Like it or not, no matter how skilled or experienced you are—there’s always going to be someone who’s better, faster, stronger, more effective. Unless of course you’re Usain Bolt—a true master of his craft, running. Even then, no rein on top lasts forever.
As an entrepreneur and creative at heart, I decided a long time ago that I was going to be a perpetual student, a lifelong learner that focused on mastering my craft, writing. Choosing to dedicate a few hours each day outside of my day job just reading and writing for years was a great investment in building my skills as a writer.
While that deliberate practice was no doubt essential, it’s only part of the equation that’s helped me become a contributor to Forbes, Entrepreneur, Business Insider, and others. Every so often I’d hit roadblocks, dry spells, mental defeats, plateaus.
In those moments, I’d turn back to my student mindset. I’d go to the blogs of my favorite authors and entrepreneurs, buy their books, take their courses on platforms like CreativeLive, Skillshare, and Udemy.
Naturally, I wanted to learn from the best of the best—the Usain Bolt’s of my industry. Today, I want to share with you my picks for the eight most impactful online courses for entrepreneurs and creatives to take in 2017.
You can also check out my more than ninety other recommendations for online business courses I recently wrote about on my blog.
How to Start a Business
This free course compilation brought to you by Michigan State University and hosted on Coursera is what they call a specialization—in this case a series of mini-business courses covering a particular topic. The How to Start a Business specialization covers topics on mindset, ideation, planning, action, and strategy which are all essential at any stage of the entrepreneurial journey.
Rather than just talking about high-level tactics and describing what to do, these action-packed mini courses focus on guiding you through the process of actually launching a business in real-time while you’re going through the program—which is what separates it from most business courses out there.
altMBA
The altMBA is headed up by Seth Godin, the iconic marketer and prolific bestselling author who’s been inducted into the Direct Marketing Hall of Fame. In this intensive four-week online online workshop that’s aimed at high-performers who want to level up in their careers and become thought leaders, the focus is primarily on quickly launching products and perfecting your abilities at executing in the fast-paced environment that’s defining the modern workplace.
This course runs in classes, typically four times per year, and features alumni from notable companies like Nike, Google, Microsoft, and more. With teamwork being an essential component of the course, you’ll get regular personalized feedback, coaching, curated readings—and the ultimate goal is launching 13 products in your four weeks during the program.
Fulfill Your Creative Purpose
This insightful course was filmed during my time working at CreativeLive, and it was a standout in my book. Instructor Ann Rea, a successful artist, and her guests on the course do such a great job of communicating with creatives, walking them through the process of finding their mission, identifying mentors to help accelerate your ideas, and earn a living with your skills.
If you’re contemplating making the move to start freelancing, Fulfill Your Creative Purpose will be particularly useful in helping you identify the characteristics you’ll work best with in terms of clients. As one student describes this course, “So many other classes just talk about finding your ideal clients and what you want your business to stand for. This class will actually reveal that.” When taking this 30-day course, instructor Ann Rea provides you with comprehensive daily lessons to define your mission and develop a profitable business around the skills you already have.
Master Your People Skills
Behavioral investigator, Vanessa Van Edwards is commonly described as a professional people watcher. In this course, Vanessa, author of her most recent book Captivate, demonstrates her research, studies, learnings, and personal understanding of the human psyche in this 30 day course, which is appropriately subtitled, “be the most memorable person in the room.”
In Master Your People Skills, you’ll learn how to increase your likability, identify personality types, get actionable tactics for dealing with troublesome people, and become a master conversationalist. More than 27,000 students have gone through these lessons, activities, and challenges to assess and improve your people skills.
Startup Sales Success
Learning how to sell effectively is a major hurdle for growing your business, regardless of the industry you’re in. As an entrepreneur, it’s an inevitable reality that you need to learn how to develop a winning sales strategy for your unique product or service—and to be able to recognize when and how that game plan needs to change over time as the business grows. This free course, taught by Close.io founder Steli Efti is an incredible value, even compared to many of the paid courses I’ve seen that profess to teach you about sales.
Steli has run massive sales campaigns with more than 200 high-growth startups over the past several years, helping them set the right sales goals, create realistic sales plans, and execute in ways that have netted millions in closed deals. In Startup Sales Success, he teaches all of the best practices for anyone in a sales role, arms you with his time-tested sales scripts and email templates, walks you through the process of giving a captivating demo, and much more.
Power Your Podcast with Storytelling
If you’re considering launching a podcast anytime soon, Power Your Podcast with Storytelling should be considered mandatory viewing. Instructor and founder of Gimlet Media, Alex Blumberg, teaches straight from his lifelong career in journalism, radio, and podcasting. Best known recently for his meteoric rise into the hundreds of thousands of podcast listeners just a few months after launching Gimlet Media’s first podcast, StartUp, this course dives into Alex’s personal process for telling stories that capture the hearts and minds of your listeners. Which, if you’re lucky, can create a viral sensation from day one with your podcast.
You’ll learn how to tell powerful, memorable stories. The course also includes production techniques that can help you create a multi-layered sensory experience, develop your narrative instincts, and prepare for an interview to get the best answers and the essential elements of a good story.
30 Days to Validate
I couldn’t end this list without covering my own most effective business course to date, 30 Days to Validate. If you want to start a business, but you’re not exactly sure where to begin—this course is for you. The hundreds of students who’ve taken it start with a very simple goal within 30 days of signing up: Land a minimum of at least 10 paying customers for your idea. In the course, we walk step-by-step through my seven-stage process for finding the right business idea, estimating how much demand there is in the marketplace for that idea, and into the process of building an audience around your concept.
It gives you the tools, templates, tactics, and actionable strategies based around how I’ve quickly validated my own businesses. From generating $5,700 in pre-sales of a physical product, to pre-launching an online course driving over $1,091 in one week, to landing a $120,000 consulting contract, this course will help you validate your idea for an online business, physical product, or service with real paying customers in one month or less.
