A good way to do a cheaper and better signal is to contribute something back to the community. In the good old days, people volunteered for various things in th

A good way to do a cheaper and better signal is to contribute something back to the community. In the good old days, people volunteered for various things in their city/state/country. These days, you can easily contribute code to an open source project, or run user groups. An engineer can hack together a cool DIY project and let the internet run with it. Are you a writer? Publish using on-demand services like Lulu. The key part to this is marketing and raising awareness. Without harping too much: social media makes marketing for one-person projects doable.