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Attention Entrepreneurs: Education Courses Can Help You Succeed

Entrepreneurs and small business owners who don’t want to spend time and money on an entrepreneurship degree program have the opportunity to take individual entrepreneurship classes. The Kauffman Foundation reports that nearly 3,000 schools provide entrepreneurship classes. Look for courses taught by instructors who have actually been successful entrepreneurs or small business owners. You can also learn from the successes and failures of other students who are willing to share their experiences.

Free Online Entrepreneur Classes

Some colleges and universities offer free online entrepreneur courses, including Capilano College, Kutztown University of Pennsylvania, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Open University, and UC Berkeley.

Highly Ranked Schools

Fortune Small Business (FSB) offers specialized lists of the best colleges for entrepreneurs. Colleges are selected based on months of interviews with hundreds of entrepreneurs, professors, students, alumni, university administrators, and venture capitalists. The interviewees were asked which programs they thought were the most innovative and effective and why. Here are the schools ranked the highest (in alphabetical order): Boston University, Grand Canyon University, University of Houston at Victoria, University of Wyoming, and Western Carolina University. Some colleges and universities allow students to just take the classes they’re interested in.

The University of Arizona’s top-ranked McGuire Center for Entrepreneurship provides three non-credit entrepreneurship courses. The McGuire Center has been given a #2 nationwide ranking by Entrepreneur/Princeton Review, so you know the courses are of the highest quality. The excellent instructors will teach you how to start a small business or grow your current business. Another benefit from the program is the fine mentoring offered by McGuire Center staff members. (It should be noted the author has no connection to the university.)

Social Media for Entrepreneurs

Social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter are effective tools that entrepreneurs and small business owners can use to reach prospective customers. Even those with experience using social media for business purposes can benefit from taking some courses. Mikolaj Jan Piskorski, associate professor of business administration at Harvard Business School, said, “Often our perception of social media, and what we can and can’t do using social media, is very much tinted by what we think our favorite person is doing - and our favorite person in usually ourselves. So it is about getting students to understand that the empirical skills are absolutely necessary, because whatever they think is intuitively correct, is probably about themselves, but nobody else.”

Social media courses are available online. Massachusetts Institute of Technology offers its New Media Literacies courses for free on the Web. The courses cover blogging, podcasting, wikis, and more. They include thorough lecture notes and slides for reference.

If you’re an aspiring entrepreneur or if you’re looking for ways to be more successful in your current business, consider taking some courses in entrepreneurship.

Brian Jenkins, a writer for BrainTrack since 2008, contributes content about many topics related to college degrees, including those in entrepreneurship.

This is a guest post by Alvina Lopez:

Twitter and Small-Business: 3 Brief Stories to Inspire Other Small-Business Owners

We often hear Twitter stories about customers and large corporations and how the two interact both online and in real life, but what of all the small businesses? How have they adapted Twitter’s usefulness into their business models?

If a quick Google search is any indication, most of them have done exceedingly well. There are many success stories around the internet that tell of small businesses’ ability to connect with clients and potential customers in order to promote their brand in many ways, ranging from basic status alerts of hours and location changes to extravagant sales and contests.

Here are just a few scenarios that other small business owners can learn from:

@powells – Powell’s Books (Portland, OR)

Powell’s books is a well-known independent books store that recently celebrated it sixteenth year of having an online presence and store (its brick and mortar location is forty years old). As part of this sixteenth birthday celebration, the store recently offered over $500 worth of free books to contest entrants, all of whom had heard of the prizes online. This celebration, no doubt, also brought many new customers to the Powell’s Books website, and hopefully their experience was good enough to keep them coming back.

@desserttruck – DessertTruck Works (New York, NY)

DessertTruck Works is one of the many street food vendors that travel around our cities to sell their food to hungry urban workers. Many of the street food vendors use Twitter to tell their customers where to find them, what deal sand meals they’ve got for the day, and how their trucks will handle inclement weather, traffic problems, and other sudden changes in the route. By keeping customers informed, DessertTruck Works and vendors like it can better protect their expected sales figures, thus keeping profits up.

@danielha – cofounder of Disqus, a third party blog commenting platform

Shortly after a blogger Tweeted that she did not think she could use Disqus because it would not handle the older comments on her blog, essentially erasing them from the blog after the switch, cofounder of Disqus Daniel Ha responded to her with a question: “doh. how can we make it easier for you?’ What followed was a back and forth through email which ultimately led to Disqus finding a way to handle old comments. By watching his brand and interacting with users, Ha managed to help one blogger out and greatly expand Disqus through this improvement.

As I said earlier, these are just a few of the many small business Twitter success stories that you can read about online. The important thing to keep in mind is that in each of these stories, and in others around the internet, we see small businesses using Twitter to focus on connecting with clients and potential customers. They’re not simply in the game to get the most followers, but rather they seem interested in developing relationships within the community. They understand that using Twitter to gain others’ trust is the first step to growing their business.

By-line:

This guest post is contributed by Alvina Lopez, who writes on the topics of accredited online schools.  She welcomes your comments at her email Id: alvina.lopez @ gmail.com.

There is a new guest post on using a Moleskine and a smartphone at the Work.Life.Creativity blog.
Read the whole thing.

Up until this past weekend I had been doing all of my writing and thinking at stephenpsmith.com - and it just wasn’t getting me where I wanted to go. So I had a chat with my colleague Patricia Mayo and she offered to help out by migrating that site to this one, and she did an awesome job!

The reason that it wasn’t doing what I wanted is because I wasn’t doing the right things, in the correct way, there. I was posting everything in all of the areas that I work in, perhaps trying to be all things to everyone. And that is obviously not what the general readers wanted from me.

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