How To Create Your Own Infoproduct Using Public
Domain Material.
by Asoka Selvarajah, Ph.D
One of the key ways for a person to make a lot of money is
through creating and selling information products to targeted markets. The
explosion of courses and books showing people how to solve a myriad problems
proves that this is truly the information age. Moreover, the demand for such
products will only increase.
The problem is simply this. How do you
actually create an information product? There are essentially three main
ways: (1) You write it yourself from scratch, (2) you have someone else
write it for you (also known as Ghostwriting), or (3) you use existing
copyright-free public domain materials. It is the latter option that we will
discuss here.
There are very strong reasons for going down the public domain route. For a
start, there are excellent materials available. Other people have taken the
time and effort to research and write on a specific subject, and now you can
avail yourself of this material for free.
By public domain, we mean material that is available for anyone to use. Some
material is placed deliberately into the public domain. An example would be
much of the educational material produced by the US government. However,
some material enters the public domain for other specific reasons. In
general, there are 4 classes of public domain material:
1) Generic information, e.g. facts, numbers, ideas, titles, etc. Not of much
use to you from a product creation standpoint!
2) Materials deliberately placed in the public domain. Certain musicians
have place their work in the public domain. P.T. Barnum's autobiography was
placed in the public domain.
3) Many works by the US government and its subsidiaries. All Federal works
are public domain.
4) Previously coprighted works that have fallen into the public domain. THIS
is the major area of interest (although you can also use a lot of material
from the government too).
An excellent example of how a public domain work has been used to create
great riches in the modern day would be Wallace D. Wattles' "The Science Of
Getting Rich". Success coach Bob Proctor has created an enormous course,
complete with audio cassettes and workbook around this material. It sells
for $495. Online, there are many different people offering a course based on
this book, in one form or another. You could do so too.
However, the field is much wider than this. There is public domain material
available on almost every conceivable subject, from numerology to
flower-arranging, from cats to stock trading.
There are many variations of what you can do with public domain material.
You can simply offer it in book form, just as it is. You could modify it, by
adding new material you wrote yourself, and then copyright the new composite
work. You can record the material into audio format, and then sell it as an
audio cassette/CD course. You could even make videos of the material, or
give a live seminar based around it.
The possibilities are endless, and the profits are potentially enormous. The
key issues, however, are to (a) find the public domain material in the first
place, (b) establish that the material really IS public domain and that you
are not enfringing anyone's copyright,, and (c) create a saleable product to
an interested target market that has money to spend and a desire to spend
it.
Previously, (a) was a big issue as there was a great mystery as to where
this public domain material was hiding. However, with the advent of the
online world, much of it is easy to find. Try typing the phrase "public
domain" into a search engine. This alone will reveal a lot of material that
you can use.
Establishing the legal side is important
in order to prevent yourself from falling into serious trouble later on.
Fortunately, there are specialized legal firms who can, for a relatively
small fee, perform a copyright search for you and establish if a specific
work really IS public domain or not.
Finding a market for your product remains one of the most important matters
of all. Before even embarking on creating your product, you need to do
sufficient research to ensure that there is an easily locatable target
money, keen on your information, and with money to spend on it. An example
of such a market would be golfers. A bad market for infoproducts would be
unemployed broke people. Sure, there are plenty of them. However, they don't
have any money to buy any products you come up with. No, not even a book on
how to get out of debt!
Overall, if you wish to make money through helping people, information
products are an excellent way. If you don't wish to create it yourself, then
public domain is definitely a recommended route. The work is already written
- often very well written - and all you have to do is adapt it to the modern
world, and market it in a creative way.
Copyright 2005. Asoka Selvarajah. All Rights
Reserved.
Suggested Resource That Can Help:
Yanik Silver offers an excellent resource on the subject of creating and
profiting from Public Domain material. if you are interested in learning
more, you should sign up for his material at:
I highly recommend Yanik's work on this subject. He tells you all you need
to know to get going, as well as giving you all the places online where you
can easily find all the public domain material you will ever need.
You can read more of Asoka Selvarajah's
articles at his blog.
