William R Ward wrote: > I just had my first real training class, and I'm trying to arrange for > more. But I need advice on how to reach potential customers. What > are some suggestions you might be able to offer?
Are you arranging public courses yourself? I decided that was way too much risk and too much work, so I always work with other companies who can handle the marketing for public courses. So then it becomes a game of pitching your courses to a training provider or getting certified to teach their stuff. I should note that most all of my work has been in the realm of software quality. I just recently crossed over onto perl-trainers because I'm doing tutorials on scriping for test automation engineers. I have no idea what the landscape is for the big perl training houses, if any. > * My site is listed on Gabor Szabo's http://www.perltraining.org/ site. Have you analyzed how much traffic you have on your site and where it's coming from? > * I've been working on a flyer to have available at various geeky > events and locations ( but where? ). I've found dozens and dozens of geeky events in the Dallas/Fort Worth area. I could go to three meetings per night if I could clone myself. I keep the ones I know about listed at http://tejasconsulting.com/resources/software_resources_NTex.html. You could look at the national organizations and track down chapters in your area. > Any other ideas? Anyone want to send me a copy of a flyer they've > made? [caveat - the next two paragraphs are SQA-type references] I have a mediocre one at http://tejasconsulting.com/courses/stqa.pdf. It's cut down from a flyer that a training company mailed out a few times. My latest Perl tutorial is on page 7 of the mondo-PDF file at http://www.sqe.com/downloads/testautomation.pdf. It's slick, though it's for a conference, not a training seminar. It's hard to find electronic copies of training brochures - most have been formatted for web browsers. There's one at http://www.pnsqc.org/f_broc02/sprgwrkshp.pdf. My snail-mailbox fills up with the hardcopy brochures though. :-) The book "Getting Started in Consulting" by Alan Weiss has some good tips about marketing, much of which applies to training as well as consulting. I can point to other general consulting references if you're interested. -- Danny Faught Tejas Software Consulting http://www.tejasconsulting.com
