While a letter can be a very powerful tool for beginning a new relationship with a key decision maker, it is limited in terms of what we can realistically expect readers to do once they have read it.

Practically speaking, unless readers have a burning need for your services, they will not pick up the phone. Thus if your call to act is limited to Give us a call today to discuss your…you will never hear from a good percentage of your readers. And that will be a setback for your business since there are likely to be lots of people who would like to learn more about you but are reasonably suspicious of leaving themselves open to a full-bore sales pitch.

However, if the call to action is for more information, you will find that a large chunk of your readers will take that next step.

That’s you can say the role of a Free Report.

This is a must

Your Free Report should build standing for you and move the probable client forward to the next step in the relationship building process. If your reader puts down the report without taking that next step, then your report hasn’t completely done its job.

What you want to do first is…

Develop an attention getting title.

• What initially makes someone want to read your report is….your title. But, most writers don’t give this the thought it deserves.
• When you send out a report your goal should be that people stop what they’re doing, and read it right then.
• When you’re developing your title focus on…results.

That’s what your readers want. That’s what they’re interested in. That’s what they’re going to read.

            Ask yourself, what result do your readers want?

• For a catchy, compelling headline, ask yourself this question; What would accomplishing the goal enable readers to do that they can’t do now?

Here is a fun example that illustrates this. Which would you rather read?

“How to automate your business” or
“How to set up your business so that it runs on autopilot while you play golf”?

Key Point: Identify what the desired result would be and include that in your title.

• . Make sure that your title suggests targeted results. By this, I mean that the more you refer your role in the title, the greater the response and interest. “Time Management for Physicians”, “Tax Tips for the Family Owned Business” can be some good examples.

The bottom line is that your title is critical.

Style

To be completely successful, a report, which makes recommendations, must ensure that the persons for whom the report is intended:

• Read it without unnecessary delay.

• Understand everything in it .

• Accept the facts, findings, conclusions and recommendations.

• Decide to take the action recommended.

It all about the style you adopt to present relevant facts accurately. It also demands that you communicate in a way that is both acceptable and intelligible to the readers.

Selectivity

Careful choice of words can enable you to convey your messages with enough clarity.

Accuracy

Everything you put in your report should be factually accurate. The facts should be capable of being verified. Moreover, your arguments should be sound and your reasoning should be logical. Nothing should be there to misinform, mislead or unfairly persuade your readers. If you do, you will be doing damage not only to yourself but also to your business. Accurate information is essential for effective communication and decision-making.

Objectivity

A report should not be an essay reflecting personal emotions and opinions. You must look at all sides of a problem with an open mind before stating your conclusions.

Make it clear that you have an open mind while writing your report. This will, in most cases, make your conclusions and recommendations more acceptable to your readers. The emphasis, therefore, should be on the factual material presented and the conclusions drawn, rather than on any personal beliefs, biases or prejudices.

Conciseness

Julius Caesar reported his visit to our shores as Veni, Vidi, Vici (I came, I saw, I conquered). While none of your reports will be as short as this, you should aim to keep them concise. Ideally, a concise report is the one, which is short but still contains all the essential details.

To ensure you do not include material, which can safely be left out, you should not ask: ‘Can this information be included?’ Rather, ‘Is it necessary you should ask for this information to be included?’

Clarity and Consistency

The best way to achieve this is to allow some time to elapse between the first draft and its revision. Try to leave it over the weekend, or at least overnight. If cannot do this, at least leave it over a lunch or coffee break. It is essential to have a period of time, no matter how short, when you can think of other things. In this way, when you come back to the report, you can look at it with a degree of objectivity.

Simplicity

Usually, your report will be as simple as it can be if your writing is selective, accurate, objective, concise, clear and consistent. Do not oversimplify… for example to the point of missing out information, which the reader needs to fully understand… You should again keep your readers firmly in mind and keep asking yourself whether they will be able to follow the logic of your presentation.

