As a small business owner, you often need to understand various aspects of your business as you build it. Certifications can be a great way to expand your knowledge and expertise and make you stand out from the competition. It goes a long way to upgrading your skills, giving you a substantial advantage over others. But it can also improve your business as you build it. From understanding SEO, marketing, coding, finance, and entrepreneurship...the list goes on. We combed the web for the best free certifications that you can take right now to immediately uplevel your skills as an entrepreneur.
The Google Digital Garage is a free training program delivered by Google. It was designed to help people develop the digital skills required to get a job, switch careers or start their own business. You can learn courses in digital marketing, data, and tech. You can choose the difficulty levels and the number of hours.
First, what is Google Analytics and why should you care? It’s used to measure site metrics and other user data. This helps you to be more strategic in your content marketing, product development, and even measure your business's progress. There is a course for beginners, advanced users, power users, Google Analytics 360 users as well as courses on using Data Studio and Google Tag Manager.
The beginner’s course includes:
Introducing Google Analytics
The Google Analytics Interface
Basic Reports
Basic Campaign and Conversion Tracking
Hubspot Academy offers 45 free courses (some with certifications) on topics such as blogging, social media, YouTube, and Twitter. The HubSpot Inbound Marketing Certification Course teaches you the basics of SEO, blogging, conversion analysis, and reporting, among other concepts.
The Inbound Marketing Certification Course includes:
Inbound Marketing Fundamentals
Planning a Long-Term Content Strategy
Creating a Blog Post
Creating Topic Clusters and Pillar Pages
Understanding Social Media Promotion
Developing a Conversational Growth Strategy
Understanding Conversion Strategy
Understanding Lead Nurturing
Aligning Your Marketing With Sales
Applying a Customer Marketing Approach
4. Codecademy
Codecademy offers free courses ranging from the basics of learning how to code to CSS or JavaScript. If you want a deeper dive, you’ll have to upgrade to pro (which is paid).
Free Code Camp can teach you the basics of HTML5, CSS3, JavaScript, GitHub, and more. It has more free features than Codecademy.
6. Alison
Alison is a database of free certificate courses from leading companies, colleges, and experts. Some categories include IT, Business, Marketing, and Adobe InDesign.
You’ll have to sift through some of LinkedIn’s free certifications but it will be worth the effort. They have 9,000+ courses and 425 learning paths from marketing to product and manufacturing to web design.
8. Cybrary - Project Management Professional Course
Cybrary offers plenty of free (and paid) courses on various topics. Through the globally recognized PMP course, you’ll learn how to initiate, plan, and manage any project.
MOOC is an open online course system offering subjects from well-respected universities. They have subjects on almost everything from business and management to data science. If you want to be credentialed they do require a nominal fee.
10. Coursera
This is another online course system from well-known universities that allow you to audit their courses for free without paying. Their motto is to learn without limits. However, if you want to be credentialed, you'll have to pay a fee.
11. Udemy
Udemy has been around for a while and offers 130k online courses. You can find
courses in tech, personal branding, marketing, and everything in between.
Amazon’s Web Services certification is great for those interested in becoming a cloud practitioner. This is great for people in developer and operations roles. All you need is an Amazon long-in.
The world is limitless with opportunities. We hope these free courses help you to up-level your business skills. Make sure you bookmark this article as we'll continue updating it with anything new that comes through the pipeline. Have you used any of these learning platforms before? Let us know.
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