Ideas for Your Home Business Reports

There was a question recently at our Wahm Forum which I answered, and I thought it would also make a great blog post, so I decided to share it here:

Question: What do you do with reports that you have written other than just marketing them on your site?  Are there directories that you can submit them to just like you would submit articles? How do you make them avaiable to bloggers?

 Reply:

I haven’t done a thorough research on “report directories” to submit to. I did indeed find one, but it seemed sort of spammy to me since I was encountered with a few popups, so I will not list it here. Funny thing is I did start a squidoo lens for free reports, but haven’t worked on it yet. (smile)

Usually you offer your free report as an incentive for signing up for your mailing list. So, I usually have my report ready in PDF format and load it to my hosting server. When they sign up for mailing list and confirm their signup my autoresponder automatically sends out the next message with the link to my free report. I instruct them to save it to their computer.

You could use article marketing to advertise your report as well. Submit several articles on topics targeting your target market and include your bio at the end by putting in a plug about getting your free report when they visit your site.

Getting a few online partners to offer your report in exchange for your offering their report (not competitors in the same exact field, of course) or some similar exchange might be a good possibility.

So for the question of distributing your report, an autoresponder works good for mailing signups.

I have also used to use Tradebit.com which offers file storage that you can share or sell for as low as $0.59 per month for 40 mb of storage. Click on “Sell here now” at the very top of their web page to view their different levels of service. *You can also start a group there where you allow certain people access to your file. One other thing that I like is that they make it easy to link to your files and you have your own webpage. So if you sign up be sure to make your username a good “keyword” because it will be used for your url link. (In fact, I guess I could write a whole article on the subject on how to market online using tradebit, but I’ll pass for now…I blog more on this later.)

As far as the purpose of reports, you brand it with your business information…sort of like handing out your business cards in hope that they’ll keep it on hand and later when they need your services…they’ll hopefully contact you. It also helps to establish yourself as an expert in your field as you share your knowledge within your report.

For affiliate marketers, placing their affiliate links in their reports and distributing the free report will hopefully increase sales as well.

Others have used reports to create viral marketing. They sell their reports for a small sum and include an affiliate program to encourage others to sell their report and distribute it as well, and all the while they are spreading the news about their business because their reports are branded.

For more information on profiting from reports check out  ”Write that Report.”