Almost all training organizations and colleges offer online training now. Find a technical school in your area that offers online courses is my recommendation.

Here is the truth about paid education:
Accredited private/state Colleges: Full of 2-year-old+ material (some material as old as 5-6 years) and instructors who are FAR removed from the world of profit and innovation. Stay far away.

For-profit colleges: Full of 2-year-old material but has a few instructors who know their shit. These guys base class offerings off of economic indicators and local business steering committees. Stay away if you can help it.

Tech universities: Mostly up to date material, BUT, most of the instructors are part-time because they work in the real world full time. Most are also seasoned veterans with very current experience. This is where you learn the nitty gritty of a topic, not just the theory or concept.

Technical Education Centers: New Horizons Computer Learning Centers for example is an excellent resource. They put uber-amounts of training, certifications, and real world experience into their instructors and are great for niche learning. Plus they are in SO much hurt right now you can EASILY negotiate a 5-6 course deal for the cost of 2 courses. Trust me, they’ll take $6K for 5 courses, especially since it’s online.

Very much consider meet the teaching staff at any place you consider attending; if you can’t meet them and size them up, don’t bother wasting the money.

REMEMBER THIS:

You get a formal education to make a living.

You self-educate to make a FORTUNE…

Take my Wordpress Review Plugin, WFReview, for example.  I wanted to make sure that I knew of any and all negative reviews of the product, or complaints even, and I wanted to know as soon as possible after the content showed up.  I went to www.google.com/alerts and setup a few alerts that would notify me if my name, product name, business name, product misspellings, etc., ever showed up on a blog that Google recently indexed or found the RSS feed to.

Sure enough, a few days into the launch of WFreview version 1.0, I received some google alerts that hit on my product name.  Thankfully, the alerts notified me of blogs that absolutely LOVED the product and were singing it’s praises from the mountain tops.

The real lesson here is you need to be proactive with your reputation.  Everyone takes a beating sometimes, even if it’s totally wrong and unfair.    Start by monitoring the easy stuff, your brand names, your business names, employee names, product names, COMPETITORS keywords, and anything else unique to your industry.  This way, you get a TON of email that tells you 2 things:

1. The trends in your industry as they apply to you.  If someone is talking about your product as it relates to your competitor, that’s a good thing.  Offer to sponsor the blog or post even. Get your banner right up next to the content, even if it’s neutral.  People will recognize your brand and will be more likely to click through to your site.
2. What others are writing about.  Odds are if someone with a huge following is writing about your product, you can guarantee you’ll see some traffic from the post. Take the effort to contact the author to correct any misinformation or give MORE information.  Giving them a very generous affiliate commission on your products is another surefire way to keep your name in thier posts.

Follow some others too, http://search.twitter.com is an excellent resource to find out what people say about you.  Check it often and be sure to use misspellings of your keywords/products.

If a social media platform has an API, odds are great that you’ll be able to integrate a scheduled search function in your own reputation management system, which I’m sure you’ll be building after you do a few Google alerts and mentions of your business and products start rolling in…