Short reports are incredibly valuable because not only will they appeal to the busy shopper, but they are much easier to create than full-length books.
In fact, reports can be as short as 10 pages
long because if you’ve done your job at filling the pages with solid information, your audience will still
be satisfied with their purchase.
And think about this: With short reports, you can cover more ground
in less time.
You know how quickly some niches and buying patterns change. What’s hot today is often irrelevant tomorrow, and in the digital product business you need to keep a close pulse on your market so that you know what your audience is interested in and willing to buy.
Also, when it comes to digital products, the early bird always gets the worm.
What I mean by that is you need to stay on top of trends.
For example, if a certain money-making
opportunity suddenly becomes a hot topic, you’ll make a lot more money if
you’re one of the first to create a short report that outlines how someone can jump
on board. First to market always wins.
If you were to create a massive digital product that takes months to develop,
you run the risk that by the time you bring it to the market, the topic isn’t
nearly as popular as it had been.
Short
reports remove that risk.
You don’t have to worry about your product launch taking months, or even weeks,
giving you the advantage of being able to launch quality, in-demand products on
current hot topics, before demand dies down or the market becomes
saturated.
Plus, since you won’t spend a lot of time creating each report, even if they fail to meet your expectations, you can quickly replace it with a new report that’s been tweaked to sell.
They’re also a lot more affordable to
outsource since you could hire an expert writer for half of the price of
someone hired to write a full-length book.
Short reports are also one of the easiest ways of evaluating a market, test new
niches and identify demand, while there is an active buying
pattern.
If you’ve ever considered creating an information product before, you know just
how much time can be spent on market research.
You could literally spend months testing the viability of a market, and trying to come up with a unique angle or slant so that your product stands out.
By the time your product is “market ready”,
you’ve lost a couple of months in potential earnings, not to mention your
opportunity to position your product in front of a majority audience may be
gone since they may have purchased other books and are no longer interested in
the topic.
With short reports, since you’re not spending a lot of time creating the
products, you can make money faster, while working on expanding your collection
of in-demand products.
In fact, you could create a report that continues to sell for years in just a couple of hours!
Are you excited? You should be! This is an exciting opportunity to make money with info-products quickly and easily.
In the
next chapter, we’ll take a closer look at how you can create a bestselling
report in under two hours.
Reports That Outsell
When it comes to writing short reports that people want to buy, your content must be both conversational and engaging.
It doesn’t matter what niche or market you’re in, if you want to create bestselling reports that people want to talk about to others and encourage repeat sales, you need to create content that is easy to understand and keeps their attention.
Here are a few simple rules to follow:
- Use contractions in your information product (Example: Use “that’s” instead of “that is”). This makes sure that your content doesn’t read too stiff or formal. You can still write in an authoritative voice while keeping it light and entertaining.
- Break up your paragraphs into easily digestible segments of information. Don’t create a wall of text! No one wants to wade through extremely long paragraphs. You want to keep skim readers in mind who will just blaze through your content quickly, picking out the golden nuggets that are of interest
- Create chapter headlines and sub-headlines that are interesting and bold. It’s your job to keep your reader glued to the pages of your product, and you can do that by offering ‘visual guidance’ by defining sections, while keeping them engaged.
Remember, on average, consumers read at an 8th grade level. That means you want to dumb-down your content so that anyone can understand and follow it.
And finally, the less fluff and filler, the better. You’re not trying to achieve a certain page count. You’re trying to get the most important points across, cutting out the fat and delivering a polished, meaty report.
When creating your content, you want to first research your market so that you can identify the top questions being asked by people interested in that niche. That way you can slant your content so that it addresses those key issues.
When you can identify what motivates your audience, you’ll be able to create best-selling information products that leave your readers thoroughly satisfied, and better yet, able to take action with your material.
You need to clearly address their concerns early on,
reassuring them that your information is beneficial to them to motivate them
into taking action and to remove skepticism.
Creating In-Demand Reports
When writing your reports, you need to narrow your scope so that you have a very specific focus for your report.
