Free Online Courses for Small Business Success

The willingness to learn new things is one of the hallmarks of successful business and professional people. Taking a free online course can be a great way to help you acquire new information and hone your skills. Many online courses are designed with the particular busy lifestyle of small business owners in mind. Also, many allow you to learn at your own pace.

Many helpful courses are available in their entirety online. Each offering is organized into a series of lessons on the e-course 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.

Business Success Course 

The Business Success 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 principles being worked on as well as related resources. Because practicing a skill is an important step when making it a part of your repertoire, it is recommended 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

The Speak for Success Course 

The Speak for Success Course is 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. You can start working on your speech to speak more professionally right away.

While you can, of course, work through this course individually, try 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

The Small Business Makeover Course

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 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.

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