Public Domain

Lets look at it another way. We all have problems right? Products and services are there help us solve those problems, but when you’ve found a problem with the product that’s supposed to solve the problem in the first place, there’s your way in. That’s your little space there to recreate these products, but give them a twist. Make them better, faster, cleaner, more reliable, more cost effective, better presented, you get the idea.

Now don’t get me wrong, I’m not telling you to go out, buy peoples stuff, and just clone it and give it a fancy new name and change the layout a bit and sell it on. Aside from probably getting you into trouble with copyright laws and such, it’s just not practical or ethical. What I am showing you though is that you can take basic ideas, and you can make them a better solution to a specific problem from the ground up.

Now, no matter how much I tell you this, nothing that I know of is better than a little bit of practical experience. What I want you to do is program this method into the back of your mind. I can’t guarantee that you’ve come up with something already, if you have, great, but it’s most likely that you won’t have. Not to worry. That’s because you’re probably not using any particular products right now aside from your chair, your glasses and maybe a drink.

Go About Your Business But Mix With Your Market

So here’s what I want you do. When you’re done reading this, go about your day-to-day business in the normal way, but notice everything. If you’re in online marketing, every time you use a product that doesn’t have an option or a feature that would make your life easier, note it down. Whatever your field of expertise, the best way to come up with ideas and innovations related to releasing a product into that particular market, is to get in there, and start using other peoples stuff, and really brining to the front of your mind the problems that you encounter when using them.

It’s hard when you’re looking from the outside in to come up with these ideas, so I don’t want you to worry if you haven’t come up with anything viable yet. It’s likely because you aren’t using other people’s stuff right now. Once you’ve been doing this for a few days, you’ll learn to spot things like this almost by second nature, and you won’t have to keep actually looking for problems and improvements that you could make.

Start practicing now, and once it starts to sink in, you’ll find yourself randomly stop, and announce that the product your using isn’t correctly addressing your needs, and you’ll be able to add something into that concept folder that does address your needs correctly, or more quickly, or more reliably. Keep it in mind, and practice it often. Mix with your market. If you’re not using a selection of products and services in the market you’re thinking of breaking in to, you won’t get any ideas. That’d be like me trying to come up with an innovative new idea to introduce into the field of Ice Hockey when I don’t know anything about it.

Never Dismiss Anything:

Now let me open your mind a little bit with something that I really think is the key to mastering this. I do not ever want you to dismiss an idea that you come up with. No matter how wacky or crazy it seems, no matter why you think it won’t work. Just put it in that folder for now. I’ll tell you why. Ever had a sudden idea about anything that you think “Hey! Wow, I just had this great idea” then you say something along the lines of “Oh, oh no. Never mind, that won’t work because of insert problem here“.

This is what blocked me when I first started trying to master this, and I was wondering why I wasn’t coming up with any ideas to put in my folder. It’s simple, and it’s natural. If you come up with an idea and instantly start finding problems with it, you’ll dismiss it. Kind of an ah well, that won’t work approach. This will get you nowhere. Open your mind a little, and don’t start dismissing things on a whim because they seem impractical or even impossible at first glance.

We’ll talk more about this later, but let me tell you, I have a concept folder, just like yours, neatly tucked up in my business documents folder. Some ideas in there, when I wrote them were impractical, there was no market for some of them, some I couldn’t afford, and some just needed large numbers of customers to pull off effectively. Today, right this moment as I type, and possibly years after I’ve come up with these ideas, I’m actively working on three of them.

Think about that, three ideas which seemed like they’d never happen last year, and one of them even stretches back over three and a half years that’s just now become a viable option. Things change quickly; times are moving faster than ever before. Never forget, keep an open mind, and don’t start placing these limits on yourself before you start. Once we remove those limits, the ideas will start flowing. Start recording them. One of them may well be the next big thing in your field of expertise. More on how to sort the good from the not so good ideas later, with some simple checklists that you can use.

