Making The Most of Public Domain and Private Label Content
by
Leokadia Angela
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.infogoround.com and http://www.thelostfiles.com
provide guaranteed public domain or private label content for a
monthly 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.
Time to start creating!