One of the reasons why you would write free reports is to circulate affiliate links. Here is some background on how to go about inserting a link into the text of your free reports, and making good money from your work.

One of the first things you need to do is make sure the positioning of the links within the text of the free report makes sense. The idea is to have the reader discover your link while reading through the body of the report.

The presence of the link will be obvious, as it will normally appear as a blue font that is underlined. What you want to happen is that the reader comes across the link, sees it is relevant to what he or she is reading and decides to click on the link before continuing.

This is not something that is as likely to happen if your links are not named in such a way as to hold the attention of the reader. Using link names that jars the reader away from the content with no apparent purpose will probably mean that not only will he or she click on the link; the reader may also stop reading altogether and move on to another page on the web.

When it comes to the sheer mechanics of inserting a link into your report, here are the basics of completing this procedure:

First, you will want to make a source document with your links already set up. To accomplish this, open a blank document in your word processing program. Also locate the site you wish to have the link take the reader to and have that up in an open browser.

Highlight the URL you want to create as a link, then right click on the mouse or use the “Control” and “C” keys on your keyboard to pick up the URL for copying. Switching over to your blank word processing document, paste the link onto the page. Continue this process by cutting and pasting over all the links that you want to use for your free report.

In effect, you are creating a source page that you will be able to use in the next phase, which will involve inserting the links into the text of your free report.

For the second stage of your task, write your report. Include the keywords that you plan to use as the names for the links in your text. This will provide you with the easiest manner to work with the insertion of the links, as you will have the places marked out in advance.

Keep in mind that you want the text to flow naturally, and hold the attention of the reader. The links should come along as an obvious part of the report, not as something that seems to have been stuck into the body for no apparent reason.

Pay close attention to the way you construct the report and you should be able to include quite a few links, as well as important keywords that will help your free report to show up in searches.

Next, begin the insertion of your links. You can accomplish this by reading through your finished report. As you come to a place that is ideal for the insertion of one of the links, toggle over to your saved source document, and locate the link that you want to insert.

Highlight the link and use the same procedures to copy and paste as you did when creating the resource page. The link will appear in the body of your test, either highlighted in blue font, or underlined, depending on which criteria you have selected.

Note that if you are using a Microsoft Word document to create your free report, that you can simply highlight the text in your free report that you want to use to lead to the link and then click on the “Insert Hyperlink” tab on the toolbar.

From there, you will have a screen appear that allows you to paste in or type the URL you wish to associate with the word or phrase you selected. This will automatically create the link in your document for you and provides you with the option of using any key word or key phrase to lead out to an affiliate ad or site.

Make sure you save your document once the links are inserted. From this juncture, it is just a matter of converting the document to PDF format. You can do this through Word or you can download http://www.openoffice.com and use the word processing program.

All you have to do is simply cut-and-paste your report; and then click the “PDF” icon. Once you’ve done that, all you need to do is find the right home for your free report and begin to promoting it. From there, you will realize some income from your efforts in a short time.