

Now we’ve got the Super Affiliate Rockstar Greg Davis up on stage. This is mean, kick-ass keyword stuff:

Greg has set up a CPA network all of his own called eliteclicksmedia.com. He just gave an amazing talk – a real affiliate rock star.

UPDATE: After a fantastic curry with the System Faculty and guests, we then proceeded to deprive the over-lit bar in the Sheraton of some of it’s single malt, delivered with less than no joy by a really bored Polish barman. I had to do this simply to enable me to get at least some sleep in the hotel’s unbelievably shite bed.

We all needed to get back home, so had to get on the road as soon as we could. We did hit a 5 mile tailback on the M6 but it was an otherwise uneventful journey.

I had lots of memories spinning in my head – all the new friends we have made, the brilliant minds we engaged with, th fun of being on the stage in front of such a vaired and lovely group of people (some of whom are doing AMAZING things online). If you were there: thank you so much for such a great weekend immersed in my favourite subject: internet marketing :-)

I’ll upload a few more pics here:

Some networking action:
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Wealth Master Paul Avins:

Here’s a load of pictures posted by Steve on his Picassa account. See if you can spot yourself.

You can get full MP3 recordings of my talks at the even inside my Inner Circle.

In the past Google used to disregard no-follow links when it came to handing out “Link Love”, but nowadays any “link love” that may have existed will just evaporate through a no-follow link. Now that things have changed nothing is gained by disallowing the flow of link love to people who have taken the time to join a conversation.

As of today I have installed the do-follow plugin and as an approved commenter on my blog, you will now receive plenty of “Link Love” from my uber powerful blog just for posting a good comment.

I was just thinking about the first time I became aware of the internet, and the first time I actually used it.

It was in 1984. I was in a Computer Studies O Level class. The teacher (whose name I annoyingly can’t remember. He had a beard and was very nice) had just spent an hour telling us that in the “footoor” we would no longer be sending letters to communicate. We would be sending “electronic mail”, or E-mail.

I was very interested in this. Not least because my mother was the village postwoman, and I feared for her job.

I asked many questions about what this E-Mail would do to the economy. What were the implications?

My teacher didn’t have all the answers, just a firm knowledge that this thing was coming. I didn’t have the depth of intelligence as a 15 year old, or was not at the right point in my life (if you’ve read Outliers you’ll know what I mean), to invent Hotmail right there and then. Otherwise I’d be on a Caribbean island with a framed, signed, picture of that teacher sitting on top of my Steinback next to the Aston Martian having Earl Grim Tea with Gilliam Wates discussing how we were going to save MS Africa (TM).

The teacher, I remember, was taken with my curiosity and invited me into the school Tech Room.

In that tiny room, stacked with beige BBC Micros and red and black wires flagellating cathode ray monitors all around, I sent my first email.

It was via bakelite red phone connected with what I seem to remember (unless my memory is cheating) a black bakelite modem.

There was a lot of whirring and beeping, and I’ll never forget the exhilaration of seeing that dark green pixelated screen displaying that tiny flashing cursor in the top left corner before letters started appearing on the screen with a message from someone in a University that my teacher knew in America.

I wish I could remember what that email said. I imagine I probably said something psuedo-intellectual like “Have you read Cosmos by Carl Sagan. It’s brilliant isn’t it?”

Or maybe I just said “Hello”

If that teacher of mine ever comes across this blog, I’d just like to say two things:

1. I’m really sorry I forgot your name. Sometimes I blog on a whim and the idea of trawling through the garage for 25 year old school reports at eleven at night before putting fingers to keyboard just put me off, okay?

and..

2. Thank you.

What was your first memory of the internet? I’d be fascinated to know. Leave a comment.

I’m a bit slow on blogging this because I’ve been doing so many live talks, but, even last night, I was telling the audience that Google pays no attention to meta-keywords. Here’s Google’s “Friendly Face”, Matt Cutts confirming this:

Does this mean we should ignore meta keywords when optimising our pages for SEO? Hell, no. Google may be the Daddy, but there are plenty of little children out there reading and indexing this stuff. And that means traffic. The best approach though, as always, is:

- keep it relevant
- don’t overstuff (maximum 20 keywords)
- make sure your keywords are one’s that people are actually using to find you, not ones that you’ve just made up in the office :-)

i.e. do your keyword research!

More details on how to do this properly in the Internet Marketing Training Area.

Interestingly, one law firm recently sent us reams of evidence to prove that we were using their clients’ trademark in our online marketing. We did this all innocently because the word itself is in the English language as parlance for the product we were selling, and there are plenty of keyword searches under that name. They even stopped us using embedded YouTube videos in our blogs that contained their protected name in the video titles. Something that had been put there by other people!

My point is this – it does pay to be careful about what keywords you use, even if Google says it pays no attention to them, because the more successful you get online the more attention you’re going to get. If you do sell anything online that has copyright or is a protected name, make sure you get permission from the company than owns the legal rights over the word before you start optimising for it.