That way not only are you providing a solution to a specific problem, but you’ll be able to create your product in just a couple of hours with a clear outline.
Conducting research and brainstorming will make writing your book a breeze. Don’t underestimate the value of good research and an outline.
Write down the top questions you find; they’ll make fantastic chapter titles or headlines throughout your report.
Take notes of everything you uncover when researching your market. Pay attention to Facebook groups as they’re a goldmine for valuable information based on ongoing conversation and repeat questions.
Brainstorming is the information-collecting process that will kick-start your writing process. Even if you’re planning to outsource your content you’ll want to research enough to be able to come up with an outline to hand your writer.
Start off by thinking from your readers’ perspective. Ask yourself questions about the topic. If you were looking for a book about your topic, what questions would you want answered in this book?
For example, let’s say you’re writing a book on credit repair. What do most people want to know about credit repair? What are your questions? Write them all down, no matter how insignificant they seem.
Here’s an idea of a few things you might want to know if you were searching for credit repair information:
• How do I know what company to trust?
• How long does it take for an item to be removed from my credit report?
• What defense do I have against identity theft that’s ruined my credit?
• Can I get a loan with bad credit?
If you know a lot about your topic, think about the questions that you had when you were first learning about it.
You’ll want to make sure there’s enough information in your report to be valuable for people who are new to the topic, as well as people who already have a bit of knowledge about it.
Google.com/Alerts is a fantastic niche tool. You just enter the
search term you want to learn more about and you’ll be notified whenever that
keyword phrase is used on social media, websites or blogs. It’s a great way
to uncover recurring questions and hot topics.
Try to get behind the psychology of your reader. Using the previous example, think about people who are looking for information on credit repair.
Most likely, they’ve had some credit problems in the past. They may be looking to buy a home or make a similar large purchase. They want their credit scores to improve so they can improve their lives.
Knowing this, you can begin to see some questions and concerns they may have about credit repair. They’ll want to find out how to fix their credit step-by-step.
Consumers appreciate step-by-step products because it’s the next best thing to hiring someone to do a task for them. Make it as easy on them as possible.
When you follow these steps, you’ll develop a long list of questions for your project.
Your questions should focus on solving your readers’ problems. Questions like “What is credit repair?” aren’t important to your reader.
They already know what credit repair is, or they wouldn’t be interested in your book. The more specific the questions are, the better.
Don’t worry about not having answers to your questions at this point. You’ll find the answers as you begin to write your special report.
Following this question and answer method will make the writing process extremely easy by giving you a solid outline that you can fill in.
Uncovering Hot Markets
You’ll want your special reports to be focused on popular, evergreen markets.
These are niches where content rarely changes or becomes outdated. They’re also markets that are constantly in demand.
Here are a few broader markets to help you get started. You’ll
want to narrow down your focus by digging into one of these umbrella niches to
uncover a specific segment that you can sell to.
- Self-Improvement (weight loss, public speaking, etc.)
- Finances (budgeting, retirement, etc.)
- Relationships (marriage, dating, repairing relationships etc.)
- Health Related (acne, insomnia)
- Entrepreneurs (home based business, startups, etc.)
- Family Oriented (family budgets, time management, etc.)
Each special report needs to target a very specific audience, or at least answer one very specific question.
Further, if you focus on evergreen markets you’ll be able to create a series of additional products to sell to the SAME customer base!
Here’s what I mean:
Let’s say you created a report on how to repair your credit. You’ve
already identified your audience and know your demographics (people with bad
credit!).
So, you could easily create a secondary report catering to that same audience that takes things a step further.
Once they have their credit repaired they’ll likely want to apply for a credit card. You could write a short report on the easiest credit cards to get for those who don’t have the best credit rating.
Or, perhaps a report focusing on securing a mortgage for those who are still rebuilding their credit. The possibilities are endless.
Focus on:
What is your market most interested in?
Determine overall demand, and create your report around the topic that is of the greatest interest to most your market. This is the easiest way to get lift off and increase your chances of success.
What information is already available to them?
You don’t want to provide rehashed information. It’s important that you find a fresh, unique angle so you can position yourself as the go-to person who has the information they need.
