Chapter Two

DAY TWO:
Create Your Free Offer

A FEW YEARS AGO, life didn’t smell too sweet to Sonny Ahuja. The recession and competition on the Internet had created the perfect storm, driving five of his seven mall-based retail perfumeries out of business. Plus he owed more than $100,000 to his suppliers.

His only hope was to compete on the Internet. But how would he attract new customers?

Ahuja decided that the best strategy was to give something away for free. But what?

In person, he was able to share tiny vials filled with samples of new perfumes, or at the very least, spritzes from the bottles he kept as samples. But you can’t download digital scents in a PDF.

So Ahuja decided to create a downloadable free report.

Most marketers would be hard-pressed to come up with an information product that makes sense for perfume buyers.

But Ahuja knows his customers. And he knows there is one fear most online buyers have when they buy fragrances from a new company on the Internet: paying for an expensive perfume but being sent a cheap imitation.

Frankly, consumers should be worried. These counterfeits often have ingredients like urine, bacteria, and antifreeze.

So Ahuja wrote a free report that takes aim at that very issue: “20 Ways to Spot a Fake Perfume.” It’s available at GrandPerfumes.com.

Offering a free report that focuses on one of the major concerns his niche market has about his products has changed his business. He now has an email list with 18,000 subscribers, 5,000 friends on Facebook, and more than 100,000 Twitter followers.

Ahuja says his report does more for his company than simply generating leads. “If we’re telling them twenty ways to spot fake perfumes, then they know we’re not going to send them a fake perfume.”

The result is a relationship with his customers that gets them to buy again and again. In an Internet world dominated by the lowest prices, Ahuja has an advantage. “We are not the cheapest company for perfumes on the Internet,” he says. “We have built a business on credibility from the report and from the relationships we build through our newsletter.”

Ahuja has achieved great results by driving traffic to his website. But Raleigh Regan found quick success in a simpler way. Regan, who creates employee newsletters for companies, gained a client worth $36,000 by simply responding to a LinkedIn posting.

“They had a question about starting an employee newsletter. I answered the question and posted a link to my free report (available at StartingAnEmployeeNewsletter.com),” he says. “Two days later someone read the answer, called me up, and literally with no vetting said, ‘Can I get a quote for a newsletter?’”

Because the report established Regan’s credibility, the company didn’t even bother seeking other quotes. “They’ve been a client for more than two years,” says Regan, “and they’re worth more than $18,000 a year to us with the four big newsletters they do a year.”

The free report strategy helped disability lawyer Brian Mittman (mentioned in the introduction) make a big lifestyle change. A little over five years ago he moved his entire office from Lower Manhattan to the suburbs, which allowed him to reduce a three-hour round-trip commute to a mere ten minutes. “Everyone told me I was out of my mind,” he says. “Yet in the last five years I have continued to dramatically increase the number and quality of new cases I take on.”

He credits the educational marketing benefit of using a free offer for making the difference. “Even though we’ve been in somewhat of an economic recession, my gross and my net have continued to increase dramatically, and it’s not because of one huge case I picked up.”

Step One: Choose Your Format

There are a number of choices, but the reality is that how you deliver the information is far less important to your audience than the content. You may decide to offer a free video, audio program, software, or diagnostic tool. These are all fine options, but you’re going to be hard-pressed to get them done today, unless you already have them developed.

For the purpose of getting your marketing program up and running quickly, we’re going to focus on creating a free report. However, since video is increasingly becoming an important marketing tool, I’ve included information on how to incorporate it into your system in Chapter 8.

Remember, the key with developing this free report is to zero in on providing information your niche market really wants to have. Although I’m calling this a “report,” don’t let that scare you off. Some of the most effective free offers have been simple lists. For example, Guy Giuffre, a Realtor, offers a list of foreclosures in his area at santacruzbankrepos.com. Investors who are interested in this particular niche segment of the real estate market repeatedly come to his site to download the most current list.

It is interesting that Guy doesn’t have to do the work to compile the list. It’s offered to Realtors via ForeclosureRadar.com. He simply reformats the information and then promotes its availability to his particular niche market. Giuffre says that foreclosure list is worth $50,000 per year to him in new business.