Avoid Pointless Words

Some words and phrases like basically, actually, undoubtedly, each and every one ,during the course of our investigation … keep cropping up in reports. They add nothing to the message and often can be removed without changing the meaning or the tone. Try leaving them out of your writing. You will find your sentences survive, succeed and may even flourish without them.

 

 

Here’s a lesson I learned from Eben Pagan, who is one of the business people who had a  big influence on me lately.

“Give your BEST stuff away. For free!” is what he says. And he explains it very interesting.
It won’t work for ANY business, I am sure, but here’s my 5 cents:

It is always a challenge to figure out what to give away free.  You do have to explore the art of giving away more for free but at the same time attract more in return.  It is an interesting mental exercise and doing business online takes the whole ‘chicken and egg’ riddle a step further.

Now you must be wondering as how “give things away for free” concept goes with the ‘you get what you pay for’ mantra.  Therefore, you must be thinking, if you are going to get something free you are about to get a lot of headaches trying to make things work.  But amazingly some of the best online services are free and they have wonderful customer service and products.  Now, let us see how they make money and sustain their businesses over time.  What is it about the web that makes giving away things for free so necessary and easy? 

The Free Line..

The idea is that there is a line, a point on your sales funnel where you distribute free value, and below the line comes all the paid-for products, moving from front to back-end.

In the world of Internet marketing the concept of the sales funnel is well known. The process of moving customers from free resources, into paid front-end products down to high margin back-end items, has made millions for many Internet entrepreneurs.

The whole of process begins with some free resources and nearly everyone online has experienced this part of the sales funnel, like a blog you read. A blog is a “free resource” that the owner offers to the world that at least in some part and the blog contributes to bringing people into his sales funnel.

So, propel readers away with free content and then sell them on your paid stuff once they trust and value you!

 

How it can help your businesses.

Moving the Free Line

If you ever talk to an Internet marketer, you will know the idea of the free line moving further and further down the sale funnel. What was previously a front end product you had to pay for becomes a free resource sitting above the free line.The argument generally put forward is that moving the free line ever further down is one of the techniques you can use to beat the competition.

If you have a well constructed sales funnel that enables you to distribute more value for free, then you can out-value others and can also offer better commissions to affiliates. This secures more traffic and customers. So, it is about extracting the highest profit from the back-end and provide the most value above the free line.

Give Away Your Best Stuff

The principle is quite simple – you must give away some of your best content in order to capture attention. Content is the force that drives traffic online, and if you give so much quality for free, more links are connected to your site, which means…. more traffic, enhanced credibility, more exposure, and  more sales !

Remember that web users expect things to be free. This is why if you intend to do anything online, you better be giving it away for free.

No copying but Innovation

You also need to know that releasing a free e-Book and replicating what others have done is not going to cut the ice. A super-duper content can still draw huge amounts of attention. An e-Book format with old resources and formats will not make a splash. This is exactly why the concept is about MOVING the free line – you need to innovative ways to provide and distribute value.

Sometimes one of the best ways to make a splatter when offering free value is to use innovative delivery methods. , like you can conduct a live web-stream of your event or release a  great video content for free as part of your launch process and break the die by asking for email addresses of the visitors.

You should not be surprised if you find membership sites, videos, audios – even physical product like home study courses, DVDs and audio CDs floating above the free line. This can be a good marketing tool to generate more and more business.

Expect the first adopters of these techniques to come from the Internet marketing industry, since this place is already saturated with free content. From there it will seep down into other industries. Imagine how you can do with this concept like the free line if none of your competitors understands it!

How Does Moving The Free Line Affect You?

If you are already in an online business then you already work on some level to provide free resources. If you don’t, you must be struggling to build up traffic. Consider what you currently offer for free and brainstorm how you can go one step further and wow your potential customers with your free content. Always remember to use unique delivery methods and always plan to offer more for free in the future.

If you haven’t yet established enough free resources then your job now is to work on building up a store of value for others. With time, your previous efforts will continue to offer value, while your current activities can move towards producing content for front-end products and eventually back-end offers.

