Article by Brian Elrod

Free reports are significant now days on the web. It is a bandwagon which most Internet marketers are getting on simply because it works.

People get on the “Information Super Highway” because they want and/or need facts concerning all kinds of things. People look for free reports about subjects that will make them feel preferable, look more fitting, become more proficient, or solve a quandary for them. Reports can take numerous forms, but no matter the form, a report is merely a writing that provides facts concerning a specific subject.

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 since the Internet really is the “Information Super Highway” information on almost any subject is readily available.

First, let’s discuss writing a free report from ‘scratch’.

The first thing that is required for a 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 free membership site. The people that you will give your free report to 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. In order to choose a great topic, you can listen to the members of your own free 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.

This is a very easily accomplished task. 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.

You need organization and form. An outline supplies both. 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 from the site. Memberships in these sites are usually rather inexpensive and they provide you access to a lot of material that is almost ready for you to use.

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, anyway.

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 that the authors of those articles had 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.