Although Guy periodically updates his free offer, you may find that your report can exist for years without revisions. The more you focus on “evergreen” topics or advice, the longer its shelf life. My “how to write a sales letter” offer (GentleRainSalesLetters.com) has been up and running for the past eight years without my doing a single thing to it. The mechanics of how to write a compelling sales letter haven’t changed much in the past ten years. As long as the free offer works and continues to bring in new prospects, there’s no point in fiddling with it. Thus, if you have a choice and want to make your life simpler, I recommend trying to find a topic that will have a high “curiosity index” for years to come.

Step Two—Picking a Hooky Subject

Since the success of the free offer will depend on what we choose for the subject, this is worth spending some time thinking about. There are three questions that I think are particularly helpful for selecting a topic:

    •  What’s the biggest area of pain to your target audience?

    •  What are they most afraid of?

    •  What are they most curious about knowing?

All we need is one topic for what you’re going to do today. Although I said that this is a very important step, I don’t want you to think that if you get this wrong, disaster ensues. The reality is that in the months and years ahead, I want you to create lots of free offers. Some will be home runs and a few may be whiffs. That’s just the nature of the game. Over time you’ll become increasingly adept at knowing precisely what your niche market is most insecure, curious, and fearful about. That knowledge will enable you to create numerous reports and a virtual tsunami of new prospects opting in. I currently have more than 60 websites, each offering some sort of free information. But it all started with a single report.

Here are some additional ideas for your topic:

    •  Your target audience’s biggest ongoing frustration

    •  A new trend or strategy they’re aware of—but haven’t figured out how to use

    •  A myth you can debunk (For example, this book debunks the myth that marketing is too complicated and too expensive and takes too long.)

Another good idea is to ask current clients in your chosen niche market what’s keeping them up at night. The answer is likely to make a great subject for this report. I’d like you to develop a list of all the potential topics for your free report, and then you’ll narrow it down to just one for today’s assignment.

I’m sometimes surprised that more companies don’t use free reports to attract more prospects. In fact, when I speak to groups, it’s not uncommon for people to come up to me at a break and say what a “great idea” free offers are. I guess this surprises me since this approach has been around for decades. I distinctly remember my first experience with this type of marketing. I was eleven years old when I saw an ad in the back of a comic book with the headline, “The Insult That Made a Man out of Mac.”

The five-panel cartoon that followed was the Charles Atlas classic where a bully kicks sand on scrawny Mac and his date, getting Mac so mad that he is willing to “gamble a stamp” so he can get a free report that will help him get a “real body.” In the final panel, Mac has successfully transformed from skinny wimp to muscular dude and (completely politically incorrect by today’s standards) socks the bully in the jaw.

At the bottom of the ad was a reply form to receive the free report about the “Secrets of Dynamic Tension.” It asked me to check the boxes for what I wanted. Bulging biceps? Abs of steel? I remember thinking, “Is it possible to have both?”

A couple of weeks later I received my free report about Dynamic Tension, the Charles Atlas exercise system that helps you “get fit fast . . . no gadgets, just results.” Not surprisingly, a few days after that, I received a letter from Charles (call me Chuck) Atlas, who told me that while the information in the report was good, investing in the Charles Atlas Muscle Building System would get me the results I wanted quicker.

A few days later another letter arrived and then another (for all I know they may still be coming to my parents’ house), each one encouraging me to continue the exercises in the free report and gently pushing me to take the next step in the sales cycle.

What made this marketing campaign so successful was that Charles Atlas understood exactly what was going on in the heads of scrawny prepubescent boys who read comic books. Because they were targeting a very specific niche audience, the copywriters were able to speak to the insecurities and desires of their very specific market. This is important. In order to create marketing materials that will motivate your prospects to engage with you and to take action, you need to have a very clear vision of who they are, of their fears, hopes, and aspirations. This is true regardless of whether you are selling products to consumers or services to businesses. So let’s do a quick exercise that I first learned from marketer Frank Kern that will help you get into the mindset of your niche audience.

Answer the questions below, to create a “perfect prospect” for what you are marketing. (Tip: Write down what immediately comes to mind.)

    •  John (or Jane) is my ideal client. He/She is __ years old. His/Her three biggest frustrations are ___, ___, and ___. Sometimes he/she even wakes up in the middle of the night worrying about___.

    •  If he/she could wave a magic wand, he/she would want these three things to occur:
1.
2.
3.

    •  When he/she goes online to find a potential answer to this problem, he/she may enter keywords into Google such as ___, ___, and ___.

