How To Profit From Special Reports
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Joan Stewart – What a special report is, and this is what it is for me and this is how I started out doing it, a special report is a five-page Word document, single-spaced, that teaches people how to solve a particular problem. This is not a promotional piece for you. I don’t want you to go in depth about how great your business is. That’s not what this is for. It’s a helpful problem-solving article on how to tackle a topic that is extremely narrow. That’s what a special report is; that’s the short explanation.
Dan Janal – Tell us about your success with these special reports. How many have you written? How much do you sell them for?
Joan Stewart – I’ll tell you, first of all, why I’m such a big fan of them, because people might be wondering, “Why should I be writing special reports when I can sell a book for $25 from Waldens?” First of all, I don’t have a book that I sell for $25 at Waldens and I don’t really want to have a book. I’ll explain in a little while how I sort of tripped into these special reports purely by accident, and once I found out how powerful they are, I just kept writing them. Here are some reasons I love them. They require no investment up front at all, other than the time it takes to research your topic. You don’t even need any special software program other than a word program like Word. You don’t even have to have Adobe Acrobat, but I would recommend that you get it so that you can turn these special reports into PDF files.
Dan Janal – Joan, let me stop you right there because I’ve just discovered something really interesting about Adobe PDF files. You can get the reader for free; everyone knows that, but if you want to create those PDF files, you have to get a copy of Adobe, which costs anywhere from $400 to $600 in retail stores. I just realized, or found out, the other day that if you go to the Adobe website, you can actually get a subscription, an online subscription, to create your own PDF files for as little as $10 a month or $99 a year.
Joan Stewart – Really? That’s terrific.
Dan Janal – Exactly. So you don’t have to make a big upfront investment in anything with Adobe; for $10 a month, you can just try it out and see if you like it.
Joan Stewart – Great. Other reasons I love special reports—you can recycle your material from existing sources that you have, and we’ll get into this a little bit later. Customers buy these in bulk because they’re so inexpensive. Customers also like them because they’re quick and easy to read. They don’t want to have to sit down with a 257-page book to learn how to solve a problem. If I can help them solve their problem in five pages, for an investment of $9, they’re going to think I’m terrific.
Dan –Less is more with special reports.
