Small Business Online Courses

The willingness to learn new things is one of the hallmarks of successful business and professional people. These free online courses can be a great way to help you acquire new information and hone your skills because they're designed with your busy life in mind - you can learn at your own pace.

These courses are available in their entirety online. Each is organized into a series of lessons on the ecourse topic. Once you choose one and start it, you can work through a lesson once a week, once a day or on whatever schedule suits you.

Bookmark this index page to make navigating from lesson to lesson easier.

Here's an outline of each of the free online courses I offer. In each case, the hyperlink will take you to the page where you can start that particular course.

This small business online course focuses on helping you free up more time to do the things you enjoy by becoming more organized. You will learn techniques to relax and rejuvenate so you have more energy to tackle your many tasks and learn how to market your business more effectively by marketing yourself. 

Each success strategy includes tips to help you apply the strategy being worked on and related resources. Because practicing a skill is an important step to making it a part of your repertoire, I recommend that you take at least a week between lessons when you're working through this course.

Start now and start being more successful.

• Lesson 1 - The First Step to Time Management for Business Success
• Lesson 2 - Setting Specific Goals
• Lesson 3 - Decide to Delegate
• Lesson 4 - How to Increase Business Success with Daily Planning
• Lesson 5 - Get Ready to Sell by Building Self-Confidence
• Lesson 6 - It Pays to PAK Your Small Business Image
• Lesson 7 - Joining Business Organizations and Networking Groups

Designed to help you shape up your oral communication skills, these six speech lessons will make you sound more polished and professional - and ultimately, because of the power of good communication, become more successful. Clicking on the title link will take you directly to Speech Lesson 1, where you can start working on your speech to speak more professionally right away.

While you can, of course, work through this course individually, I highly recommend enlisting the services of a speech buddy or monitor to help you with your speech exercises. It's almost impossible for anyone to analyze their own speech when they're speaking - especially when they're focusing on speaking well.

If you can't find a speech buddy to exercise with, another alternative is to record your speech practice exercises and then play them back to analyze how you've done. Each of the seven speech lessons has an exercise (or exercises) that you will be asked to do, both during the lesson and as practice before going on to the next lesson.

• Speech Lesson 1 - Stop Dropping Your G's; Enunciation Matters
• Speech Lesson 2 - Axe Those Fillers
• Speech Lesson 3 - How to Pep Up Your Tired Voice
• Speech Lesson 4 - Motormouths Don't Make Sales
• Speech Lesson 5 - Buzzwords and Slang Bury Your Message
• Speech Lesson 6 - Active Listening Is The Most Important Thing You Say

Is your small business the success you want it to be?

If not, maybe your business isn't ready for it. If your small business is going to achieve what you want it to achieve, it has to be fit. Not necessarily lean and mean, but strong and healthy enough to run efficiently and tackle new challenges.

That's what this Small Business Makeover series is all about; getting your small business into shape so it can be successful. Because business success doesn't just happen; business success has to be worked at and prepared for.

Each small business "workout"  focuses on increasing your business success by improving a particular aspect of your business. Although the course is organized into five lessons, you don't actually have to do them in the order that's presented here. It really doesn't matter if you work on improving your customer service before you tackle your business finances, for instance. 

For your convenience, each of the Business Makeover lessons are linked, so you can start where you like. 

• Lesson 1 - Business Planning Makeover
• Lesson 2 - Customer Service Makeover
• Lesson 3 - Small Business Marketing Makeover