More clients means more money, right? It also means more awareness and rapid company growth. However, it can be a challenge to ramp up your client list quickly. It takes a solid strategy and a proven plan. Here are five smart strategies to get more clients fast.

#1 Partners! Partnerships can help you double your list overnight. Multiply your list and you multiply the number of opportunities you have to turn prospects into customers. And there are a number of ways you can make a partnership work for you.

For example, you could promote a partner’s e-book or product on your website in exchange for them promoting your e-book, product or service on theirs. You could swap reviews or even exchange advertisements.

However, one of the best ways to optimize a partnership is to cross-promote each others opt-in list and free giveaway. Then, when people sign up, you have permission to communicate and market to them. Have a product promotion ready to go and really capitalize on your new subscribers.

#2 Offer a huge referral reward for new clients. Get out your list of clients and prospects and offer an astounding reward for referrals. Put your current customers to work for you. It’s sort of like an affiliate system but it’s a one-time thing. Less work for you!

#3 Stir up a commotion. Sometimes all it takes to build your client list is a little excitement. Stirring up a commotion with humor, a great video or article is always successful. Or if humor isn’t your thing, what about controversy? You can boost your awareness and your customer list virtually overnight.

#4 Offer a “never been seen before” promotion. People love to get things for free. Next to that, they love a great deal. Release your best product or service at an unheard-of price and market the heck out of it. Really make a splash.

#5 Expert status. Who are the experts in your industry and how can you work with them? Do they have an information product you can buy the rights to? Do they have partnership opportunities? Can you interview them and distribute the recording on your website or blog? Can you write a guest blog post or article for their site?

Partnering with experts expands your reach more than you can imagine. Simply standing next to an industry expert boosts your credibility, reach and awareness. Study industry experts and determine how you can provide value to them. Be ready with a spectacular promotion to take advantage of all of your new website visitors.

Regardless of why you want to get new clients fast, having a plan in place and approaching it strategically makes a difference. Explore your resources. Look to partners, industry experts and your own product or service portfolio for ideas. You have it in you to reach your goals. Take the steps to make it happen.

The idea behind viral marketing is that if you can get the product up in multiple places on the web and in front of as many eyes as possible for as little money as possible, you are doing some really good marketing on a budget. Most of the companies behind this style of promotion are smaller businesses that just want to get the word out about their product but don’t have the money to hire a public relations firm or spend money on advertising.

One of the more effective methods of viral marketing is to form a Joint Venture with another business. While you have the product, your JV partner may bring his customer content list of thousands and his marketing skills to the project. In most cases a JV will benefit both parties involved with an equal split of the profits and possibly the work.

Another form of getting your product, to race around the internet world, is to set up an affiliate program with 100s of individuals and business promoting your product. The difference between a JV and an affiliate, is the affiliate will only get paid a percentage of each individual sale personally made by them.

If you want to get into the nitty-gritty of what is viral marketing, then you should realize that it is something anyone with a computer and a little bit of technological savvy can do.  First of all, using social networking sites like Facebook, Twitter or MySpace is a fairly ingenious way of getting your product or service out to the public. You can set up a site, get all of the relevant information listed on your homepage, and then add friends.

Theoretically, just adding whoever to your profile isn’t going to do you any good as they are likely looking to connect with friends and won’t be interested in your product.  The best way to market yourself is to look through the MySpace groups and find those with similar interests.  Say that you are a writer marketing a new book.  Adding other writers isn’t going to get you a whole lot of customers, but adding people who are fans of your genre, well, that’s a different story.

Some viral marketing ideas include sending out chain letters with information about your product buried within a story that urges people to continue resending the letter to all of their friends. This is a decent idea, but if you use the chain letter to try and collect money for something that doesn’t exist or run a scam for a business, then that is fraud and is a crime. You have to be careful and make sure that you aren’t breaking any laws.

Now that you have an answer to the question of what is viral marketing, you should also know that using viral marketing plans too much can cause some problems.  If people feel they are being slammed by the product, then you are going to find many of your potential clients turned off by your aggressiveness.

Just remember that you’re trying to get the word out and tell people about your idea without being too pushy and you should be just fine.

Whether or not the application will take off is yet to be seen, but regardless of the success, or lack thereof, that this new app. will have, it’s very interesting to see Burger King making such a strong move into the world of Facebook as a means to reach its target customer base.

The group Burger King is targeting, the tweens through twenty-somethings that make up the bulk of Facebook’s user base, are pounded with ads more so than any generations past. The constant attachment to the internet comes with a constant supply of advertisements, for everything you could imagine, delivered from all angles. Predictably, these savy-surfers have become very good at simply ignoring the ads and surfing away through their games or chat or whatever content they may be enjoying. Ads aren’t considered the bad guy, but your run of the mill, cookie cutter advertisements simply won’t cut it with these folks.

S0 how does one get their ads noticed among a sea of people who’ve trained themselves to turn a blind eye? Easy. Well, easily said at least. You turn your ad into the very content that these people are on the internet to enjoy in the first place. While viral campaigns and the like are not new by any means in online advertising, gigantic companies like Burger King tend to be slow to react to the more cutting edge ways or reaching their audience. This is one reason it’s great to see BK taking such an active interest in spicing up their internet campaigns.

Another recent foray into the world of blending the line between ad and content is Burger King’s partnership with Seth McFarlane of Family Guy fame. “Seth McFarlane’s Cavalcade of Cartoon Comedy” is a series of animated shorts done by McFarlane’s company, Fuzzy Door Productions, and sponsored by Burger King. Available on YouTube, the intro to each episode has the King, Burger King’s mascot, on the run from some pop-culture danger, such as the Hovito warriors from Raiders of the Lost Ark. By sponsoring these videos, Burger King has essentially produced an advertisement, but in such a way that instead of being a burden, viewers are more than happy to watch it.

That willing involvement is the key to successful campaigns on the net. People are more than happy to go to YouTube and watch the opening sequence with the King and then the short, and quite funny animation that follows. Likewise, the tongue in cheek fun of telling your friend you sold them off for a free hamburger will make Burger King’s new Facebook campaign enjoyable enough for people not to mind the fact that they’re being fed an advertisement.

Burger King has done a very good job at using new media to reach out to its target audiences, and the way that they’re going about it tells me that someone in the marketing department at BK knows what the score is when it comes to reaching out to the types of users that sites like YouTube and Facebook attract.