    •  If he/she is going to do business with me, he/she needs to believe I can ___, ___, and ___.

    •  The myth he/she believes (which I will shatter) is ___.

    •  He/she might not invest in my products or services because ___, ___, and ___.

    •  The biggest obstacle he/she faces when trying to solve this problem is___.

This exercise is important not only for writing your free report but also for positioning your products and services in such a way that they become irresistible.

Based on what I’ve covered thus far, I want you to write down what the topic of your report will be. If you have a number of potential subjects, go with your gut and select one. Remember, over time, it’s likely you’ll create multiple free offers that cover all the topics on your list.

Step 3—Create Your Title

Now that you have a topic picked, it’s time to come up with a title.

A good title is crucial since it’s what will initially motivate prospects to request it. While the content is important, if we don’t hook people with the title, our marketing effort stalls out. That’s unfortunately what happened to a financial advisor I’ll call Steve.

To his credit, Steve believed in the marketing system I’ve been discussing, and he certainly was passionate about his topic. Perhaps that’s why he decided to title his free report “Indexed Solutions Simply Explained.” Not surprisingly, after a month of making the report available on his website and spending a good amount of money promoting it, not a single person downloaded it.

So our first step was to come up with a new title for the report. I asked Steve what his clients’ biggest fear was. He said, “That’s easy. They’re afraid they’ll outlive their savings.” We put those words right into his new title: “A Simple Solution to Make Sure You Won’t Outlive Your Retirement Savings.”

And even though the information in the report was still about indexed solutions, the new title was a huge improvement. He went from zero requests during the first 30 days to over a hundred per month.

Another of my clients, Alan, is a roofing contractor. He tried to offer a free report that was just a brochure about his company. “I thought that if people saw my company as trustworthy,” he says, “they would decide to hire me.”

We replaced his brochure with a giveaway called “7 Warning Signs Your Roof Is About to Leak Even When It’s Sunny and Dry Outside.” Alan went from no response to 300 requests in two months. Those reports converted into five new roofing customers, or a total of $50,000 in new business. Annualize that and you’ve got an additional $300,000 worth of business.

Not bad for a marketing program that only takes you one week to implement.

The secret to a good title is to focus on your market’s challenges, frustrations, and aspirations, just as you did when you picked your topic. Choose the biggest one they face. Your report should convey that you have a solution to their problem, using “fear of pain,” as in the roof report above.

If coming up with a good title sounds hard to you, don’t worry. In a minute I’m going to share some fill-in-the-blank templates to make it easy.

It’s important that your report focuses on the benefits your product or service offers, not just the features. Although most of us have heard about features vs. benefits, it still is sometimes confusing. An easy way to define a benefit is that it answers the question, “Why do I care about that?”

Let’s say you’re talking about a Tempur-Pedic® mattress: A feature is that it’s made of space-age foam. Another is that it has a higher density of cells than any other mattress. And even the fact that it contours to your body is a feature.

So let’s add benefits and make our reader really care about these. For example, space-age foam gives you a more relaxing night’s sleep. A mattress manufactured with a high-density cell structure keeps you from waking up in pain. The unique design that contours the mattress to your body ensures you feel energized when you wake up in the morning. So whenever you are struggling to create a benefit, remember the question, “Why do I care about that?”

Benefits are a critical component in creating the title of your free offer. Here are some classic report titles you might have seen before:

    •  “Do You Recognize the 7 Early Warning Signs of High Blood Pressure?”

    •  “How to Ensure You’ll Live Long Enough to Celebrate Your Granddaughter’s 25^th Birthday”

    •  “The Lazy Man’s Easy Way to Riches”

    •  “The Most Useful Time-Saving Tips You’ve Ever Seen for Harried Housewives”

    •  “How to Have Your Home Beautifully Remodeled on a Shoestring Budget”

    •  “What the IRS Doesn’t Want You to Know That Can Save You Thousands of Dollars”

You might be able to just adapt these templates for your report. Change a few words and you’ve got a brand-new title of your own. For example, number 4 could easily be changed to “How to Optimize Your Tax Return on a Shoestring Budget.”

Here are some more fill-in-the-blank formulas:

   1.  “7 Secrets Every ________ Needs to ________” (The first blank should be the name of your target audience, e.g., CPA, hospital, etc. The second blank should be the benefit your prospects want the most—e.g., “attract hordes of customers” for CPAs, or “avoid lawsuits” for hospitals.)

