Practical Thread: Advertising to businesses

Hello all!

As you may recall, I started a thread called "Intro and Question" a few
days ago wherein I asked if there was any practical information to be
had in fsb.  I got a lot of good responses, some practical information,
real-life answers and saw some interesting tangents to that thread.

One thing that surprised me is that several people approached me
off-mailing-list and said they have been lurking in here (some for
years?) looking for practical information on how to run their fsb but
were disappointed not to find much. 

So I thought I'd do the lurkers (and myself :-) a service and ask a few
more practical questions. I'm going to post them under the subject of
"Practical Thread: Yadda Yadda Yadda".  That way, they can be easily
ignored. :-)

So, on to my first "Practical Thread" subject: 

One of the things I've been struggling with is "how does one advertise
to find more clients?".  

Hang on!  It's not as open-ended as it appears. 

I realize that advertising is a Black Art and to Do It Right one should
hire an ad agency of some sort.  I've even found one that I'd like to do
business with (http://www.y2marketing.com/) Problem is, they want more
money than I've got at the moment, so I need to bootstrap my
advertising campaign (as well as everything else :-).  

My biggest question in this regard is "how does one advertise to
*businesses*?" The advertising that I've done so far that has gotten
nibbles has gotten nibbles from consumers (usually about their non-FOSS
software).  I've gotten no responses from businesses.

Yes, I've joined the local Chamber of Commerce (CoC).  Yes, I've attended
some of their functions. You know what kind of business people I meet
there?  Ones like me; single people looking for clients who (unlike me)
think Windows is the ultimate in computer technology.  You know what
kind of business people I *don't* see there?  Ones like my customers;
multi-employee, multi-million dollar businesses who are trying to
leverage IT to improve their business processes.

Yes, I am currently working on speaking at local business groups as
mentioned in Scott Allen's "Developing a Reputation" series over on
about.com.  (That's one of my favorite techniques because I *love*
getting in front of an audience!)

One of the things I've noticed with my clients and former employees is
that they didn't actively participate in the CoC, they didn't speak
in front of the Kiwanas, et. al, yet they are running businesses of the
size and shape that I'd like to someday.

Is it just a matter of scale like the difference between setting up and
running a personal email server as opposed to setting up and running an
email server that handles 1M of messages a day?  Or am I missing
something?

-- 
 
Regards,
 
Faber                     

Linux New Jersey: Open Source Solutions for New Jersey
http://www.linuxnj.com