Do you ever offer free help but it still sounds like 'Selling'?

Yes. We have a platform that curates free startup high-quality knowledge around the web. Once we see a problem that is answered in a specific resource from our database, we link it to people. That is seen as 'selling' (it's 100% free to use but still). In reality, it is indeed one of the marketing strategies to gain traffic, but also we do actually spend time linking only the resources that actually can be very helpful for the one asking it.