Some Examples:

For now though, here’s an example of the above method. So here’s me, trying to put up my first website in which I just happened to opt for what was at the time, probably the most complicated website you could put out with regards to how many different types of resources you needed. It was a membership site, and I wanted fully functional affiliate management, fully functional access management and a totally automated system that would deal with everything for me, on autopilot, and that’s before we even look at the auto responder and advert tracking scripts that were in the membership area.

Now at the time, I couldn’t find a system that did everything I wanted it to do. Either it was too simple and there wasn’t enough customization, or it was super complicated, costs five thousand dollars to buy, and wouldn’t fit in with the other scripts I had up there. So, me being a bit of a dreamer and liking to play with money I don’t have, I started writing down ideas, and everything I needed, how much it was costing me to try and hook the six or so scripts up to function as I needed for my business. This is how my concept folder started.

Understand this was five years ago or more, and seeing as I was still working a job, and just got my own place back then, I couldn’t afford to go all out and get something built that I wanted. So anyway, the idea, and the picture of this perfect system sits in my concept folder, like the one you created earlier. Five years later and staring 2005 in the face, this very system is now over eight thousand dollars down the line in development costs, (including some very personalized scripts) and nine months into it’s creation.

So what would have happened if I deleted this idea five years ago because it cost too much, and it wasn’t viable back then. I’ll tell you what, I would have lost what’s going to form the base of my next two products, a product with a seven to eight hundred dollar price tag, which even if it only sold a rather shoddy seventy five copies in it’s whole entire product lifetime, would make a nice tidy fifty thousand dollar profit.

See how important this is? Not only would dismissing the idea in the first place have lost me a perfectly good product for the future, but dismissing it before it even got started because I didn’t have the funds at the time, or the resources and knowledge to promote this to a wide enough audience would have been a crime, and I wouldn’t have even known it. I hope I’ve also shown you how the idea came about originally and what I mean about mixing with your market, and solving your own problems with your own products.

There are so many other examples I can think of, this site for example. I’ve always wanted to share what I’ve seen, experienced and learned with other marketers, but I’d just never had the time to write and develop such a course before, but things changed. I could go on forever, but I think the point has been put across now, and it’s up to you to fill that folder with ‘maybe’ and ‘could be’ products without prejudice.

Now before we move on, I want to say, if you’ve been inspired, or this report has hit you hard and sparked your imagination so far, and you’re coming up with ideas already, go, go now and write them down, record them. Do this any time you get an idea for a new product. Drop everything, record it, then come back to what you were doing before the subject changes and your train of thought is directed elsewhere.

Method Number Two:

And on that note, we’re going to change the subject a little here to look at the second way of creating products. This time, we have a little twist on the improvement method we talked about above. This one is a little less general, and something you’re most likely going to come up with when looking at the ideas you gained in method one.

I like to call this one Nichifying. Strange, yes, and there’s no doubt in my mind that there is in fact no such word, however, for the examples I’m about to give you, there’s no other way to sum it up like that. So what is Nichifying? Well, it’s as it says really. It’s taking a product that has a wide audience, and twisting it, changing something about it again, but this time, instead of trying to improve it, you’re evolving it in such a way that you’re reaching a very specific, much more targeted market that may be untapped.

Lets look at some real world examples. The one that immediately springs to mind is the rise of alco-pops. I’m not sure what you call them in the US, or Canada, or wherever you may be, but over here in the UK that’s what they’re called. Now the drinks industry was real clever with this and took something that used to be marketed to an older generation of drinkers, and turned it into a colorful, soda-like tasting pleasant drink that is targeted at younger people. It’s still alcohol. It’s the same product; they just gave it a twist, added a little something, and voila, brand new market. A very clever move indeed.

Now this one is a little harder to grasp, and hurts my brain a little more than the improvement factor, so lets look at a few more examples. How about processors for computers. Just starting to emerge are the above and beyond processors that aren’t just for the mass market, but they’ve been tailored to suit developers, designers, multi taskers and servers specifically. It’s the same again, it’s still a processor, but it’s been tailored to a specific market. In this example, rather than change the target market completely, they’ve kept it the same but introduced and tailored their products to very specialized tasks.

