These are just my opinions based on my own personal experience, but I recommend you do NOT take the following courses for the reasons I've put on each one - basically learn from my experiences and mistakes :-)

Diploma in Web Business Development and Marketing (10-15 hrs) at Alison.com

All the courses on Alison.com are free, including the assessments, you just need to pay for the vast majority of certificates/diploma's you earn at the end of each course, I just never have. This course (Diploma in Web Business Development and Marketing) was a huge shock though, 'cos the instructor basically gave you all the information you need (with the exception of where to buy the list of email addresses) to become a full time internet spammer. The webpage was literally just a one page site with a sign-up box and needing to "invest" in an auto responder. The instructor recommended asking the visitor to opt-in twice to get the free gift (which was just a PDF with 8 pages full of copied and pasted information from the public domain and about 2 hours work start to finish) so that you could be sure you weren't accused of spamming.

You are taught how to "build your list" (harvest email addresses) of people who have opted-in to get your free gift (explained up there ^^) and how to form "relationships" with them so that you can keep on spamming them for many months and years into the future (but because they opted in to your list twice, apparently that's not spamming).

Then the marketing bit of the course is about creating a like/fan page on Facebook and persuading people to like your page so that they can get the free gift from your site. After wasting three days and the best part of 50 hours listening to this bloke, this was literally the only thing I learnt anything about and will use parts of.

Basically, if you've already got a website for your business (if not, my hubby is a web developer that does exactly that) and a Facebook page then you really would be better off avoiding this course so that you don't damage your reputation. If you've got a site but not a Facebook account then it's so easy to set up the account and Page and only takes an hour or so, then you just need to contact your current clients and ask them to hit the like button on that page then away you go.

An entire educational company to avoid is DLU. Learn from my mistake of believing they were ready for students! When I tried to study with them, nothing was ready and the end of course assessment would have cost me £65 each attempt I had to take it. I realise that they need to make money, but charging a lot less for each assessment and being better prepared for students would have been a different story.

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