As a blogger, your main free value is the content you publish. The next step might be to build up a free email auto responder course, with five training emails set to go out in a sequence. Free distribution of a catalogue of videos or audios can also be a smart idea to attract traffic.

So, you can see..the options are limitless. What’s important is that you realize the thrust you get of these over deliveries and expect the free line to move further down over time.

 

You can’t stay in business if you are not driving forward, breaking in new ideas and in return, asking for nothing but attention.

 

Internet Marketers who use split testing experience higher success levels than those who do not perform such tests. Split testing allows marketers to measure the effects of different content on their landing pages against user response, and thus select the best performing page. Split-testing is typically a time consuming process. Without any special tools, a marketer would need to create their landing page content, and run it for a specific period of time to test the results. Then, the marketer would need to run the same page with one change- perhaps a different headline font, or a different wording for the headline, and test the results of that variation. It’s expensive and time consuming because you can only test one item at a time in order to obtain accurate results, and because it is completely based on trial-and-error.

Google Analytics has allowed marketers to measure their conversion rate (how many visitors become buyers or perform the specific action a web site asks them to make), but tracking this doesn’t tell you what content on your site is effective and what areas need improvement. As any internet marketer knows, if you’re going to spend money on pay per click advertising and other means of getting web site visitors to your web page, then what content you actually put on that page is priceless! You want successful performance from your ads. How can you monitor the actual effectiveness of the content on your page, and know what content is performing well and what isn’t working?
Google is currently offering a new service for split-testing landing pages, called “Website-Optimizer”. It makes split-testing much more manageable and less expensive than testing without the tool. Basically, the optimizer is going to allow you to try different variations of content on your landing page and measure the results to see which page has a better performance (conversion rate).

The Website Optimizer is free, and can be used without extensive experience running testing experiments on landing pages. In other words, you need not be a split-testing genious to use the optimizer tool. Before beginning a landing page experiment, Google even provides internet marketers with a “pre-experiment checklist”. It details step by step what you’ll need to do, from selecting your test page, to setting a goal for the experiment, to the actual running of the experiment and reading of results.

Using the optimizer, a marketer can experiment with new headlines, different promotional copy, and a variety of images designed to turn web site visitors into “conversions”. Google will provide you with easy to read, graphical reports to determine the content that performs the best and encourages site visitors to the highest conversion rates.

When determining what to test on your page, you need to take your goal into consideration. If you want your site visitors to take a specific action such as downloading a document or making a purchase (the call to action) then you might want to test different headlines. You might try different graphics- to see whether photographs of products or a person using the product has a better result. Changing the actual page copy to decide whether lengthier text offers better results, or shorter and more direct copy has better conversions. Testing the format of text might offer changes in conversion rates as well; try bulleted points or paragraphs. Finally, try altering the actual “call to action” portion of the site. If you have a button that says “sign up”, try a different phrase, like “quick sign up” or “get it free”.

While you need to have an active Google AdWords account to use the optimizer tool, you will be able to test traffic coming from various locations. You’ll test incoming visitors that are a result of your AdWords advertisements, Google search results, and other search engine traffic.

View the impressive demo here:http://services.google.com/websiteoptimizer/overview/index.html

Ressource: http://services.google.com/websiteoptimizer/

From Google:

“…You want your ads to be successful. To measure that success, you use click and conversion tracking to gain insight into user behavior on your pages. If users are reaching your pages, but you aren’t getting the conversion results you want, what do you do? It’s time to make improvements to your site. Website Optimizer can help.

The Website Optimizer allows you to test changes in the website content of your pages in order to determine what will be most effective in getting conversions. You choose what parts of a page you’d like to test — headline, image, promo text – and we’ll run an experiment on a portion of your site traffic to determine which content on your site users respond to best. When we’ve collected enough data, we’ll provide you with reliable reports and a suggested course of action in order to optimize your site for maximum business results.”

