Looking for a way to add value to your products and services and generate keyword-rich content for your site? Offer how-to articles.

Offering free advice is one of the oldest and most effective tricks in the marketer's book. It not only sets you up as an expert with advice to give, it makes your customers feel indebted to you. People value good information, and they appreciate it all the more when it's given away for free.

You don't have to be a professional writer to produce useful articles, either. A quick Internet search [Break and link if needed] on any topic -- how to market your business, write your own HTML snippets, optimize your site for the best search engine listings -- will yield an abundance of information. Once you've found a handful of really good nuggets, think about how those tactics or tools mesh with your niche market. Use concrete examples to explain them.

• If your article is a marketing how-to, create a Sample Company and give concrete examples of how Sample Company would build its Web site content. Don't be afraid to explain why Sample Company chose the Deluxe Hosting Plan based on their organization's size, pairing it with Group Outlook® with Mobile for maximum flexibility as the company grows. Maybe Sample Company didn't have a logo yet and used the Dream Design Team to design a new logo, along with letterhead and business cards.

• Or do you have a real customer who would be the perfect example for your concept? Contact them and ask if they'll let you use them as a case study with a link back to their new Web site -- don't forget to get a testimonial if they're willing.

• If you're pulling together an article on Search Engine Optimization (SEO) -- include a sample meta tag with keywords relevant to your target customer. (Do a couple of quick searches yourself to determine good keyword sets -- you can even view the source code of great sites you find and take examples from their keyword lists.)

Better yet, since you have personal experience with the products you sell, write about them. Tell your customers what you've learned about keyword advertising, or about time-saving shortcuts in Quick Shopping Cart®. Tell them how you increased your inbound links by swapping links with other sites. By making your experiences available to your customers, you shorten their learning curve. And cement their loyalty in the process.

EXPERT's tips
> Provide useful information that is directly relevant to your customers' everyday lives.
> Quote reliable and widely recognized experts, setting their words off with quotation marks.
> Break information down into numbered steps.
> Double-check to make sure your instructions are accurate.


RESOURCES
>MarketingProfs.com
>MarketingExperiments.com
>MarketingSherpa.com