   2.  “10 ________ You Should Never ________ if You Want to________” (Start with a noun like “foods” or “deductions,” next blank is a verb—eat or ignore, third blank is a benefit—lose weight or lower your taxes.)

   3.  “Is Your Competition Getting More________ Than You? What ________ Never Taught You About________” (This one’s a little different. The first blank is a benefit or an opportunity: I.T. work, customers. The second blank would be an authority, e.g., your marketing professor. The third blank is a benefit related to the first benefit—such as more customers.)

   4.  “Secrets Revealed: What ________ Say When You’re Not in the Room” (Fill in the blank with a group your target market values—”your customers,” “your employees,” etc.)

One style of report that generates a lot of curiosity is a myth that people believe but that’s not true. The “debunking a myth” model works quite well in many different businesses. An example of a successful report in the insurance industry that uses the myth model is “The #1 Health Insurance Myth: The More You Pay, the Better Your Coverage.”

One of my personal favorite formulas is the “Steps” model. “7 Steps for Developing Leaders to Take Your Company to the Next Level.” “5 Steps for Hiring Great Assistants That Work Independently.” “10 Steps for On-boarding New Employees to Reduce Turnover.” The reason I particularly like this model is that one of the biggest problems you face when marketing your services is that people just don’t understand what you do. By breaking your process down into a series of steps, these reports are both easy to write and easily understood by your prospective clients.

How Much Should Your Report Cover?

One of the challenges of writing your free report is deciding how much information to include. If you don’t include anything of value, the reader will feel tricked and be unlikely to convert into a paying client. Conversely, if you provide too much information, they may decide that they know everything they need to know and, again, don’t need to engage your services. So it’s a bit of a balancing act. As marketing expert Jimmy D. Brown says, “We want them to feel satisfied, but incomplete.”

The way we accomplish this is to focus on telling our readers what to do and what not to do, but not precisely how to do it. That’s what leaves them incomplete.

Here’s an example that will illustrate this point. Suppose you were writing a free report for foreigners who were unfamiliar with cooking a Thanksgiving dinner. Using this model, your report would tell them not to cook lobster or Quiche Lorraine on Thanksgiving. Then it would explain that the perfect meal for Thanksgiving is turkey with stuffing, cranberry compote, and sweet potato casserole. You could go on in great detail describing what a Thanksgiving dinner looks and smells like. You might tell the reader about the history of the holiday and how the traditional meal evolved over the years. However, you wouldn’t give them recipes or tell them how to cook those items. That’s the information that you charge for.

Will people who download your free report be satisfied even though you aren’t giving them all the information they want? Most likely the answer would be yes. They would have learned about the history of the holiday, what they need to prepare, how many courses, why Detroit always plays football on Thanksgiving Day, and lots of helpful information. In fact, if we wrote the report in an engaging style, it would be likely that the reader would be very enthusiastic and motivated about preparing their first Thanksgiving dinner. If we followed up the report with an offer of recipes or a video with step-by-step instructions, we’d have a lot of buyers.

The Development of Your Report

One of the easiest reports to create is one that follows this six-part structure:

   1.  What is the biggest problem your target market is facing? (By this time you should have this one down cold.)

   2.  What are the consequences if they ignore the problem?

   3.  What are the other options they might consider to solve this problem?

   4.  What is your solution? (Think about the steps you take to solve the client’s problem or deliver your services.)

   5.  What results do you get? (To the extent you can quantify your results, the better. If you have testimonials about the results you get, include them in this section.)

   6.  What do you want the reader to do once they’ve finished?

As I go through each of these in detail, make notes about what you would like to include in each section. It will then be a simple task at the end to compile your notes into the final report.

Problems and Consequences

I’ve covered identifying the big problems your clients face, so you should have those pretty clear in your mind. However, simply stating the problem usually isn’t enough. It’s too easy for the prospect to shrug and say, “I’ll worry about that later.” We want them to worry about it now, and that’s where consequences are helpful.

The goal of consequences is to convince the reader that their problem will cause them a major headache if they don’t address it ASAP. Consequences are a powerful tool and easy to develop. Simply bullet-point out a list of what might happen if the problem is ignored. In workshops I called this exercise, “How many steps till bankruptcy/death/divorce?”

For example, in my world, the problem my prospects face is a lack of new clients. So what are the consequences?

