Chapter 4:
Making Money With Public Domain
There are a lot of ways someone can make money with public domain and now that you know where to get your material you need to know how to take that free stuff from the internet and make money with it!
Think about the last time you needed a lot of information about a subject all at once. Yes, you could have used public domain but you didn’t because it would have been a pain to search through all of the resource sites to find that information and put it together for your own resource, or maybe you didn’t know you could.
The bottom line is you’re able to take the content from the public domain and put it together, ready for someone to use. And if you spend your time looking hard enough and do enough research, you can put little packages together that would be centered on a theme.
Of course, with the package you create you have the problem of someone else just taking your hard work, slapping their own label onto it, and repackaging it so they can sell it also. So you should make it difficult for them to just rip off your efforts. You do this through adding value and some of your own content to your product.
Whatever you could add to the package to make it more personal will make your public domain collection a valuable collection and unique to you. That way there would be an advantage to getting the collection from you instead of going directly to the source.
There are two basic ways you could use to distribute these files. Ideally you should use both but if you just use one it would be okay also.
Digital Distribution (Over the Internet)
This is probably the easiest way to deliver your product. It would be delivered just like any report you would have delivered under any other circumstances (such as a report used as bait to get people on your mailing list).
This is clean and simple because it requires no babysitting. You could just offer some of the products for free, with an incentive for your packages that would offer extra content contributed by you.
Manual Distribution
This is an expansion of digital distribution; you can physically burn products to CDs or DVDs and mail them to people who request it. The idea here isn’t that you would make a huge profit off disc media but that you would give an extra option to people who wanted a “physical” copy.
Generally, the accepted price point would be a maximum of USD $5 or $10 depending on the content type and amount on the media. You would ship it in protected packaging and very soon after they order so you can build a good reputation.
Audio
When you compile a set of audio files, you have several options on what you can do with them and you can target a group of people with each bundle. Audio files are needed for various projects so you should keep this in mind when creating bundles.
Sound Effects
Sound effects are small sound files that video artists use to fill in their video projects to make sounds that would not otherwise be recordable or heard naturally audible to the viewer.
If someone is trying to create a low-budget film or wouldn’t otherwise be able to create a lot of sound effects easily then they would see this package as a great help for their project.
You could add to the package by adding your own sound effects that you might have or could make, such as clashing two pots together or the sound of a cat purring.
Audio Books
There are a lot of great books and stories in the public domain but some people just don’t have time to read them all. One of the more popular ways to “read” any book now is to listen to it being read.
Volunteers will read public domain books and documents and submit them to places such as LibriVox (librivox.org) so other people can enjoy them. You can take these works which are put back into the public domain after recording them and package them how you want and sell them if you wish.
You could take the collected works of Louisa May Alcott, package them, and offer them as an audio interpretation of the author’s work. Or, you could take a collection of government audio books and repackage them.
The value you could add to this would be adding your own recording to the mix of files. If you could provide your own flair to an audio book, that would make it more appealing.
You could even release “editions” of your public domain packages that include your own work so people would work to keep up with your next endeavor. This could gain you a lot of followers over time and it might even be something you could enjoy doing.
Music
Taking songs that are in the public domain and packaging them together can be very advantageous to many different groups. There are a lot of good, traditional songs that have been recorded by artists and released into the public domain.
One of the biggest categories here would be holiday music for those that would celebrate Christmas. There’s a huge market for music such as this and is evidenced by the fact there is so much of it available at the stores during the winter holidays.
Other possibilities would be taking music with certain moods and packaging them together. You would take bright, happy music and put them together as a peppy package. You could take slow, emotional music for those that would want a sad package or even have a complete collection of classical music or focus on a particular artist.
If you are good with music or have some personal music lying around, you could include that with the package. This would be a great way to even get started in the music business if you wanted to go that route eventually. Once again, this would be a great way to get a lot of followers.
Other Sound Files
You might find a sound type that I haven’t discussed here, and if you do then that’s great. You can always find a way to use those and package them together. Just remember to add something of your own work that you would not release as public domain so they anyone would have to work at separating yours from the public domain.
Images
There are a lot of images out there that you can use and just as there are a lot of different types of sound files, there are just as many (if not more) categories for images that you can use.
Images are used in just about everything for the internet – websites can use just about any image for just about any purpose. If you have a good supply of images then you could have a valuable package for people.
Once again, these can be themed. So put together themes of image collections for people while adding images that you can supply for limited rights and you’re set.
And getting close to the end.
Philip
http://philipjubb.com
http://internationalarticledirectory.com/
http://certainscripts.com