One last example here, lets look at this in an online marketing sense. Looking around you, I’m sure you’ll find there’s no shortage of dodgy old e-books and a lot of very general products about, so us as marketers have started to do this, either by taking a specific set of tactics and tying them into an original named system to be carried out in a particular way, such as this site for example, or taking it to the major extreme and just extracting one single subject and creating a product around it. A whole course about copywriting for websites, a whole course about joint ventures or e-zine management and creation.

So there we have it, you can take an existing idea or concept for a product, and if you really can’t use method number one to improve on the job it does, can you either go specialized and target it at a specific market, or even totally change the product to appeal to a different, untapped market. These are generally the alternatives to mass-market products, targeting every computer owner, or targeting every online marketer isn’t always the answer. Use method one to come up with ideas, use method two to refine your ideas, and come up with alternative angles that may not have been immediately obvious.

Why is Content Important?
 
Are you new to online marketing? Or are you one of the millions of frustrated website owners watching helplessly as your site fluctuates up and down (even on and off) the search engines?

Is your traffic suffering as you try to stay on top of the most current methods of finding traffic, only to find that they are ineffective for bringing targeted traffic or stop working soon after the search engines catch on?

There is a reason that staying in the search engines is vitally important. The amount of people who are searching for information online is increasing rapidly.

An Ipsos-Reid poll showed that people are starting to rely more heavily on the internet with increases in the frequency of internet usage in North America the UK and Asia. At the time of the poll 72% of Americans were online within the previous month, and that number continues to rise.

How are they finding information on the internet?

According to research published by GVU (Graphic, Visualization and Usability Center), most users – novice, expert, young, old, male and female – find new websites from two main sources: hyperlinks and search engines.

Pew Internet & American Life Project also published statistics about search engine use which indicated that “84% of online American adults have used search engines. That amounts to 108 million people. On any given day, 56% of those online use search engines.”

How many of these potential visitors are finding YOUR website? More websites are created each day leading to increased congestion and competition for the top spots in search engine results. How are you able to compete? Well first of all, how do search engines bring you traffic?

Two of the most popular methods of getting traffic from search engines include PPC – Pay Per Click – and SEO – Search Engine Optimization.

PPC:
Pay Per Click is advertising provided by the search engine providers (Google, Yahoo! and others) where you PAY for top placement. Their strategies for placement differ slightly. Some search engines will give you higher placement if your ad has a higher click-through rate (meaning more people click on your ad in ratio to the amount of times your ad was shown), others give top positions to the highest bidder.

In either case, you PAY. It is a quick way to get listed in the search engines and a smart way to get your traffic flowing – but it is not the cheapest AND you could spend far more than is profitable for your business if you don’t know what you’re doing.

SEO:
There are a lot of companies working ‘behind the scenes’ to help website owners get plenty of traffic from the natural search engine listings. Natural listings mean the search engine has ranked you according to the value it believes your site will offer an individual searching for a specific word or phrase.

Understanding exactly WHAT the search engines want to see when ranking sites requires knowledge of the algorithms. These algorithms change all the time as search engine providers try to outwit the search engine optimizers trying to find loopholes in the ranking system.

Some SEO companies will promise you top spots for a certain cost. Some are honestly creating optimized websites – others may be using techniques that could possibly get your site BANNED from the search engines entirely (once the search engine catches on). However, optimizing your website for better placement in the search engines is a technique that you should become familiar with and use to your advantage.

Both of these traffic methods have their pros and cons for generating traffic from the search engines. You will find out more about using them properly later on. But first you need to know what REALLY works…

Content is KING!

Before you start to think that this is another SEO technique that may or may not work depending on the current algorithms of the search engines, think about it…

EVERYTHING on the internet is CONTENT.

