Marketing on the Web has reversed the traditional process of advertisers reaching out to find customers. Today tens of thousands of surfers roam the Web starved for meaningful information. They reach out for you.

Mastering Online Selling

The key to traditional offline selling has always been reaching out to masses of people through paid advertising, press coverage and interviews to announce the availability of information or product..

These marketers have traditionally relied on a two-fold approach: creating demand for a product and then announcing its availability. In other words stating here I am and I have something that you might want. That doesn't work on the Internet.

Your challenge online is to discover who is searching for the information or the product that you offer. Once you determine that, you search out the words and phrases they use on the search engines to locate the product they seek.

Using that information, you'll open the floodgates and hordes of surfers will visit your web site. That's what the new industry of Search Engine Optimization is all about.

Using Keywords

The process is centered on ?keywords? and ?key phrases.? These are the tools surfers use to locate the products they seek. They are the terms you must discover and use whenever you promote.

You too have tools to help as you ferret out those terms. Companies like Wordtracker help you search for the terms and synonyms that surfers might use. They also report on the number of web sites that are competing for those surfers by featuring those key words in their text. Enter ?keywords? in your favorite search engine to find other companies.

The more popular the keyword, the more surfers will use it. BUT with many other sites using these words to attract them, the less chance you have to reach a meaningful position in the engines' rankings.

For example, I have found that the most obvious keywords in my own work, "retirement" and "writing," are overwhelmingly competitive, forcing me to search far beyond them for other effective words. But I also combine these two words, as I have in the name of my web site www.retirement-writing.com to create a distinctive keyphrase.

Other Options

However, the Web provides other effective ways to supplement your keyword efforts.

The "spiders" that search engines send out to crawl through web sites and evaluate them for positioning on the engine's listing are highly impressed by links, especially inbound links from quality web sites covering the same topics you cover.. They follow links and in that way constantly discover new sites to evaluate.

However, it is important that your links be highly pertinent to your subject matter and come from well-respected sites. The quantity of links you establish is nowhere near as important as the quality. In fact, if the spiders suspect that you are amassing links randomly through "link farms" or other sources, they will punish you.

Press Feeds

The shift of readers from print to the Internet (50 million strong) makes digital

News Engines a prime promotional outlet for Internet marketers. In 2006, Nielsen/Net Ratings reported that Yahoo! News, for example, reaches almost 30 million readers, far more than the New York Times and the Washington Post combined. Companies like PR Newswire are now available to aggregate press releases and feed them to news outlets.

A new technology, Real Simple Syndication (RSS), has blossomed recently that allows you to send material out directly to other sites and to news groups without the intervention of an aggregator.

Distributing Articles

Writing and distributing articles on subjects related to your web site or book is a well proved way to bring visitors to your site and up your ranking on the search engines. Information-hungry surfers will not only read your articles wherever they find them, but, if impressed by what you write, will head right to your site for more.

But remember these surfers are looking for content. Real information, not self-serving promotional chatter. That will turn off readers.

At the end of the piece in your bio box, you are free to mention your writings, your web site or any other means the reader has to contact you.. It serves as your mini advertisement and should contain direct links to appropriate pages on your site.

You are free to send articles directly to other sites and blogs. By distributing them through aggregators like www.isnare.com, you will reach tens of thousands of potential readers.

Take advantage of this new world of topsy-turvy marketing and see your book and article sales soar.