In this post, I’m going to talk about a technique that has been around the industry for long but I have never seen many people do it effectively. It’s making money online by writing and selling short reports while building a high quality list which you can later segment as well! Short reports (10-20) pages generally focus on one single question, and aren’t essentially too explanatory by nature and are priced at around $17-$27. They sell really, really well and help you make money as well as build that damn list.

Without any fluff, let’s get the ball rollin’ -

R for Research

Market Research happens to be our first step. There are short report ideas floating literally everywhere but we need to pick one up to compile a short report. The best place, in my opinion, for this job are highly active niche forums. If you carefully observe the behavior, trends, common questions & problems etcetera, you’ll notice some similarities, and when you do that – BANG! You’ve hit a good prospect idea. When enough people are looking to solve a single problem, you have a great opportunity – Write a small report which solves the problem and present it to them.

For an example, for the Internet Marketing niche, here go a few ideas -

… How to increase your conversions?
… How to drive traffic? [Actually, you can write TONS of short reports on various traffic techniques]
… How to make first $100 online?

and so on…

When you browse through some of the most active niche forums, you’ll come up with such ideas. It’s easy. And simple.

Okay, once you have an idea of what you’re going to write about, let’s go to the next step.

O for Outline

The next step is to outline, make a brief sketch of what you’re going to write. This step is not *essential* but it helps me focus and craft a better sales letter and overall marketing plan. Load any writing program you use and list down the question and your answer to it. Look out for points to expand and those which need a little bit of details. For an example, A report on making your first $1000 can talk about a couple of methods, each detailed in about 10-12 pages.

Another important – very important – thing is actually naming the product. Too many people neglect this and I bet they’re losing money with that approach. If you see major online product launches, they ain’t named through a slam bang approach. Product Launch Formula, Mass Control, Traffic Secrets, Day Job Killer etc… all go down as some of the major launches in the history and if you observe – they have great names. All those names convey what the product is about in at maximum three words. A good name for a newbie short report may be “Newbie Success Blueprint”, “Newbie Profit Formula” etc.

Positioning yourself and your product right is very, very important.

S for Sales Copy

Okay, this might be a bit surprising – sales letter before the product?

Well, YES! That’s how I do it, that’s how it works for me and that’s how I’d recommend you do it.

Writing the sales copy first has its own benefits. You’re very enthusiastic about the product and that can effect the sale. You’ve an idea of an ideal product and you compile the copy based on that idea. If the end product doesn’t deliver on the promises made, you can always modify the product and add those, or even remove those points from the copy.

I’ve talked about Copywriting in the past… if you take a look, I’m sure you’ll find something interesting there. In the upcoming days, I’ll compile a short post on Copywriting for short information products.

W for Write

Next step is to write the product. You need MicroSoft Word, Open Office or any other word editing program for the purpose.

Load it up, choose a suitable theme and color scheme, select 13 pt Verdana, Times New Roman, Arial or any font you like. It’s been gathered from tests that Arial is the most readable font on the screen.

Expand on the outline you’ve already available and make sure you deliver on the promises you made in the sales copy. You could start with a basic introduction of yourself and quickly get to the point. We don’t have much space for filler information anyways.

When you have more than one short report on the market, you’ll be able to link ‘em up (i.e. cross sell) each other. Someone who is interested in making $100 a day might be interested in getting his conversions higher, might be interested in attracting more traffic through article marketing and so on. When you have products in the market, utilize your reach and cross sell.

Last but not the least, evaluate what you’ve read. Get it proofread, double checked and edited for any grammar, spelling errors. Having bad grammar, text that is hard to decipher can make it a bad purchase for a buyer and he’s less than likely to buy any more stuff from you. You get the money but you lose a customer.

S for Sell

Now, the next, the last and the most exciting step of it all – actually selling that report. You have a sales letter, a great product… now what? We’ve to sell the report… but HOW? Well, our first step should be to grab a domain name and get a decent site up. The domain name, if possible, must be the report’s name. Now, we’ve to drive traffic to our products. This is the toughest part of it all, and discussing about tons of traffic techniques is out of the scope of this article but I’ll discuss them in coming posts.

One way of getting loads of traffic to the website without doing much work is recruiting affiliates. I wrote a product on getting affiliates to sell your product, you may find it useful. What I do here is I give away 100% commissions on the front end and make money on the backend with a deep sales funnel. More on that later.

For today, that’s it. Please share your comments below!