Some of you already know some of this but not all of it, and some of you do not know this but may have had some clues, I have been excited at times and have been dropping hints. It’s time to “spill the beans” and share exactly what’s going on.

I received an unsolicited approach in the last quarter of 07 for a possible partnership/merger between my established distance learning portal Audiocourses.com and the global face-to-face educational provider SAE Institute.

After various negotiations we have now struck a deal and I have signed on the dotted the line, so to speak.

SAE was established in 1976 (SAE History) and now operates over 50 institutions in 21 countries around the globe. SAE has an exceptionally strong brand name in the field of sound engineering and music production, and also more recently, film making, games, and other media related disciplines. If you are a musician or budding sound engineer/studio technologist etc, this is unquestionably “the” brand, SAE is in fact also the world's largest media education provider, fact.

Audiocourses.com is a pioneering distance learning portal working at the cutting-edge of educational technology since 2000. The portal has graduated students from most corners of the English speaking world, it is a specialist e-learning internet school, with vast experience and proven results. Considerable credibility has been established and the site is dominant in most areas of its core business.

Putting these two cultures together then and you can imagine the possibilities, exciting times ahead with enormous potentials.

Personally I am very excited by this deal, it is the coming of age of my company, something I started on the kitchen table and have shed pints of sweat over, uncountable sleepless nights and all the rest of that stuff you need to get your baby going. I’m chuffed!

So what will I be doing?

Primarily I will continue managing Audiocourses.com and with that comes the integration of the SAE Graduate College. I will also be engaged in helping restructure the SAE network of websites and market the online presence of the SAE brand worldwide.

These are huge projects requiring heaps of project management along with various milestones and launches and exciting strategies. Naturally I hope to share some of this with you as I work through it.

All of this will be carried out by my new-media web marketing consultancy company Audana, which some of you may recall carried out work for Crayon and Coca-Cola as well as other great clients through 07. Audana will grow steadily and aggressively extend its client base through 08.

Watch out for the official press releases soon.

Can’t wait to get stuck in, wish me luck!

Technorati Tags: audio audiocourses.com brand deal distance learning elearning institute marketing media merger online portal sae school web sae audiocourses.com distance learning school web marketing online brand audio media institute merger deal portal elearn

These are my 140 characters or less web bizz tips for the week, that I first post on Twitter, then blog here.

Let me know if you want something expanded by leaving a comment.

1. A prospect needs to sense credibility before making a buying decision, credibility is built up overtime, no short cut.

2. Build mechanisms to bring prospects back. Newsletters and free courses work well, so do forums and other interactive social elements.

3. Use persuasive copy which reinforces the user benefits, not how great you or product is. How will your product benefit a persons life?

4. Get a dedicated IP, forget shared hosting. Make sure your ISP gives you an IP address which is not appearing on blacklists or such.

5. Build own email lists, social media sites are good but you need your OWN, with your own privacy policy in place, own your data.

6. Check your site load speed, if it is less that ultra rapid you will be loosing surfers period.

7. Have more text than pretty pictures, search engines can't understand pretty pictures, but they love text, like a hungry pac man.

8. Actively seek out in-bound links, make it part of your weekly routine, ensure the target keyword phrase is in the anchor text.

9. Don't waste your time with time wasters, are you here to work or fuck about?

10. Publish content daily ensuring that the url, title and H1 are the keywords you are targeting.

Stay tuned for more tips, you can always subscribe to my feed with your email address, put it in the wee box on the right.

Technorati Tags: business H1 IP keywords search search engines tips title traffic url web keywords tips web business IP traffic search engines search H1 title url