18 Feb 2008 04:53:04 | Roger C. Parker
Save Time and Boost Profits with Free Content
Public domain gives you a head start creating ebooks, ecourses,
newsletters, teleconferences, website content and email
registration incentives you need to keep in constant touch with
clients and prospects.
Public domain refers to information free from copyright
protection. The two most important sources of public domain
content are:
1.Books with expired copyrights. Copyright protection for many
books written early during the previous century has expired. In
addition, millions of other books, published later, have lost
their protection because their publishers did not renew their
copyrights in time.
2.The second source is Government created materials. In
addition, hundreds of thousands of government-published books,
pamphlets, reports, and ‘how-to’s’ are available. Information
published by the United States Government and other governments
is typically not copyright protected.
Basing your marketing materials on public domain content boosts
your profits by saving you time and energy. This time and energy
can be invested in more profitable activities like networking,
selling or direct customer service.
In many cases, proper use of public domain content can increase
your billable hours five to ten per cent!
This is in addition to reducing the amount of time it takes to
complete a marketing project. One client, for example, had been
struggling for three years to write a website incentive showing
attorneys how to prepare an effective marketing plan.
Within a week of learning how to search for, and use, public
domain content, he had completed his special report and it was
already attracting new business to his consulting firm!
Public domain content can be used ‘as is,’ or you can repurpose
it into different forms. For example:
1.Newsletters. Adapt chapters of a book into issues of your
newsletter that build on each other.
2.Teleconferences. Use a book as the basis of a series of
teleconferences.
3.Website incentive. Create a special report or email
registration incentive based on a government booklet.
4.Autoresponder series. You can offer a ‘mini course’ as a
series of lessons delivered at weekly intervals.
5.Articles and speeches. Books can be repackages in shorter
units, adapted to current conditions.
6.Checklists and worksheets are always welcome and can be easily
assembled from copyright-free sources.
Often, the original, copyright-free work can be used ‘as is.’
The owner of a fly-fishing camp located a ‘fly fishing coloring
book’, which he sends him clients to give to their children.
Putting public domain content to work basically involves four
steps:
1.Goals. What do you want to accomplish? Simply keep in contact
or motivate fence sitters to act right now? Your answer will
influence the amount of information you need, as will your
market’s information needs.
2.Locate. The next step is to locate appropriate public domain
content. This involves research that can be done at your
computer, at any hour of the day or night.
3.Verify. You’ll want to protect yourself by making sure that
the materials you have selected are indeed copyright free.
4.Adapt. Unless you are going to reprint a book or government
pamphlet, you will want to scan or transcribe it, and reformat
it into the format that works best and suites your marketing
needs.
No longer do you have to write every word of your marketing.
Information in the public domain permits you to market more
efficiently, so you have more time to provide your unique
products and services.
Public domain material allows you to save time and money while
creating an ongoing stream of credible customer communications.
About Author :
Roger C. Parker is the $32,000,000 author with over 1.6 million
copies in print. Do you make these marketing and design
mistakes? Find out at www.gmarketing-design.com