I Love Public Domain Works

There’s so much public domain content available all over the
internet, with Master Resale Rights available and sites springing
up left and right with Private Label articles you can use to
create your own products, but what do you need to bear in mind,
what is the best way to use all this content and what can you
create with it?

What to Look Out For:

Copyright - you absolutely must check on this - violating
someone’s copyright is not clever and can be a really expensive
mistake not to mention seriously damaging your reputation. Is it
really public domain? All those lawyers fees can really mount up
when checking into all this but believe me, you really don’t want
to end up in court over it.

Public Domain Content - If you have the money to have a lawyer
look at copyright for you then fine, go ahead and get started.
Where can you find this type of content? It can be difficult to
find content that is free to use but here are a few links to get
you started:

http://www.gutenberg.org/
http://www.wikimedia.org/
http://www.gpoaccess.gov/index.html

Master Resale Rights - If you can’t afford expensive lawyers what
else can you do? One rather less pricey way is to buy Master
Resale Rights to a product - this gives you the opportunity to
name yourself as the author, use the content in another product,
rewrite the whole thing - the possibilities are endless. Just be
aware with this that you will need to look at the terms and
conditions of what you are allowed to do with the product before
you buy.

On a budget? - not to worry, there are still many ways you can
find great content without spending a fortune or worrying about
whether you can legally use it. Sites such as
http://www.instantpublicdomainprofits.com/
provide guaranteed public domain content for a small fee. You could also sign up to some of the well known
internet marketer’s newsletters. Why? Well if you’re serious
about internet marketing you should be checking out all the
latest happenings anyway, but a lot of newsletter owners will
have free ebooks, giveaways and articles to download - some of
which you will be able to use as your own.

So you’ve got your content ready to go and you’ve checked your
rights and permissions but there is one more thing to think about
- sites such as http://www.copyscape.com/ can check for duplicate
content on the internet and of course so can the search engines.
This could mean anything from the search engines deciding they
won’t rate your site as highly because the exact same content is
available elsewhere to some smarty pants asking you if you really
did write that incredibly good article because they’ve seen
someone else claiming that they wrote it too, so you do need to
be aware of this when looking to use content you haven’t
personally created, but that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t go ahead
and make the most of all that wonderful information.

What Can You Do?

You could just read the information to learn from it yourself;
you could read it to get ideas for businesses, more articles,
content, the list is limited only by your imagination.

How about:

Ebooks
Print Books
Presentations
Membership Sites
Face to face courses
Mini courses
Teleclass content
Webcast content
Podcast content
Blog content
Content for your Autoresponder
Ezine content
Articles for your site to build AdSense income pages
Viral Reports
Tips Lists

When it comes to using all the content you have gathered, you
need to look through it all and decide what you want to produce.
If you plan to use content from more than one source, such as 2
or 3 articles by different authors to be combined into a report,
you will need to go through and change the content into a similar
style, check that it is all written in the same tense, make sure
the formatting is the same throughout, check for spelling and
grammar (for example - spelling for some words is different in
the US than the UK) and look through all the articles to see if
any of the points made are duplicated.

Once you’ve done this, make a list of points you want to make in
your report, read the articles through again and start combining
them together to fit what you want to say - cut and paste to copy
sections into the right place.

Next, look at the way your draft reads now and see if it fits
your style of writing, your personality and your business.
Reword it to fit with this - there’s no point in producing a very
formally written, stiff sounding report for a hobby site.

At this point you could just tweak it, proof read it, and then go
ahead and publish it but to take it a step further and make it
really unique, why not look at how you might rewrite it so that
all of the content is yours - now you’ve got the basic idea down
and laid out, it shouldn’t take you long to reword things, add in
some of your own ideas and keywords that fit your site, and maybe
a few quotes and suddenly you’re looking at something that no-one
else has got, that the search engines will love and that no-one
can claim you copied.