    •  You’ll have to rely on referrals that may not come when you need them.

    •  Which causes the “famine” business cycle . . .

    •  So you dig farther into your savings . . .

    •  And you no longer can go on vacation . . .

    •  Which causes stress in your marriage . . .

    •  And eventually divorce . . .

    •  Which causes you to start drinking . . .

    •  And your current clients all leave you . . .

    •  Forcing you into bankruptcy . . .

In reality you’re not going to put this into your actual report, but the exercise is helpful nonetheless. What I find is that it frees up the imagination, which then enables you to scale back the “bankruptcy/divorce/death” scenario but still communicate real consequences that may occur. Remember, it’s simply not enough to just communicate a problem. You need to put the salt of consequences in the proverbial wound if you’re going to make people care enough to take action.

The Other Options

Our solution to the problem is not the only option available. Your competition probably offers some alternative ideas, and we all have to deal with the option that a prospective client may just decide to do nothing. Excellent marketing is all about proactively addressing concerns and objections. By including this options section in your free report, you may be able to minimize or even eliminate your competition.

Think about what you offer. Then compare your solution to others that are:

    •  More costly

    •  More time-consuming

    •  More complicated

    •  Less effective

    •  Less proven

    •  Less pleasant

Obviously, not every business will have competitors with each of these characteristics, but you get the basic idea.

Let me give you an example.

By now you have a good sense for the marketing system I champion. It focuses on making compelling free offers, which are then followed up with a drip-marketing sequence that builds trust and eventually converts prospects into paying clients. It’s a highly effective system, but it’s only one of many different approaches for getting more new clients. Thus, in my free report, it’s advantageous for me to try to paint other options in a less-than-favorable light. Here’s how I handle one option, which is cold calling for new business.

    And then, there are those methods that may be productive (although I have my doubts), and certainly don’t cost much money, but aren’t any fun at all.

       This category is dominated by—you guessed it—cold calling. I equate cold calling to plowing a field with a mule. I suppose it’s possible to accomplish the task, but with all the other options available to you, why would you want to?

       Personally I think cold calling is unpleasant, boring, repetitive work that’s best left to those who can mindlessly “smile & dial” rather than use their brains to develop labor-free marketing systems.

       But again, that’s just my opinion. You may feel differently.

Granted, there’s nothing terribly subtle about what I’m communicating, but I’ve found that many of my prospects think that cold calling is the only option available to them. This section disabuses them of that belief and reinforces the unpleasantness of going down that road. Those who love to cold call are unlikely to ever adopt my type of marketing, so the fact I’m calling them “mindless” probably doesn’t hurt me in the long run. Remember, not everyone is going to become your customer, and it becomes a Herculean task to try to convince those who are not slightly predisposed to your approach to pay attention to you. I’d much rather cast my net wide and communicate who my approach is right for and who it isn’t. That way when it comes time to actually talk with prospects, you’re spending most of your time with those who are inclined to be positive toward you.

Your Solution

Now that you’ve addressed the options they shouldn’t take, this next section focuses on your solution. As I mentioned before, in this stage we’re going to share what the solution is but go very light on the specifics about how to actually accomplish it.

There are a couple of items to keep in mind:

Focus on benefits rather than features. Just to reiterate, the feature is the grass seed. The benefit is the lawn that will be the envy of your neighborhood. When you talk about benefits, you appeal to your prospects’ emotions. As the old marketing saying goes, people make their buying decisions based on emotions and justify them with facts.

(There’s one caveat here: If your market is made up of engineers, load up on features. Engineers make buying decisions mostly based on logic.)

Here’s one additional item to think about as you are communicating the benefits of your products or services: As long as it’s accurate, you want to position what you offer as the opposite of what you said about your competition. If they’re expensive, you’re less so or a better value. If they’re complex, you’re simpler. And remember to reiterate that you specialize in people just like your audience. Simply by emphasizing the niche focus of your business, you’ll eliminate a large percentage of your competition.

Mention benefits even if they seem obvious. Don’t assume that your reader knows what the obvious benefits are. Even if all of your competitors could make the same claim, there is absolutely no downside to reiterating what might appear on the surface to be obvious. It is extremely hard to overdo benefits.

Explain Your Solution as a Series of Steps

Prospective clients will more readily understand what you do if you explain it as a process or series of steps. The number of steps doesn’t need to be seven. Ideally, you should have at least five and no more than ten.

