We are setting up a company to provide high end IT training that is not easily availble through regular triaing outfits - univs., professional training institutes, etc.

Since it is eLearning, we are making the assumption that our potential clients can be best contacted on the web through banner ads and search engine marketing.

What are the best places to advertise and which search engines might get us the best exposure?

Thanks.

With all due respect to you and your colleagues for venturing into your own e-learning business, I'm a bit confused by your request. Isn't figuring out how and where to market your products part of the process of establishing your company in the first place? You need to do marketing research to identify and understand your prime market (not make assumptions about it) and use that as part of the data to figure out how and where to market. If you don't have anyone with marketing expertise on your team, there are many possible options -- if you don't have funds, there's always the library or book store.

I have to agree with Fanatic Facilitator.

Exposure is quite different from effective exposure. To get exposure, you can get banner ads in any training or NON-training related sites. The challenge is to place the banners where web users will pay attention to your add, which will lead to a click on your banner (and cost you money each time). Ultimately you want to place the ad in areas that will reach your target audience... to get this info you must do your marketing research. Keep in mind that getting clicks on your banner that don't generate sales is NOT effective marketing either. So don't focus on exposure, or clicks alone.

Thanks for your advise. We have done secondary research using research material available on the internet. We have hired a professional marketing person who developed and marketed an elearning course for a reputed university. That course was named by fortune magazine as one of the best in that field. We have done one round of primary research using an online survey. We are doing a second round of the same survey using search engines... At the end of this phase, the bsiness plan and hence the marketing plan will be tweaked. Hence, we are covered on that front.

The objective of my question was to poll readers/contributors of this discussion group and see if others have used any channel successfully. Any pointers would form a part of our starting point for our research. Again we are not depending one just one source of information. thanks.

Mr. Trainer
Have you or your company considered co-operations?

Since the business of your company is content-oriented, it is good to find a partner that may have complementary business to yours, like training content development tools providers.

Basically, both of you and the partner have the same or similar target audience.