Today at lunch I looked at LinkedIn advertising. I only capture the last part to share here, but you put in a title, short text, and an optional image, then you narrow the geographical area and then pick a functional area OR job titles. LI says that nets out to 23k members in the Orlando area. If I change to job titles, it goes to less than 1000.

I decided to try it early just to get a feel for it. It doesn’t like wrongly capitalized words. SQL, SSIS, DBA – the acronym police don’t like them! I set a campaign to run for Orlando IT professionals at a minimum bid of $2 with a cap of $10/day. I’ll let that run through Monday and see if/how it works.

The real question is, when and how much to spend? We don’t have a huge budget, so maybe we invest $100-$200 if it seems like it will generate any traffic. Right now I’m thinking to do do this 3-4 weeks out. By then we should have gotten most of the people on our list that will attend to register, and we’ll be working on the ‘bring a friend’ angle. Maybe that’s the right to try to reach the people we’re not connected to.