Most people surfing the internet are looking for information. They aren't necessarily out to buy anything. By giving them useful information, you not only entice the search engines to rank you higher due to your abundance of keywords, but other webmasters may find value in your site and they may link to it, increasing your popularity. You will most certainly receive more traffic as a result of offering information.

In addition, customers will appreciate your helpful information. It is a well established fact that customers tend to buy from someone they trust. Obviously, helping them by offering free, valuable information on your site is a fantastic way to gain their trust. They will begin to think of you as an educator. One of the highest paid marketing consultants of this day and age and a marketing legend, Jay Abraham teaches this strategy.

You need to educate your prospects on every aspect you can. Your product, you or your firm, the field and even related fields are all fair game. You might want to assume the prospect really doesn't know anything about your field, and then bring them up to par.

The best strategy is to offer a bit of valuable content directly on your website. It will be advantageous for you to find out what your customers really want to know and write about that. Give them a primer on the topic your product or service relates to. Free reports work excellent for this purpose and if you offer it on your website, you can easily set-up an automatic download system.

As we've already discussed at length, this will help with search engine rankings, gaining links, and with grabbing your prospect's interest.

If you're having trouble coming up with quality information to offer, start by including as much information related to your specific product or service as possible. Explain every last detail of whatever you are selling. Don't leave any room for customers to ask questions. Remember, the best way to accomplish this is to try to put yourself in your customer's shoes. What would he or she need or want to know? If you can manage to do that, you will always outsell your competition.

If your price is low, explain why it's so low. Explain why you offer the best value. Explain what your product or service will do for them. What will they learn? Will it save them time and money? Explain how. Your prospects won't really appreciate what you have to offer them until you explain it to them.

From there, you can dig deeper and include background information about your central topic. You can also include tips, insider information and further instructions. Remember, if your prospect doesn't know about it, it will be much appreciated. Don't take your knowledge for granted?

For instance, if you have a resume-related product for a specific type of career field, offer free info about job interviews in that particular field. Provide details on careers in that field (explain what would they do everyday at work) and maybe even the best schools to go to for the field. You could also provide some helpful job hunting resources.

You could easily generate dozens of pages full of high-quality content that the search engines, other webmasters and perhaps most importantly, your prospects themselves will truly appreciate.

But, it isn't wise to give everything away for nothing. You can put some of your more prized info in an e-book as a special report (even 10 pages is enough), a weekly newsletter, or in an email series. So in addition to all the stuff on the site, you can offer a free sign-up for people who want to receive your more ?prized and valuable info?.

If you offer some sort of software, allow customers to try it free for a short while. If you have an online course, give them a preview for free. The key is to trade this valuable information for your prospect's name and email address so that you may follow up with them later.

You could also offer a weekly, bimonthly or just a monthly ezine. These are email newsletters that you write-up with fresh content on a regular basis. Many people would gladly trade their name and email address for relevant, up-to-date information on a topic that interests them.

Copyright ? 2005 by L A Parmley. All rights reserved.