The easiest way to come up with your steps is to describe the process you go through with clients. What do you do first? Then what? And then?

For example, an organization offering change-management consulting might describe their solution in the following way:

   1.  We identify the gaps between where you are now and where you want to be. This enables us to establish metrics by which we can measure the success of the project.

   2.  We obtain organization-wide buy-in. The reason most change initiatives fail is because of a lack of senior management support. We will work with you to ensure that your program has the necessary levels of support to achieve the long-term results you desire.

   3.  We provide customized skills and knowledge training for management and sales teams, which are delivered in both classroom and online formats. We structure the implementation schedule so that it best serves the needs of your sales team.

   4.  We capture and publicize success stories to reinforce the value of the initiative through internal publications, Web success stories, a catalog of success cases, and other means.

The Results You Get

This is often overlooked, but it’s an important section. If you want people to buy from you, show them that you get results. There are three ways to do this:

    •  Big-Picture Totals

    •  Mini Case Studies

    •  Testimonials

With big-picture totals, you make a sweeping statement about how many companies you’ve worked with in total and what you’ve accomplished overall on average. For example, you might say, “We’ve worked with more than one hundred manufacturing companies and lowered their power consumption a minimum of 10%, saving them a total of $1.5 million a year on average.”

The more specific you can be, the more power these statements will have. If you are able to mention a particular industry and a total amount that you either saved or earned, that’s impressive.

Big-picture totals are helpful, but if you can’t come up with the numbers, don’t worry. There are other ways to communicate the results you achieve for clients.

Mini case studies are simply one or two paragraphs that describe what you did for a company. You are telling a story in three steps:

    •  Here was the problem.

    •  Here’s what we did.

    •  These were the results.

We assisted a national franchising organization facing significant growth challenges in creating a vivid picture of the future that aligned their leadership and enabled them to implement a strategy for growth resulting in 18 new franchisees in 6 months.

If you have permission from the company, you can use their name and provide details. If not, you can create an anonymous company or a combination of companies and talk about your results with them.

Finally, make sure you don’t forget to include testimonials.

Ideally, you already have some. Use them. Especially if you can combine a testimonial with a great mini case study.

But if you don’t have testimonials yet, or you don’t have the right testimonials, try to get some in the next few days. I’d like you to have them before we launch the website that gives out this free report. Keep in mind that testimonials provide the social proof that you can do what you say you can do, so they’re extremely important. Although written testimonials are the quickest and easiest to get, if circumstances allow, try to get video testimonials as well. Posting these on your website will play a huge role in building credibility for the services you offer.

The best testimonials are ones that communicate the benefits you offer or address concerns or reasons why someone wouldn’t do business with you: “I thought implementing a new software system would be too complex, too time-consuming, and cost a fortune, but . . .”

Tip: The best way to get your clients to give you the kind of testimonials you want is to write them yourself.

Don’t worry, this isn’t unethical. Here’s what you do:

   1.  Write to your customers or clients and tell them that you are looking for testimonials for a new marketing campaign you’re launching. Tell them that if they provide one, you’ll gladly link the testimonial to their website, which will increase their visibility on the Internet. (It’s always good to get in the habit of including benefits when you’re asking someone for a favor.)

   2.  Tell them you’ve provided a sample testimonial that covers the points you’d love for them to make but that they can edit it as much as they wish.

   3.  Include the sample testimonial.

   4.  Tell them when you need a response. (Keep the deadline short so that they don’t procrastinate and put it into the pile of “things to do later.”)

Most of the time they’ll tell you to use what you sent, exactly the way you wrote it.

The All-Important “Call to Action”

Remember, marketing is a series of steps. At each one we want to motivate the prospect to advance to the next level. Thus, we want to make sure we wrap up with what we want the reader to do once they’ve finished the report. This is your Call to Action. In most cases, we want people to pick up the phone and speak with you. You may call this your “free consultation” or “complimentary strategy session,” but the goal is to get the phone ringing.

It’s important in this section to outline the benefits of what goes on during this call. Unfortunately, simply asking people to call for the free session isn’t enough. One trick that I’ve found effective is to list the types of questions people typically ask. Don’t give the answers, just the questions. This feeds the desire for them to learn the answers by calling you. I sometimes also use language such as, “I guarantee (you’ll leave the meeting/put down the phone) with new information that will help you address (the particular problem you solve).”

