On the seventh day of Christmas, Spin Sucks gave to you seven online courses, six PR professional development opps, five productivity tools, four PR pro gifts, three PR trends, two PR books, and one habit to change in 2018.

Last week, we focused on the things for communicators.

This week it’s on the things to help communicators.

We started with productivity tools and professional development opportunities.

Today we have online courses.

You can spend a lot of money and time on online courses so we’ve distilled them down into our seven favorites—ranging from $15 to $1,295.

You choose your own adventure.

Online Courses for Business Development

A few years ago, I was introduced to the concept of whale hunting by Barbara Weaver Smith.

So successful in her right, in terms of landing large clients, I was intrigued.

I read Whale Hunting and I began to stalk her online.

Little did I know, she was doing the same to me, as she built her business and wanted to add communications into the mix.

We became fast friends.

Earlier this winter, she launched an online course to teach you everything she knows about how to get over your “minnow mindset” and land big clients.

If you are in charge of business development for your organization—or you own your own business—this is an investment worth making.

You’ll learn how to have initial meetings with companies that spend six figures, how to write the proposal, and how to close the business.

Land Your First Six-Figure Client also teaches you how to negotiate the contract and onboard the clients.

Start 2018 off right by setting a goal to land some whales.

Online Courses for Social Media Mastery

Shonali Burke launched The Social PR Virtuoso a couple of years ago to teach communicators how to:

• Set your social PR foundation
• Deconstruct social PR content
• Optimize social PR outreach
• Measure social PR success

This online course does more than teach you how to use social media effectively in your communications program—it gives you the confidence to be able to answer questions such as, “What’s the ROI?”

Plus, you get to listen to Shonali’s magical accent while you learn.

That’s worth the price of admission right there.

If you’re interested in stepping up your social PR game, use SPINSUCKS17 when you check out here and you’ll get a 40 percent discount.

Online Courses for Public Relations

Deirdre Breakenridge is a LinkedIn Learning instructor and has six PR online courses.

Which means you get to choose what and how you want to learn.

Choose from:

• Foundations of public relations
• Media training
• How to handle an unruly audience
• Marketing communications
• Create a go-to-market plan
• Competitive market analysis

I venture to guess a good majority of you have executives or clients who could take the media training online course.

Perhaps you put this article in front of them to make a subtle hint.

Or, just hit them over the head and make them take the media training course.

Either way, Deidre has several online courses for you—and your executives or clients—to choose from.

Online Courses for Social Media Marketing

Martin Waxman also is a LinkedIn Learning instructor.

He has five online courses on the platform.

You can choose from:

• Social media marketing for small businesses
• Using social listening in marketing
• Social bookmarking
• Marketing with Snapchat
• Social media optimization

Some of you know that Martin is my co-host on Inside PR and there are several episodes where I make fun of his Snapchat obsession.

He is a teenager in an adult’s body.

And he’s one of the smartest and wittiest people I know so you cannot go wrong with learning from him.

Ever.

Overall Online Courses for Communicators

I don’t have much experience with Udemy from a student’s perspective.

But Howie Goldfarb commented yesterday,

Are all of these online courses vetted?

I know for a fact that Udemy is extremely vetted (as is LinkedIn Learning) because I’ve talked to them about doing courses there.

And the process is stringent.

All that to say, if you want to take online courses there, you can’t go wrong with anything you choose.

They have:

• Public relations, which includes things such as getting media coverage and PR for nonprofits
• Communications, which includes things such as public speaking and business writing
• Social media marketing, which includes things such as demystifying Facebook ads and how to gain Instagram followers
• Digital marketing, which includes Facebook mastery and Google AdWords
• Entrepreneurship, which includes building passive income and cryptocurrency

They pretty much have something for everyone—and their online courses are on sale right now for as little as $15.

Online Courses for All Things PR

Ragan is, of course, one of the leaders in online courses for communicators.

They launched their online training about a year ago and it is complete with:

• Internal communications
• Writing and editing
• PR and marketing
• Visual communications
• Social media
• Executive communications
• Crisis communications
• Intranets
• SharePoint
• Media relations
• Video production
• Mobile

They are known for holding half- and full-day events chock full of great information for the communicator.

Their online courses are recorded from all of their events and distilled down into learning made easy.

For a little more than $100 a month, you can have year-long access to all of their training.

Seems like a no brainer to me.

Online Courses for Business Results

Our own Modern Blogging Masterclass was launched in 2015 as a pilot.

With 150 students, we tweaked, improved, and re-launched it last year.

And, with even more improvement, we re-launched it this year.

It is now available as a self-study program, complete with 20 lessons, templates and worksheets, and step-by-step instruction on how to show ROI.

It marries owned and earned media and combines search engine optimization with results so you can prove the work you are doing is generating qualified leads.

You will learn how to:

• Build a plan to eventually rank for your highly competitive, priority keywords or phrases. 
• Find the questions your prospects are asking so you know what kinds of answers to provide.
• Build an editorial calendar, based on your organization’s priority keywords and the questions your prospects are asking.
• Determine your online competition so you can attract the right prospects and drive qualified leads.
• Repurpose content, create contributed content, and use media relations to reach new audiences.     
• Build landing pages that are specific to your goals (more investors, more sign-ups, more leads, more money) that you can track specifically to your efforts.
• Build content upgrades in existing content, to drive leads.
• Use traffic sources to drive the right traffic (and prospects) to your site.
• Build community.
• Create a dashboard and the kinds of metrics you should include.

The course is $997, but you can buy the self-study version for a whopping $97. Happy Holidays!

I’m biased, of course, but the Modern Blogging Masterclass is the best online course to help communicators both integrate the PESO model and measure results.

The Floor is Yours

Now it’s your turn.

Which PR online courses have you taken that are worth our investigating?