There are many ways to connect with your prospects and build a profitable online business. It used to be that writing an eBook, or having one written for you by an author with more experience writing on your topic, was the way to make money on the Internet. Things have changed quite a bit since 2005 or 2006, and this is no longer the best way to make residual income online. The industry has shifted, and now it is better to start off with a short report, in order to build a list of as many prospects as possible.

There are several reasons for this change in the way we now do business, but perhaps the greatest one is that there is just so much more competition these days in almost every niche you can think of. Instead of sending people directly to a sales letter for the eBook on your topic, you will want to send them to an optin page where they can exchange their name and email address for a short report that will tell them more.

You can then direct them to a sales letter for a product or course on your niche topic, and you will also be able to send them follow up emails that contain more information. Over time you will be able to

I write lots of articles, but I needed a better way to connect with people online. Writing short reports is the best way I have found to reach out to new prospects by showing that you have a level of expertise in your niche. These reports are a way of providing useful content to your prospects while showing that you are credible in your niche. You can then use them in a variety of ways in order to build your list and to drive traffic to your sites.

There are several ways to create your report. I have learned this strategy from a training course I took on how to write short reports. The fastest and easiest is to use articles on your topic and combine them together. Remember to follow the rules on this by keeping the article intact. This means that you must not change a word, and keep the resource box at the end. You can choose several articles on your topic and create your short report. Add a few paragraphs at the beginning and end and it will be complete.

I also like to repurpose other writing I have done in order to create my report. This would include using outlines from teleseminars I have given, using transcriptions of webinars I have taught, and even taking my autoresponder messages and turning them into a logical sequence to present to my prospects.

For each report, my goal is to

When you are getting started on the Internet with information products, it is typical to want to write an eBook on your niche topic. The problem is that you can’t be sure the eBook will sell until you have spent valuable time marketing. It also does not help you to build a relationship with the people on your list. For this reason it makes a lot of sense to write a short report before you write the eBook. This will tell you if it will be worth your time and effort to take the report and turn it into a much longer piece of writing. I have a free report on writing short reports that you can access right away.

Short reports are typically anywhere from about 7 to 15 pages long. This gives you enough space to present your specific topic to your prospects. This type of writing can also be completed much more quickly than an eBook. The result is a short report that will be ready to market in days instead of weeks. This will allow you to determine very quickly if there is a market of hungry buyers in your niche who would be interested in a more detailed presentation of information in this area.

I like to give away my short reports, but you may decide to sell yours instead. My thinking is that I would prefer for