Written by Bob McClain, Web Copywriting Expert

All the great sales pages in the world are useless if no one finds the website. And Google isn’t impressed by sales pages. They are impressed by good quality, informative content.

Since the Internet is one big popularity contest, Google watches to see which content gets the most links. Because the content that gets the most links is the content Google wants to send people to.

So you don’t want to write content just to write content. It has to be targeted to your audience and also meet your business goals.

First, you need to know what your goals are for the content…

If you’re an affiliate marketer, obviously the goal of the page is to sell some affiliate program. But you don’t want to sound like you’re selling anything. You want to write a real, helpful and informative article about the subject matter.

Usually, an affiliate product makes something easier or faster. The best way to sell something like that is to write an article telling people how to do it manually and then at the end, mention that if they want to “automate” the process and do it the way you do it to save time since “time is money”, they can get the software or book or program or whatever that you are using.

Writing reviews of products is also a good way to sell a product without looking like you’re selling and create quality content at the same time. However, make sure you write a legitimate review, wa    rts and all. Don’t “sell” the product. Talk about how you’ve used it and what you liked and didn’t like about it. And then tell them why you decided to go ahead and get the product in spite of some of the problems.

If you’re looking for “linkbait”…

…then the idea is to write really long and informative articles crammed full of really useful content and information. And make sure that the title of your article has your primary keyword phrase for that article in it. You should have gone to Google Adwords Keyword Tool first to figure out a strong keyword phrase that gets at least 5,000 local searches per month but has no more than “average” competition.

In case you don’t know what “linkbait” means, it is simply an article that was written for the sole purpose of getting lots of attention, lots of links, and hopefully goes viral. And viral means lots of people email it to their friends or “dig” it, or give you a trackback on their blog.

No one has the time to write “linkbait” articles every day (or maybe you do), but you should aim to write a good “linkbait” article or blog post at least once every month. And when you do, pull out all the stops to get it noticed.

One other idea to use “linkbait” articles for is to use on HubPages or Squidoo pages. Then make sure that your “linkbait” page links to several pages on your website.