Advertising Overload
Our traditional forms of advertising Perl Training Australia have been simple, direct, and relatively cheap. A few words and special discounts to usergroups and professional organisations, talking at conferences, regular networking, referrals from satisfied clients, occasional appearances in the media, a steady stream of traffic from Google searches. These are effective, and rarely require any sort of financial commitment on our behalf. They've done a pretty good job of getting us clients.

However recently we've been spending real dollars to expand our circle of influence. The sponsorship of OSDC isn't because it gives us a warm feeling by helping an open source conference, it's because we expect to get bookings from it. Some developers may have never heard of PTA before. Some of them will know about us, but may not have known that we have a range of courses by Damian Conway open for enrollment. Entirely different developers may know all that, but have never actually heard Damian speak, and the conference will give them a chance to encounter that first hand. The sponsorship is an investment, and we're hoping for a good return.

Today we were contacted by a developer-focused magazine that's running a feature on training and certification. They had a full-page colour advertising space opposite the feature that they desparately needed to fill due to a last-minute cancellation. Normally we'd never even consider taking our a full-page advertisement in this magazine, the cost would be oppressive, but since they were so eager to have the spot filled by close-of-business, we negotiated an acceptable deal.

So not only are we sponsoring a conference, we're running full-page colour advertisements to 7,100 developers and IT managers, and we're appearing in a different magazine talking about why Perl can hold its own against Java, C#/.NET, and C++. This is just for the month of December, when we'll also be presenting at the conference, running corporate training courses, and taking a week off to go diving. Crickey!