Phoebe Chongchua's Live Fit Magazine

With the spectacular growth of technology and the World Wide Web, nearly everyone is either running a small business online or considering it. Hobbies and passions are emerging online as start-up businesses and later turning into great successes.

Whether you work for a large company, run your own business, or have an Internet-based-home business, most everyone knows the value of word-of-mouth advertising to help grow clientele.

These days increasing productivity and building a stronger, healthier bottom line relies greatly on developing relationships with clients who literally help sell your product or service. Consultative selling is the buzz word that is proving to be the catalyst to earning higher market shares for a particular product or service.

But getting a large body of people to promote your product/service can be very difficult, especially when you're just starting out. Some people have catchy products that seem to create a sort of cult following all on their own, think: Crocs shoes or the iPod. If you haven't reached that level yet, not to worry-a little time, determination, and well-thought-out marketing strategies can take you to the next level.

One important thing to remember, is, just as in many cultures, stories transfer the easiest and help to spread information-sort of like gossip. The more a product/service contains a message that can be stuck inside a story, the greater the likelihood of it being transferred from person-to-person via verbal and/or written communication such as through emails or forwarding links. This is why urban legend emails that often contain scary and false information are passed around the Internet. The messages in these types of emails are highly sticky (interesting) and easy to remember. Here are just a few suggestions for some marketing campaigns that catch not only the public but also the media's attention-(just remember to keep your message sticky).

Virtual advertising: this is very common. It's advertising that is computer generated-ads, logos, and products that are superimposed in videos and streamed onto the web.

Ad creep: this is the sometimes intriguing and sometimes annoying act of seeing advertising in places that it never used to exist before. On cars, commercial bathroom walls, floors, in cartoons, and more. It's sometimes subtle and sometimes in-your-face advertising.

Buzz marketing: aims to get people talking about the product/service in an excited manner. It creates a frenzy about the product/service. This is also called influence marketing and word-of-mouth advertising.   

Viral marketing: uses past clients who help to pass along the message or pitch of the product/service to others; it gets its name after biological viruses that are passed on from one person to another.         

Regardless of which marketing approach you use, staying consistent with your message is equally important and helps to give you the peace of mind you need to live well personally and professionally.