I went speed dating last night. I’m actually very happily married, and yet my wife sent me off with her blessings. So what’s up with that? If you’ll recall in the previous two articles (The Keystone Experiment, and The Keystone Experiment - An Open Invitation), I joined the Sacramento Metro Chamber as part of my “Keystone Experiment” to see if I could leverage all that’s available to me as a new member to promote my business, the Bay Area Search Engine Academy. These articles chronicle the steps I took to market in this economy. Hopefully they will demonstrate some things you can do for yourself whether you join a Chamber or use them elsewhere. Speed Dating for Businesses The Metro Cha

The time and date is set, the place is picked, food and beverages have been ordered. Now we just need people at the party. (See “An Open Invitation” below.) Late last month, I wrote about how as a new business in Sacramento, my first priority was to join the Sacramento Metro Chamber and use their tools to the fullest to build my business. The Metro Chamber has a long list of tools in their arsenal to get publicity for their members. However, simply joining is not enough. Business owners must actively use these tools and work them into their marketing plans. My goal is to utilize as much of it as I can, document it here for Internet posterity, and hope that others can learn from it too. Th

I’m a new business owner. Actually, I’m not all that new. I have had a Web consulting business for nearly four years, after having “retired” from corporate life. Last year, I decided to start a second adjunct business, and one key target market area that I wanted to grow into was Sacramento. So I decided to hatch an experiment, and this article will be the first of a series of articles about my experiences. It may document a success or two, or maybe it won’t, depending upon the outcome. Time will tell. Background To give you, the reader a bit of background, I’m a computer technologist coming from a twenty-one year history of working in a corporate environment with data centers, programm