How to Create a Free Report and Use It to Make Money Online

Free reports are getting more useful on the Internet nowadays. Many people who make money online started to use them simply because it works. Reports can be in any form but no matter what the form is, a report is simply a mini e-book usually 5 to 20 pages long that contains information about a specific topic. Visitors find free reports about topics that will help them solve a problem, learn to do something or become more knowledgeable. So if you have a useful report, there will be a group of people want to read it.

Creating a report is just like creating a lengthy e-book, it involves a few steps.

Deciding a Topic
The first thing you need is of course a topic. The topic or theme you select to write for your report needed to be related to the topic of your website. You are going to offer your free report to you visitors, so the report topic have to be the same with your website in order to attract your visitors download your report.

You may choose a general topic first then narrow down the general topic to one or two specific topics.

One you know specifically what your topic is, the next move is to gather information and content about the topic you like to write. You can find information about your topic through search engines. The search engines will provide tons of information. You are going to have to do some filtering work and consolidate information that you actually want.

Starting You Report Writing Project
You need to first write an outline for your report. You need organization and form. An outline provides both.

After that, you can start writing content for your report. If you have knowledge in your topic, with the information you collected, writing a report shouldn't be a problem to you unless you don't like to write.

Alternative you may hire someone to produce content for your report. Guru.com and Elance.com are good places to find an expert writer. Just tell the writer what you want and the writer will write you a quality report.

If hiring professional writer is too expensive to you, then you have to look for third option which is using PLR content. There are PLR articles sites offer hundreds of PLR articles in different topics every month. You may join a PLR article site and merge the PLR articles of a topic into a report. You may need to re-write your PLR articles for better quality and a good outline is needed to make your information presented in a logical sequence.

Adding Income Streams to Your Report
If you report offer the content that your website visitors want to read, you visitors will want to download it to get the info and possible generate good income for you.

Build a Profitable List
Report is proven to be useful for building a list. So the most important thing you must to is to create a sign up form and place the form on your website so that your visitors can see your offer of free report and type in their name and email address to sign up and download your free report.

Every visitor who downloads your report will be opted-in to your list during the sign up process. This way you can grow your list and occasionally you can send your offers to your list. Those who trust you may purchase from you every time you send out a promotional email. This is a good and steady long term stream of online income to you.

To get even more list subscribers with your report, you can create a squeeze page specially for people to sign up and download your free report. By using different marketing methods to send visitors directly to your squeeze page, you can expect to see a great profitable list.

2) Insert Affiliate Links into Your Report
Whenever possible, place a related affiliate links into a content page of your report to refer your readers a useful product or service. This is one of the ways that some Internet marketers applied to make lot of cash online.

But you don't want your readers feel like they are reading a sale letter, so don't place too many affiliate links into your report. Try to make it like 1 affiliate links in every 4 pages. Make sure the affiliate products that you are recommending are relevant to what the readers are reading on that page.

3) Selling Advertising Space in Your Report
You may search for advertisers who are selling products or services directly related to your report topic and contact them to offer your advertising space.

Marketing and Distributing Your Free Report
When everything is ready, it is time to market and advertise your reports to attract your target visitors to sign up and download your report. There are numerous methods to reach your free report offer to your target visitors of course:

Pay Per click Advertising
Advertise your offer on Google and Yahoo search engine is probably the fastest way to get people to download your report. But it pays to get result, make sure your set your budget not too high to keep your cost under control.

Use a Banner Ad
You can find someone to create a banner ad specifically to promote your free report. Those who click you banner ad should be send to your squeeze page instead of to your website for getting better result.

So where to place your banner ad on? I would suggest you to do some searches on Google to find sites and blogs that are related to your report and request to place your ads on these sites and blogs.

You may also search for other popular blogs that are related to your report. These popular blogs usually have large traffic, so they may send you some consistent daily traffic.

Article marketing
This is a very low cost traffic-generating method. You can hire someone to generate a few articles every day for you and submit them to big article directories like Ezinearticles, goarticles.com and ArticleDashboard for publication. Just make sure your writer is supplying articles that are relevant to your reports or website topic.

Your article pages in article directories will attract readers. Some readers will click your link inside your author bio to visit your squeeze page and get your report.

E-zines Advertising
Today, E-zines are everywhere on the Internet. Just type in the keyword 'Ezines Advertising' in Google and you will find a lot of e-zines offering advertising opportunities in different categories.

There are free and paid e-zines advertising opportunities, the free one wouldn't produce result usually, so you should directly look the paid one. Make sure you pick the categories that are related to your report when doing e-zines Advertising.

Placing paid e-zine ads can do some help in getting more people to download your report as some e-zine readers are actually reading your offer and signing up on your squeeze page for your report.

The methods to market a report aren't limited to the above methods only. There are many more other methods you can use for distributing your report. But most of these methods have one thing in common which is that they all require some time, effort and energy from you to see result and bring in money to you.