What online resources are helpful for learning more about starting a business?

As an entrepreneur, you’ll come across various perks and benefits. However, to enjoy these opportunities, you are required to invest lots of effort and time.

Before your business takes off, you will have to do various things on your own, because you will be lacking sufficient capital and staff members to cover the entire bases. Hence, you will be required to wear different hats to carry out these tasks. For instance, you won’t only be required to launch the product or service, but you must learn to manage the finances, market, and promote the company, and pretty much everything you can imagine.

Learning new skills essential to start a business can be expensive and time-consuming. Fortunately, the initiatives for open-source, high-quality, educational online resources have begun to grow in the recent few years.  Here are the best online learning resources that will help you learn more about entrepreneurship, business management, marketing, and more.

1. SkilledUp for Business

SkilledUp is an online repository of courses in the fields of business, technology, general education, and creative domains. In each category, there are different subtopics. For instance, within the business category, there are subtopics of sales and marketing, essentials of startups, and many more. All the entrepreneurs are required to do is to choose a topic and subtopic of their interests and pick the course that fascinates them.

2. How to Build an Online Business: A Complete Business Plan

This course provides a 12-hour video tutorial that helps you to earn your 5000 € monthly in passive income. This will do this by creating 10 websites, each generating about 500 € a month.

3. Codecademy

You may think that you don’t need to learn to code since your niche is not IT, however, seeing as the developers are too expensive to afford for a new business, your dollars are better spent on marketing or launching a better product. Learning programming and taking courses in HTML, PHP, CSS, or JavaScript will be immensely helpful in managing the website, fixing bugs, adding new features, and developing a new one from scratch after you get a grip on it. Codecademy incorporates interactive courses, making it an essential and fun resource for every business and programming enthusiast.

4. edX

edX is another useful online platform that offers more than three hundred courses and most of them are associated with financial advice and entrepreneurship. Moreover, this platform allows learning other topics that are associated with business and marketing.

5. Khan Academy

Khan Academy is a popular online platform that offers brilliant video courses on tech, science, art, design, and photography. Nonetheless, Khan Academy also has useful courses on accounting and taxes, business, and management. This knowledge can come in handy as an entrepreneur because you’ll need to have the basic know-how of each phase of your business as an entrepreneur.

6. HubSpot Academy

The free certification program provides courses on inbound marketing, comprising website optimization, lead nurturing, and landing pages. These skills are mandatory for business owners as they try to expand their business and online presence.

7. Successful Negotiation: Essential Strategies & Skills

It is a video course that will teach how to make the best out of business negotiation. It includes various negotiation methods, ways to put together the contracts and leases. This 8-hour course is offered by the University of Michigan and is divided into four manageable parts. 

8. Udemy

Udemy provides business owners slide show-based courses in the fields of entrepreneurship, management, and sales. The course is reasonably priced and takes around 2 to 3 hours on average. Some course topics are writing a business plan, pricing and strategy tactics, and ideas and executions.

9. MIT OpenCourseware: Entrepreneurship

MIT Open Courseware is a growing platform encompassing a wide range of topics from Life Sciences to Energy. The entrepreneurship category is a suite of classes that are precisely targeted at educating small business owners and entrepreneurs. These open-source courses include classes in the field of marketing, finance, and planning, leadership, strategy, law, and operations. MIT also provides videos that are of interest to business owners.

10. Open Learn

Open Learn is a repository of open-source courses provided by Open University. Business owners and entrepreneurs will be specifically interested in the money and management courses offered on the website. Some of the valuable classes available on the platform include Intro to Bookkeeping and Accounting, 21^st Century Marketing, and the likes of these. There are other free online courses on the website in the categories of technology and languages.

11. Moz

These days, you will find most of the customers from the internet. It means you should master the skill of SEO. You may have an excellent product, but you are required to provide content that is both informative, and search-engine friendly. Hence, you would want your website ranked higher in search engine queries. Moz contains all the information regarding link-building, keywords, social media, and pretty much all things related to SEO.

12. Foundations of Business Strategy

This course is offered by a professor at the University of Virginia, Foundations of Business Strategy helps you understand how to grow the value of your business. It is a seven-hour course, presented in video format. Once you complete the course, you’ll have a good concept about competitive markets, their working, infrastructure, and how to position your business amidst this scenario.

13. TED Talks

TED has some compelling discussions about business strategies, and you can access them freely from YouTube.  “The single reason why startups succeed” by Bill Gross offers insights into the question of why some fail and others succeed based on the data from numerous companies.

Moreover, some of the other valuable resources in learning business strategies are the graduations speeches by Michael Lewis at Princeton elaborating the connection between luck and success, and Marissa Meyer’s speech at Illinois Institute of Technology, explaining the importance of asking the right questions, being in the company of right people, and finding the courage to do things out of your comfort zone. Additionally, the following series can be of huge importance to the people who are just starting their businesses:

• Haas School of Business Speaker Series
• Rutgers Business School’s Speaker Series
• Wake Forest School of Business Speaker Series
• Stanford Graduate School of Business Speaker Series.

14. Alison

Alison is one of the most common platforms for free online courses as it has thousands of users. Anybody can choose from their repository of 600 various courses, and this list continues to grow. It is an essential tool as it offers courses provided by Microsoft, Google, Macmillan ranging from economics to running a successful business and starting your own company.

15. LearnVest

The majority of the leading entrepreneurs are successful because they know money management both on the personal end and business end.  LearnVest has a range of highly affordable finance classes. Including some of the free classes, like “Building Better Money Habits.”

16. Niche Consultants

The internet is an amazing place, it has made the virtual world a coaching platform. It can be of immense help to entrepreneurs to learn the stages involved in starting a business. There are great coaches and consultants out there that offer free courses and ebooks on building and growing business. Some examples include MyOwnBusiness, and Natalie MacNeil. Additionally, you may search by typing ‘niche keyword’ + ‘business course’ to find the most applicable to your requirements.

17. Kutztown University of Pennsylvania

The University of Pennsylvania offers 100 free on-demand college classes which are highly applicable to entrepreneurs, including the courses of business planning, operations, and management, and small business tax.

18. Saylor

The Saylor Foundation provides free courses and also works with accredited universities and colleges to provide affordable qualifications. Its courses are similar to the ones you’ll learn during a bachelor’s program.

19. Podcasts

Although these are not the official courses, podcasts are a valuable (and easily absorbable) method to become a good entrepreneur. Podcasts can be listened through live streaming on your computing device (if the specific podcast allows it) or through iTunes for iOS and applications like the Podcast Republic for Android. Podcasts like Entrepreneur of Fire have already garnered several listeners through each episode. This is a great way to learn the most recent knowledge and strategies in the business field. Additionally, another great range of entrepreneurship podcasts can be accessed through Think Entrepreneurship’s.

Conclusion

Being an entrepreneur has its challenges and you need to be at the top of skills and knowledge to excel at it. There are countless resources and tools that can help you navigate your journey in the competitive market. Whether you are a visual learner or auditory learner, these open-source online courses offer a variety of information, and solutions to help you with building your startup, growing the company, and getting more customers. Keep informed and stay on top of the recent business trends by taking benefit from the valuable resources.