I have details of every company in my city - how to use it?

Why would you bother to acquire such a list, if you didn't know what to do with it?

The mind boggles.

Sell/rent the info to other companies.

Send postcards offering SEO services.

Contacting all, though, without knowing more about what makes them tick, is going to produce a lot of waste.

Make them a page on your local business directory and contact them to tell them you've done that and can help them get more clients in a myriad other ways.

Do you live in a city with a population of 14?

OK buddy,

Take your list and dump it into Excel if it already isn't there.

Save yourself a fresh copy of the data so you can mess around with it but still have the clean original copy available for next time.

Sort by industry. Niche down and pick one for now. You can come back for the others later. Pick the one you feel most comfortable with. Hide the others.

Sort again by size. I would pick companies with 10 or more employees. You may pick 5+. Companies of this size have cash flow. Cash flow means they are used to ongoing expenses like payroll and services they buy every month. Adding one more service (yours) just isn't a big deal for these people. Hide the others.

Sort by years in business if possible. You have already done the majority of this work by filtering by size, but it's possible some newbies could have jumped into the marketplace with a soon-to-be-gone bag of cash they're blowing on recruits in anticipation of hitting it big. Someone who's been in business at least 2 years has lived a little. More importantly, they haven't died. This is kind of important and in niches like real estate agent is downright critical. Hide the others.

Sort by those who have an email address in the listing. Hide the others.

Now you have a short list of prospects in a specific niche, employing 10 (or 5) people or more, who have been in business 2+ years and have an email address for you to contact them with.

Can you see how this pre-qualified list is MUCH more valuable than the "blob" list you started with?

It's a list of SURVIVORS.

It's a list of people with some CASH (probably).

It's a list of people who are used to adding "one more thing"--a staff member, a service, something that will help them...and they don't have to struggle to do it. They just decide.

And it's a list of people you can REACH.

Maybe ewenmack will be nice and let you know about his "Appropriate Person" email...

But frankly he's already given enough ammo to you in this thread and the one linked to in its opening line.

(Do you know the answers? Can you call yourself a qualified designer if you don't? Fortunately since he's pointed them out, they're easy to look up.)

You can turn these into emails, can't you?

Not that hard.

A little synthetic creativity and you have a 2 or 3 email series. Heck, maybe even send them a teaser that links to a website. Your website. With this expanded message on it. MUCH better than a generic "Hi I'm website designer IG-88...after being a bounty hunter for the Empire didn't go so well, I picked up my web design skills and--" well, you get the point.

If you don't feel like going the email route, use your knowledge of decision makers from the list and connect with them on LinkedIn. They're more likely to read InMail...but it make take them 3-7 days to get around to it. They don't live in their email accounts like IMers do.

Be ready to measure up to expectations.

After moving through the first niche, repeat again for a second and so on.