Our "Of Course" newsletter is published twice a year, and we take limited advertising in each issue. About 2000 copies are mailed out to users and decision makers concerned with open source programming; we maintain our own contact and mailing list for the purpose. "Of Course" is a also a training reference guide, and copies are typically retained by the recipients throught the six months validity of each issue. Please contact Lisa Ellis if you would like further details

One of the issues that any company has is how to find new customers. We're lucky (or perhaps we make our own luck) in that the majority of our business comes through the personal recommendation of our courses by past trainees and their employers. We also actively submit our courses to internet sites that offer free listings, and this brings a proportion of new business.

With the Internet maturing, the number of specialist "directory" sites has mushroomed, and we're happy to listed by those that don't require a payment for the listing. We feel that directories that only list training companies that pay for the `honour' of being listed don't well suit our particular marketing niche, and we choose to make better use of our sales and marketing budget through tools such as our "Of Course" newsletter.

If you don't find us listed on a directory site that claims to have good coverage, should you rule us out for your training? Certainly not! A number of such sites don't state that they charge people to be listed (we feel that this is intentionally misleading) and we even came across a case where a site claimed to list all courses of a certain type, but wouldn't add ours unless we pay them. We believe that such claims contravene advertising standards rules, and we won't deal with such companies. We don't need to; our courses are busy, our diary comfortably full, and we pass on the savings made in not paying for listings in the form of keeping our course prices down.

With our niche training products, neither local area advertising nor worldwide advertising suit us well - however, there are circumstances in which we would consider local exposure if there was (say) a UK or Northern European Open Source magazine.