If you have been introduced to Article Marketing, and have had at least some success, this will be the next logical step for you to market your wares. If you are not into Article Marketing yet but want to get going with something that is your own, read on.

Free reports are a marketing technique that have been around for quite some time now. These reports are gaining in popularity and many of the internet marketing experts are using them more and more, why? Simply because they work.

Many people jump on the Internet because they want and/or need information about all kinds of things. People search for free reports on topics that will make them feel better, look better, become more adept, or solve a problem. Reports can take many forms but regardless of the form, a report is simply a writing that provides information about a specific topic.

Writing a report doesn’t have to be a time consuming task. A short report can be written in as little as one hour or less provided the writer has access to sufficient information on the subject and given access to the internet, information on almost any subject is readily available.

Generally there are three primary ways to generate a free report:
*Start from scratch
*Use PLR material
*Outsource the writing

Starting from scratch

The first thing that is required for any report is, of course, a topic.

The topic that you choose to write a report on should be one that is directly related to the topic of your website or of your membership site. The people that you will give your free report to (your target market) must be interested in getting the information that will be in the report.

Choose a general subject first and then narrow the general subject down to a specific point or two at most. In order to choose a great topic, you should listen to the members of your own website or visit blogs and forums that relate to the products and services that you sell.

Once you have settled on a topic for your free report, the next step is to gather information that is related to that topic. Use your favorite search engine and plug in key words to find information about your topic. Usually the problem is too much information rather than not enough. You are going to have to sift through and consolidate information but if you have narrowed your topic down far enough, it won’t be all that difficult.

The next step is to write an outline for your report.

A good outline supplies both organization and form. If you are trying to write a report within one hour, the best thing is to keep your main points to only three. Three well-discussed points are better than a half dozen that are only briefly touched upon. Once you have organized your research and written an outline, it will take you less than half an hour to type up a five or six page report.

The second way to produce a free report in under an hour is to download one that is already written from a PLR (Private Label Rights) site. There are many such sites that are available on the Internet. You will have to be a member of a PLR site to download reports. You will still need to do a lot of rewriting on the reports that you download and if you download articles that you plan to consolidate into a report, you will need to make a good outline of your report so that the information will be presented in a logical sequence.

You can either download a report from a PLR site or several articles that contain the information that you want to include in your free report and combine the articles to make one longer report. All material that is downloaded from PLR sites should have at least some rewrite done before you use it on your own site, 25%-50% is recommended. Depending on the quality of the PLR material you may need to do more. Remember that there is no room for poor quality in this report. Rewriting is easily and quickly done. There is even software that will accomplish part of the rewriting task for you but if you use this software, be sure that you carefully read it to check for grammatical errors and to make certain that the finished product actually makes sense.

Yet another way to create a report in an hour or less is to download articles from free content sites and then combine and rewrite the information that is in them. The articles that are on free sites must be rewritten extensively. The purpose the authors of those articles have for placing them on sites for free use is to get credit for having written them. These articles can be used as reference but they may not be reproduced word for word.

A word to the wise: Always check the accuracy of statistics or facts that are included in articles downloaded from free sites. You can use the basic ideas of these articles as well as the facts that are contained in them but you must NOT reproduce them without giving credit to the author… that is plagiarism and it is a crime.

Again… consolidating articles into a report requires that you make a good outline before you begin. Did I mention using your own articles? The best source of quality and unique information are the articles you have written yourself. Simply follow the outline above and you will have your report in less than one hour.

Outsourcing

There is one more way that you can achieve getting a free report produced in an hour or less but in this case you won’t be the one doing the writing. You can hire yourself a good ghostwriter to write your free report for you. All you will need to do is to provide the ghostwriter with the subject and the subject matter.

The only thing you have to do after you order a report is, when you receive it, you read it and then you pay the ghostwriter. The report then belongs to you. You can list yourself as the author and do whatever you choose to do with it.