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From win 7 to 10 I agree, but on our win 8 machines, good riddance, and win 10 is very welcome!

Hmm, so relevant headlines seem to be:

• New threshold for small business rates, from £6000 - £15,000.
• Corporation Tax set to reduce from the current 20% to 17% by 2020.
• Fuel Duty frozen again
• Booze duties frozen (ok not business related, but obviously important )
• Tax free allowance goes up to £11,500
• 0.5% rise in insurance premium tax
• Isa limits rise from £15k to £20k
• Commercial stamp duty - 0% upto £150k, 2% on next £100k, with top rate of 5% above £250k.

Would have been nice to see a bigger cut of corp tax in light of the recent dividend changes, but suppose at least it hasn't gone up!

Any thoughts?

Avinash is a legend, learnt a lot of analytics tricks from his blog.

Not visited his blog for a while, and what a superb article. Good to see we have a similar conclusion about Google Plus, don't worry about it  (at least for now)

The Facebook study is fascinating and enlightening.

If you insist on publishing content on your Facebook page…
1. Solve for See and Care intent (entertain, provide utility).
2. MAKE SURE you buy advertising from Facebook to "boost your posts".
Organically you'll reach a couple percent usually, to reach rest of your Likers pay to boost your posts.

So he concurs with the fact you need to boost posts to generate engagement, but I do like the amplification metric:

Amplification Rate (AmR) is the ratio of shares (or retweets or repins etc.) per post to overall Followers (or Page Likes). Is what you are saying so incredible and of value that I'll stamp my brand on it and forward it to everyone I know?

So if no one shares your post, then no one thought highly enough of it to show someone else, or have it shared on their branded page. If no one comments or likes, then pretty much you are wasting your time, which is money, so do something else!

Then his thoughts on Twitter:

Should your business be on Twitter?

No.

To the point! But his argument that if Nike and Coke can't generate substantial interaction versus time, effort and budget, is quite a powerful one.

Certainly food for thought!

Thanks for the update Trena, and glad you took the plunge

I've moved you over to a new thread as it's a great topic. 

Remember when it comes to emailing previous clients, as long as it's not to regular it doesn't matter if you don't hear anything back. If everyone unsubscribes, then that tells it's own story, but we have people who upgrade years after first listing with us, and have received numerous mails without any response.

A lot of the time it can be your mindset, mood or requirements at the time  when an email arrives. If I'm in need of my carpets being blitzed when your mail lands, I'm likely to get in touch. Otherwise it's filed away in the subconscious. If I never want to hear from you again, I'll unsubscribe.

Be very interesting to see how it goes. I imagine time and effort to sort out the mail will be recouped by 1 job, so in theory it's pretty cost effective marketing.

I'm a big believer in the apprentice model and its great to see the stigma and attitudes of old are falling away. There is an alternative to the traditional higher education model, spending years in academia then entering the workplace with impressive credentials, zero experience, and flipping burgers to start paying off your debt.

Alternatively become a graduate apprentice and get your degree alongside work experience, whilst getting paid. Or for other youngsters, go straight into the work place via a digital marketing apprenticeship or one of the many office based courses and get real world experience. 

We are hoping to take on our first apprentice this year, so it will be interesting to see how the process goes, and if we are lucky enough to find the right candidate.

For more info, see Employ and apprentice - GOV.UK

Anyone else looking at taking on an apprentice, or have any experience in apprentices they would like to share?

You would think by now most of the spammy cowboy outfits would have gone bust, or given up. But there seems to be no end to them.

A new style seems to be a sales call which gets aggressive/arrogant/obnoxious when given a gentle brush off (versus putting the phone down or being rude).

Hows this for a follow up sales mail after the phone call. Reckon it would win you over?

Attention to Concern Person Clief: Systronic Business Proposal  (what!?!)

Hi , (obviously forgot who he spoke to)

As per our conversation today regarding your website with Owner, he Refer to send you an e-mail and then you will call back us. We  are here to help you to optimize your website and We will bring your website on 1st page of Google in natural/ organic listings with highly searched keywords. Right now you are not doing search engine optimization and that’s why you keywords are not appearing on the first page of Google, due to this  you are losing more than 85 % traffic. With the help of SEO  you can get more traffic eventually more revenue from your website.

Right now you are doing Google Ads where you have to pay for each and every single click but once your budget runs out you will be vanish from Google, We can give you permanent visibility on Google, yahoo, and other search engines as well.

Please check the following listed benefits of SEO, Please have a look. I have attached Seo proposal please find the attachment.

Kind Regards

Jim Clark

Business Development Manager | SEO Specialist.

Branch : 83 Ducie Street Manchester

How can I refuse? Where do I sign up? SEO done personally by Yoda...

What happened to the standards of grammar in Manchester? I blame Oasis I can suggest a good proof reader who may be able to help out 

Do people really still fall for this rubbish?

Boring?

Now we've got Boris having a dig at Obama and telling him to butt out, with Cameron contradicting Boris and saying we should listen to world leaders.

Global handbags at dawn, how can you call this boring. I suspect it's going to get a lot bitchier, nastier, bizarre and interesting as we get closer to the debate 

After the awful release of Windows 8 and subsequent 8.1, I hung on as long as possible to my faithful Windows 7. But we then ended up in the office with a mixture of Windows 7, 8.1 and recently Windows 10.

I was surprisingly impressed with Windows 10. It takes a little fiddling (in my opinion) to make it more user friendly, and have decided to download the 3rd party Classic Shell Start Menu. But overall it's performed very well with few complaints.

My Windows 7 machine finally reached the end of its working life, and I reluctantly replaced it with a Windows 10 version. After 4 years, my new machine is obviously a lot faster, has double the memory (wish I did!), but surprisingly, I'm really impressed with Windows 10. I've also put the Classic shell start menu on it, just to give me a Windows 7 style start bar, but other than that I really like it.

The Action Centre works well, I like some of the apps like the news, but most importantly it's stable. Loaded up with the usual Office apps, plus adobe products, it's performing fine, crash free (touch wood) and shuts down and boots up in record time.

I'm genuinely impressed after spend years moaning about MS products 

Have many others moved over now to Windows 10? If so are you happy with it, or is it no different to Windows 8 or any other operating system? ie as long as your apps work, you're happy.

Agree, there is a lot of churn. I think it's more growing pains as the web evolves. Social Media still confuses most business owners who use it for link dumping and self promo.

The kids left Facebook long ago, ever since their parents and grandparents joined, pushing up the age of the average posters, but most business pages are still left having to boost pages to get any real interaction. Google plus seems to have become a confusing content dead end since it's recent re-brand and splitting up of business pages. 

The Google SERPs seem to change on a nearly daily basis as organic content battles for place with ever changing sponsor ads and maps listings.

The freemium model is slowly dying as adblockers take hold, which in turn may have a positive side affect of a reduction in content as unprofitable sites will close down. Will be another interesting year, but I think we will look back at 2016 and see it was an important evolutionary one for search and digital marketing.

Hi Diver. I saw the one you're talking about:

Reconsider the new Dividend Tax for small businesses

It's a shame, if that had been better publicised, I'm sure it would have got more support. Surprised the FSB didn't pick it up.

I can't find any other ones. The FSB is the most obvious organisation to organise support as they are supposed to be the small business champion. 

I do think small business owners are being punished and left out to dry, which will cause an inevitable backlash. It's all a very dangerous strategy IMHO.