Small Business Builder: Secrets of Success

The financing course (text-based) took about four minutes. If you like, you can print it out and read it during your mid-morning coffee break. You'll learn about:

The usual sources of start-up financing: personal savings, family and friends, banks and credit unions. What to include in a loan proposal — basically a mini-business plan. Information about SBA-guaranteed loans (such as the LowDoc program) and suggestions for finding additional information.

The Web-marketing course takes you to the Cisco Systems site. Offering both visual and audio instruction, it's a bit more polished than the financing course. It took about five minutes to register and ensure I had a new enough version of RealPlayer. (There's also a text-only version if you don't want to bother.)

The course itself took about 25 minutes — something I'd have wanted to know ahead of time, though a progress bar indicates about how much time is left.

If you know absolutely nothing about …

Creating a customer-friendly site Exchanging links Promoting via banner ads and e-mail newsletters

… you'll probably find the course, and the referrals to other resources, quite useful. You might want to open a document for word-processing so you can take notes.

For more free online courses and tutorials, check out www.sba.gov/classroom/ or www.docnmail.com. Caution: If a course requires registration, you'll have to give an e-mail address. Just say "no" to e-mail offers to avoid being deluged with unwanted promotions. Consider opening a free Hotmail or Yahoo! mailbox to use on these occasions, reserving your "private" mailbox for friends and clients.

An editor since the age of 6, when she returned a love letter with corrections marked in red, Mary Campbell founded Zero Gravity in 1984 to provide writing, editing, marketing and other services to small businesses. Her presentations and workshops address small-business topics from Web sites to business writing. An editor of and contributor to dozens of publications (books, journals and newsletters), she is co-author — with her sister, Pipi Campbell Peterson — of the second edition of Ready, Set, Organize! A Workbook for the Organizationally Challenged (JIST Publishing, 2001). Please e-mail her your comments, questions and suggestions at smallbiz@zgravity.biz. Small Business Builder is published every other Wednesday.