When you have finally built the next best thing in Web 2.0-land and are looking for more customers, visitors, subscribers,… maybe this approach can help you.

You have probably built your project with a specific audience in mind (if for some unexplainable reason you did not, take time to think of that now and evaluate if everything still aligns!). Now use the web to get lists of that target groups’ contact details.

Let’s say your customers are small businesses. Try looking for lists of their certifications: they always like to mention their contact details (just like you need to do yourself). Or if you are looking for people that like to travel, use social networking sites to pull out lists of people that indicated they like visiting specific countries.

The concept is: there are lists of contact details for almost everything. Think about where your prospects gather. The only thing you need to do afterwards is go through them and contact them. As personal as possible. It doesn’t harm to get a good copywriter (Dutch) to create an attractive e-mail or letter of course.

Even with an average success rate of 5%, that can be more rewarding than “lazy” alternatives like Google Adwords because you are 100% certain the people you contact are your audience.

Let’s just hope they take the bait!

Wouldn’t it be great to have a place where you can look for people that use the same combination of technologies like you are?

Let’s say that you’re working with ExtJs and Zend Framework: it sounds extremely useful to be able to look at a list of people who also combine those and possibly contact them or post in some kind of related forum. I can imagine there are lots of people out there that would at least be happy to find best practices or examples on the stuff that they are combining. The combinations cause things to differ from the manuals/forums/groups of each separate (in this case) technology.

Basically this can apply to combining anything: .NET + MySQL, Windows Vista + Photoshop, Ubuntu + VirtualBox, Dell notebook + Vodaphone,… Or how about business in India + United States?

Let’s hope I didn’t just invent the next social network? If this proves to be the case: please don’t forget me! ;-)