Starting to Write Your Report

Now that you have notes for the sections of your report, it’s time to get started actually writing it.

The easiest way to start your opening paragraph is to focus on the problem your prospective clients face. Here’s a simple sentence you can use to begin your free report (this also works great for sales letters): “I know from speaking to other individuals like yourself that many of them are worried about_____________.”

Another approach is to open with a story. It could be a case study that starts off as simply as this: “Allen Jones had a problem.”

A good story can have an impact on your readers and what they remember about your report.

My company once did a follow-up survey on two different free reports. The companies offering these reports were in the human resources consulting field, though each offered different services. Our goal was to see how many of the reports actually were read and what people remembered after reading them.

The first report was about seven mistakes executives commonly make in performance reviews. We talked to 195 people. Of those, 23 read the report cover to cover, and another 60% started, but never finished.

Then we tried to ascertain how much of the information readers of the full report retained. We hoped that a majority of readers would have remembered at least four items. Seventy-five percent of the readers remembered one item, but no one remembered more than that. (That one item was highly guessable, so those results are a bit dubious.)

Next we reached out to the people who downloaded the second report. The report’s message focused on mistakes executives made training and acclimating new employees. We managed to speak to 101 people. When we asked a series of similar “recall” questions, an impressive 65% could name three or more of the correct answers.

Obviously the second report resonated to a far greater extent than the first one. And what’s more, the message from the second report was remembered and retained.

Although both reports were written for an audience of human resources directors, there was one significant difference between the two reports. The first only conveyed facts. The other told a story. So there’s a strong argument to be made to start your report with a story.

Here are some examples:

    •  Marshall Coltrain gazed at the shattered window from which protruded a branch that had, until recently, housed his eight-year-old daughter’s swing. With a sigh of frustration and fear, he contemplated the wreckage and mused, “Damn, I hope this is covered.” (Insurance free report)

    •  Although the casual observer would never guess, Vice President of Operations Dan Townsend emerged from his staff meeting in a rage. “What is wrong with these people? They can’t get along for two minutes without adult supervision. There’s no way I’ll get the process control system implemented by July if this back-biting and petty sniping doesn’t come to a halt. I wish I could just fire the lot of them.” (Leadership free report)

    •  Fran Sullivan wondered why, with the economy so poor, was it so difficult to recruit a top-flight sales rep? When she started the search nine weeks ago, she felt confident that she would have it wrapped up by now. Unfortunately, nothing could be further from the truth. (Recruitment firm free report)

Add Content to Each Component

Now that you’ve started, fill out each section from the notes you’ve been making. Write anywhere from a paragraph to a page about each step. After you’ve completed the first draft, take a one-hour break (no more, no less). Then come back and read what you’ve written. Add examples where you think they might be helpful. Finally, read the report out loud. Does it sound like you speaking? If so, it’s probably pretty good. If it bogs you down as you’re reading or you find yourself wondering “What’s the point?” that’s a heads-up that you need a bit more editing.

Visual Impact

I’ve had reports that were simply Word documents that I saved as a PDF, and they’ve worked fine. In the interest of getting your campaign completed in five days, this may be all you have time for. Remember, your prospects are primarily interested in the content, not the packaging. However, if you have time (or at a later date), you’ll want to make your report look even more professional by adding pictures or graphics or having it designed professionally.

My favorite place to get photos, because they offer a great selection at an inexpensive price, is 123rf.com. You can also use istockphoto.com.

If you’d like a little help from a graphic designer to really spruce up your report, you can hire one inexpensively at Guru.com or Elance.com. You might even be able to find someone who will quickly put your report together with images at Fiverr.com, where everyone works for five dollars. I’ll talk in more detail later about how to effectively outsource various components of the marketing system, including adding these professional touches to your free report.

But remember, your goal for today is to get your report written. You can add professional flourishes later, after this week is up.

Okay, now it’s time for you to get to work. This is probably the most challenging day since it involves the greatest amount of writing. However, if you follow the structure and outline I’ve provided, I have every confidence in you that you can complete this today.

Tomorrow, we’re going to develop the content for a simple website that will motivate your visitors to give you their email address and download the report you just wrote. I promise to make it easy—with examples, templates, and ways to hire someone inexpensively to do the technical stuff. See you tomorrow.