Free Online Courses for Small Business Success

small business owner taking an online course
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Susan Ward wrote about small businesses for The Balance Small Business for 18 years. She has run an IT consulting firm and designed and presented courses on how to promote small businesses.
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Susan Ward
Updated July 19, 2019

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 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 

Business success lessons focus 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.

Speak for Success 

Lessons about speaking for success are designed to help you shape up your oral communication skills. These five 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.

It's best to work through these lessons individually and to enlist 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 speech lessons has an exercise (or exercises) you will be asked to complete, both during the lesson and as practice before going on to the next lesson.

Small Business Makeover

If your small business is not the success you want it to be, 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. It doesn't need to be lean and mean, but it should be strong and healthy enough to run efficiently and tackle new challenges.

That's what these small business makeover lessons are all about—getting your small business into shape so it can be successful. Business success doesn't just happen; it 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.