Yes, everything’s been done before but that doesn’t mean you can’t come up with a new perspective or present a different idea or way of accomplishing a specific task.
It’s important to stay focused when creating your report. It’s easy to go off track but because your report will be short, you need to choose a topic or question and block everything else out. The extra information or ideas you have could go into follow-up reports (again, think series).
If you do this right, you will be able to research and write
your entire report in under a few hours while being able to connect with your
target audience.
Fast-Track Writing System
You’ll want to create a system that will help you stay focused and on track especially if you’re relatively new to product creation. Once you have gotten used to using a system, you’ll find that it gets much easier to create high-quality reports in less time.
By now, you should have identified what your topic is going to be after
evaluating your niche. You now know what burning questions are being asked and
you’ve decided which one you’re going to answer.
Here’s an anatomy of how your special
report should be written:
Step 1: Create your Introduction
Most, if not all, special reports are written to solve a problem for the reader.
You’ll need to present the problem to your reader before you get to the solution to their problem. This is where your introduction comes into play because this is where you’ll get your buyer excited about what they’re about to read. It will also assure them that they’ve made the right decision by purchasing your report because they’re about to get the answers they’ve been looking for.
Load up your word processor and begin writing possible chapter titles for your report, starting with an introduction and ending with a Conclusion page.
You aren’t writing the actual content at this point, only creating the outline for your report. Believe me, this will help you stay on track as you begin to write.
Step 2: Create the Framework
The next step is to create the framework, or outline for your special report. This will help you come up with chapter titles so you can fill in segments and finish your report quickly.
Don’t get stuck on this step! You can also insert additional chapters into your document if you come up with other ideas later. For now, just write the main chapter titles that define what each section will be about.
Readers want structure, so each segment or chapter should be focused on addressing a specific question or concern. Chapter titles help identify what each chapter will be about.
Chapter titles are also important for ‘skim readers’, which are people who might have not a lot of time to digest your entire book, and instead are interested in skimming chapter titles to locate specific information that is important to them.
Step 3: Create Chapter Summaries
This is where you will begin to see the skeleton for your special report come to life. Each summary will include a handful of notes about the things you plan to cover in that chapter.
Your book needs a beginning, middle and end and by writing your chapter titles and summaries, you will give yourself a workable outline that will help you write faster.
Step 4: Write the Content
You’ll want to present the problem in the introduction and start to provide a solution in chapter 1.
For a credit repair report, I’d start off with answering questions about the generalities of credit repair: how it’s done, why it’s important, what the reader can hope to gain from it. Then I’d get into specific techniques for credit repair and offer solutions and resources.
By the end of your report, you should have addressed the major question you’ve decided on as your slant and provided your reader with multiple options.
They should walk away from your content feeling as though they
have a clearer idea as to what their next step should be.
Selling Your Short Reports
Once your report is written and ready for market, it’s time to start selling it! There are a couple of easy ways to get started, including by signing up for a free account at both http://www.JVZoo.com or http://www.WarriorPlus.com
Both markets attract thousands of affiliates who will help you promote your product while also building a list of buyers. You can set any commission percentage you choose, but you’ll likely want to go with the traditional 50%.
When pricing your special report, you’ll want to start by analyzing what price
strategy is currently working well in your market.
Look through the JVZoo and Warrior+ marketplaces, paying attention to what other people have settled on as a starting price. You can always increase the price after a 7-day launch week.
You’ll want to make sure you’ve created a compelling salespage for your special report, integrated your buy buttons and tested the checkout process to ensure buyers receive their product immediately after payment.
There are many different ways to set up product protection so that only authorized buyers are able to access your report. There dozens of free membership plugins for WordPress that are quick and easy to use. If you get serious about selling reports you may want to consider a more robust system like WishList Member or even OptimizePress.
Another thing to keep in mind is presentation. Consider hiring a graphic designer to create a 3D graphic of your special report. This can easily increase the perceived value of your product and capture the attention of potential buyers.
If you like this sort of information you should subscribe to our Award Winning Internet Marketing Newsletter.