For a small business to stay afloat in today's retail climate, staying current on industry trends and best business practices is crucial. While industry markets and conferences offer great educational resources in the form of seminars and workshops, you can’t attend every market, let alone every seminar. For the busy business owner that wants to keep learning on their own time, webinars offer a great, flexible option. Here are four outlets to check out that produce valuable webinars geared toward small businesses.
1. SCORE
SCORE is a non-profit dedicated to offering free business mentoring services. The association breaks its online educational resources into three categories: Live Webinars, Recorded Webinars and Courses on Demand. Live webinars allow those interested to pre-register and offer the benefit of being able to ask the instructor a question. Current planned live webinars cover topics including podcasting, maximizing after-tax profits and how to generate positive reviews. If you miss a live webinar, the Recorded Webinars section has pages upon pages of past webinars you can watch at your own leisure. Since there are so many available, you can also narrow your search with a nifty drop-down menu at the top that lets you search by topic, industry and other categories. The Online Courses are more robust and offer longer-form looks at topics ranging from building your website to incorporating personalization into your marketing.
2. Small Business Administration
The SBA is a U.S. government agency that offers support to small businesses through counseling, business loans, educational resources and more. As part of this mission, it offers webinars and links to ones put on by outside organizations through its site. Usually there are several available each and every day at different times. Upcoming webinar topics include the power of mobile in digital marketing, branding and financing. They don’t post back-logs of old webinars, so you’ll want to catch them when they happen.
3. Fit Small Business
Fit Small Business is an online resource for small businesses that offers a wide range of content on topics from marketing to financing to retail. The site’s writers host free webinars each day. Current webinar topics include how to hire employees, payroll and applying for small business loans. Before you sign up, you’ll be able to see some bullet points of what the webinar covers, details on who the instructor is and a helpful time estimate of how long the webinar will take.
4. BizLaunch
BizLaunch is focused on teaching entrepreneurs and small business owners how to run a successful business through creating training materials including how-to blogs, resource guides and other content. The site offers free webinars at set times, and also allows you the opportunity to download slides. It also uploads all past webinars to its YouTube channel, so you don’t need to worry about missing anything.
As a small business owner, you know there’s no end to the amount you can learn. The great thing about all the above resources is that in addition to webinars, they all do a wide range of work and outreach to help small businesses succeed. What educational resources do you turn to for help running your business? Let us know in the comments!
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