One of the most important principles for business success is to create awareness of your product or service. If you are an artist, a life coach, a public speaker, or a business owner, you must get the word out. The problem is that keeping your product or service in front of the public can be more expensive than ever.

Another major problem is that we live in a world where consumers actively resist most marketing ? particularly advertising. When humans are foolish enough to read an idiotic advertisement, they realize that they have wasted their time and haven't gained anything useful. Eventually, most individuals don't look at most advertisements. I, for one, can spend a whole hour reading the newspaper and not read one advertisement.

Hiring a celebrity spokesperson to promote your product might help ? but I bet that you can't afford this. Even if you can afford a beautifully executed commercial on the Super Bowl broadcast, it's still an extremely risky bet. You will be lucky to gain enough increased sales of your product to pay 10 percent of the cost of producing and running the commercial.

This means that you have to use cost-effective alternatives. The best one is publicity. Publicity is information that concerns a person, a group, an event, or a product.

Publicity is achieved through various media including newspapers, magazines, radio, TV, and the Internet. An especially compelling advantage to this approach is that publicity requires little or no money ? all it has to cost you is your time and effort.

The biggest advantage that publicity has over advertising, however, is that people see publicity as much more credible than advertising. Now is this cool, or what? Something that you can get for free can be ten to a hundred times as effective as something for which you have to pay thousands of dollars.

In fact, even millions of dollars of advertising can't buy the same results that the best free publicity can give you. Above all, publicity sets you aside from the competition much better than advertising ever can.

One key to getting publicity is controversy. Only by being different and daring can you be controversial. Clearly, the media loves controversy ? take advantage of this.

Being controversial entails ruffling some feathers and even getting a good portion of the population downright upset at you. This means that perhaps a quarter to a third of the public will love you. The remainder will either hate you or be indifferent to your message.

The problem with most publicity seekers is that they are trying to be too nice; they are not willing to take a stand or be the least bit controversial. Never let the urge to be nice interfere with your being different. When it comes to publicity, there is a lot of truth to George Bernard Shaw's words: ?The secret to success is to offend the greatest number of people.?

All things considered, the best marketing techniques often go against common sense. There is no telling where a stupid and bizarre idea might lead if you are willing to try it out. Above all, be bold and be shameless. Try anything that is legal to get your product or service noticed.

Again, if you want to get a lot of great publicity for your product or business, you have to do something truly new ? even bizarre ? to stand out. Notorious publicity applied to your product or service will get extraordinary results. Indeed, fifteen minutes of bizarre publicity beats $1,000,000 of advertising ? ten times out of ten!