Following are five ways to find the trade or professional association for your industry:
You can use the Google approach we tried for laundromats. Enter the name of the product or service. If it takes multiple words, like "child care," put the phrase in quotation marks. Add a comma and the word association. For this example, Google turns up groups such as the National Child Care Association and the National Association for Family Child Care.

If that does not work, the American Society of Association Executives Gateway has a searchable online directory of nearly 7,000 trade and professional associations.

An industry portal is a Web site with capabilities for multiple groups like current members, potential members, media, and policy makers. Portals offer multiple services like disseminating documents, chat rooms, discussion groups, registration services, databases, and the like. Polson Enterprises maintains one of the most extensive industry portals pages on the Internet.

Most public and university libraries have Gale Publishing's Directory of Associations, which lists tens of thousands of trade and professional groups.

One other way to find associations is by looking up the magazines that target specific industries and professions (called trade magazines), since many are published by trade and professional associations. The best online search source is Oxbridge Communications which has over 75,000 newsletters, catalogs, and other publications in its database. Printed directories of publications by Bacon Publishing or Burrelle can be found on many libraries' reference shelves.