If you have followed either the publishing trends or online marketing discussions that have gone on about public domain ebooks and books over the last coupel of years, you will understand there are a group of online entrepreneurs that seek to discover public domain material and turn them into paid information products.
Topics such as weight loss, golfing, travel and others never seem to lose their lasting power – even if they were written back before 1923 which is a critical date in public domain law within North America.
I myself have taken advantage of Public Domain Riches, a top-quality course and toolset that Yanik Silver designed to help take the mystery out of accessing and turning the huge volume of public domain material into profitable products almost over-night.
How can you use public domain to quickly pump up your online publishing and ebook sales?
1. Use the content to augment your existing e-book. I like this use of public domain material the best. I still like to outline my own e-books, write original content (or outsource it), add my own flavor to the material and then look to public domain to help in the content generation process.
As a quick example, I am putting together a very unique yoga book – and I needed some content fast for a few yoga poses. Not only did I find content, I found a few public domain books full of great illustrations I can use to really spice up the book.
Now my e-book is still 80% of my content, but the 20% public domain content will be priceless, and it all happened within a few hours.
2. Use public domain material as e-book bonuses. Bonuses work to both sell more e-books and increase the perceived value of your infoproduct bundle – as long as you stay relevant and keep the quality high, public domain material can be great for bonuses.
3. As a free giveaway report or e-book, to get customers into your follow-up sequence. Any experienced online publisher understands that most of your e-book and infoproduct sales will come from follow-up sequences. So, your main goal is to attract readers into your follow-up system – public domain material can be used to incent them to sign up and then to provide the follow-up content supplied in your public domain material.
4. Multimedia products from public domain material. Here’s a technique some of the real experts use – take a public domain book or e-book and turn it into a course, presentation, seminar, audio teleseminar series, series of videos or other instructional media. Note that changing the format alone often won’t result in significant enough changes to allow you sole copyright, but by mixing in your own content, or content from other sources, you will have a high-end infoproduct package all your own.
Finally, another technique that has been used more lately is to inject advertising into public domain material – where you setup a wide distribution of public domain e-books, give them away and charge advertisers to place ads in the e-books.
Similarly, you could convert public domain material into membership site material and either charge access fees or give away memberships turning a profit by selling advertising space.
To make these last two techniques work, you need to focus on large market segments instead of small niche markets since your business model is primarily based on high volume visits rather than selling specific high-value information.
If you are marketing online, publishing or selling e-books or information of any kind, you can benefit from public domain material.
Even better – there is a TON of material available, the three biggest issues we struggled with is 1) How do you find it quickly 2) How do you legally get access to the digital format of these sometimes hard-to-find products and 3) How can you turn them into huge money-makers.
There is only one course that covers it all – including some very underground techniques for finding high-value public domain material – AND some very good, specialized legal advice – it’s Public Domain Riches and you should take a look now.
Jeff