Do you really want to learn how to list build? Do you really want to know how to build a huge list, fast? Read on and you will discover what I do to build my list by 30-90 subscribers a day, at less than $10 per day.

1) This goes without saying, but you must have a web site. You cannot build a list of 30-90 subscribers a day using someone else’s web site. Get a web site.

2) This also goes without saying, but given the title of this, I have to say it. You must have a dependable autoresponder. Get one or quit thinking about list building.

3) This is not mandatory, but if you want 500% more subscribers, do it: Send all your traffic to a squeeze page. A squeeze page is a web page that has only one purpose: to compel visitors to leave you their name and email address. Nothing more.

4) You must send traffic to your squeeze page. My top two methods are: writing articles just like this, and Google Adwords. Writing articles is far more effective than Google Adwords. But I continue to use Adwords because it is a fast, easy way to get subscribers. But honestly, most of my buyers come from articles, not Adwords.

5) You must send your subscribers VUI – Very Useful Information. Your subscribers should look forward to your emails everyday. They must.

Author:

The idea of being mere passengers on a ship meant to sail to the farthest points does not appeal to people who like to put their destiny into their own hands. They have the desire of maneuvering the ships themselves, of being able to be the ones to take it anywhere they want to. Being aboard a ship on its way to a particularly great destination is something each and every one of them dreams of, and the knowledge that they have the capacity to steer it themselves is what makes them actually want to.

Perhaps this is the reason why more and more people are succumbing to one of the most popular businesses around – affiliate marketing. It is because in this business, there are no bosses to order the employees around. There are no deadlines to meet and no clutter of work do to. One only needs to be equipped with the tools needed to succeed in a business such as this, and he is bound to get what his heart ultimately desires.

Just what are the things needed to be able to succeed in affiliate marketing? What must one have within himself to be able to do well in this industry? There is a lot of competition involved in affiliate marketing, and to be able to rise above the norm, one must be equipped with just the right stuff necessary to propel him forward. There are five things one must ultimately possess if he wants to achieve the glory he is yearning for in this business, and these five things are a must for him to possess to be able to stand out among the rest.

The very first quality one must possess if he wants to try his hand in affiliate marketing is the willingness to learn and be trained. Treading through unfamiliar territory is scary stuff if one is not properly equipped, and he might get lost amidst a jungle of the unknown. Learning the tricks of the trade is also an important aspect of the game, and one’s willingness to know it all will give him far better advantages in the business than he could ever imagine.

The second quality one must possess is the willingness to invest time and effort even if direct results do not seem at all apparent. Although several months may pass without good news, it is important for one who has his foot in the industry to hold on and wait. It is this quality which would save him from giving up after investing a lot of himself in the business.

The third quality one must possess is self-determination. If one wants to conquer the affiliate marketing world, he must have the ability to push himself ahead. Never having to say die is a quality each and every affiliate marketer should possess, and the ability to motivate oneself into scaling greater heights is an ability which would actually take an affiliate marketer there.

The fourth quality one must possess is discipline. If one knows how to teach himself to work everyday with all the energy he can muster, then he is close to achieving what he has set his heart to having in the first place.

The fifth and last quality one must possess is optimism. Negative attitudes and hearsays should not discourage an affiliate marketer from pursuing what he has to in order to make life better for himself and for everyone concerned. Neither should anyone influence his attitude toward the business, because once in it, it is a must for him to be the captain of his ship and the master of his soul.

The ingredients to success in a business such as affiliate marketing are diverse and manifold, but the most important thing one needs to be able to make it big lies in himself alone. It is he who has the capacity to do everything to be able to realize his prospects, and the desire which fuels his heart in doing so is the gasoline which should keep the engine going.

Affiliate marketing is all about putting one’s fate into his own hands. The right attitude is the key to being able to steer one’s ship into that part of the ocean where a certain kind of serenity can be found, one that permeates the atmosphere as the ship sails calmly on.