[EMAIL PROTECTED] (Danny Faught) writes:
> 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've taught for the local community college for a couple of years now,
but this is the first time I've done it under my own flag so to speak.
I talked to a couple of training providers around here, but they seem
to all be completely Windows-oriented and not interested in Perl
("Perl? What's that? Can you do Visual Basic?").
As for risk, I've been lucky enough so far. I had eight people
attending my first class. Now most of them were friends, former
coworkers, or friends of those, but a couple of them were actual bona
fide customers who found me via the Web. And I have others lining up
too. So I'm pretty optimistic.
> 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.
Well, the way I see it there are the big names like Randal Schwartz,
community colleges, and a few individuals like me. I haven't seen
much else.
> > * 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?
As far as that site is concerned, I'm very happy with the conversion
rate, though the number of hits is somewhat lower than I might want.
(I won't post the numbers for reasons that should be obvious.) Though
far and away the most hits came from Google.
> > * 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.
There are a lot in my area too, but I'm sure your list will give me
some ideas I hadn't thought of.
> > 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. :-)
I'll take a look at those when I have some more time.
> 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.
Thanks for the suggestion. I will try to find a copy.
--Bill.
--
William R Ward [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.wards.net/~bill/
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
AMAZING BUT TRUE: There is so much sand in northern Africa that if it were
spread out it would completely cover the Sahara Desert!