The internet is a veritable treasure trove of information. Good, bad, valuable or not, the internet is all about providing information to people. That is why smart internet marketers know that people want information from their websites – not just SEO enriched pages of advertising.

The loopholes that search engine optimizers have been trying to use for high ranking in the search engine has created a plethora of sites that boast high keyword ratios, thousands of irrelevant hyperlinks and sometimes even redirection. These redirected websites try to create an optimized web page that the search engines will rank high but actually redirect the viewer to a less search engine friendly site.

Well, the search engines caught on. The websites that were getting the highest placements weren’t always providing quality information or useful content. In fact, they not only lowered the ranking of these sites – they even removed them from the listings completely.

This sent a shock wave through the internet community and smart marketers realized that there is only one sure way to convince the search engines that they were meant to be at the top: Quality Content.

Not only do the search engines love content, but visitors do too. By providing visitors with useful information and relevant links to other sites, they come back again and again! And that’s not the only benefit.

Because website owners are now hungry for content, there is a huge market for informative articles that other website owners can use on their sites. By offering information to these sites in exchange for a hyperlink to your website, you get even more exposure, both to search engines AND customers.

So, how do you harness the power of content? How do you pull the most benefit and profits from your information?

You have learned what public domain means and places where you can find most of these works. From here, you were able to pick out the public domain work or group of works that you feel passionate about, so much so that you are certain you can generate the same kind of interest in your buyers. You have also made sure, based on what you know about the three rules on copyright that the work is in the public domain. You have, therefore, nothing to worry, particularly about copyright issues.

Taking the example of many greats ahead of your time, you have prepared your product or products, getting them ready for reproduction and sale. Your website serves as your base where you make your product available to the whole world, but you also make use of other powerful marketing sites like eBay to create a portal for more buyers to pour in. You have built a web presence and your ideas have been solidified as you make an effort and invest time on this new venture of yours.

In the words of Lord Acton, one of the most illustrious historians in 19^th century England:  “Look at a day when you are supremely satisfied at the end. It’s not a day when you lounge around doing nothing; it’s when you’ve had everything to do, and you’ve done it.”

It has been done. You have done it – turned your ideas into dollars. 
And now you are ready to make some money in the public domain.

The Slow Free Way To Find Public Domain Works
You can perform a search of the copyright records yourself. The process is time-consuming, cumbersome, and sometimes inconclusive (however, even paid searches can prove inconclusive). But if you have the patience to sift through massive amounts of data, you can save yourself the search fees you would otherwise pay to the Copyright Office or a private company.

Before you begin your search, be sure you know the title of the work, the name of the author (or authors) and/or any pseudonyms they may have used, the year of publication or creation, and any other information that may help identify the work—number of pages, type of binding, whether it was part of a series. The more information you have regarding a work, the more likely you will be able to verify whether it is in the public domain.

You can make a simple check to determine whether the copyright of a work was renewed by searching for an edition published more than 28 years after the original copyright date and looking for a renewal notice in that later edition. This method is only useful for confirming renewal; it is not a reliable conclusion for the absence of one.

To perform a thorough search, a good place to start is the Copyright Office’s online records (www.copyright.gov/records/). All copyright and renewal records from 1978 on have been digitized and catalogued in searchable format, and they are beginning to do the same with earlier records (you can find online information about some pre-1978 records at the University of Pennsylvania’s online records page (onlinebooks.library.upenn.edu/cce/). However, keep in mind that these results are not always conclusive, even if you find no record of the work you’re searching for.

For works created before 1978, you must search the print and/or microfilm copyright records available at the Library of Congress and other major libraries around the country, among them many Federal Depository

Libraries. Also, the following libraries possess a reasonably full set of records: the University of Chicago library, the University of California, Los Angeles, the Carnegie Library in Pittsburgh, and the Free Library of Philadelphia. Check with a library near you to find out whether they have access to records—your local branch may be able to locate the nearest library carrying physical records of copyrights and renewals.

When searching for a copyright renewal, you should look through records for the years that fall 27, 28, and 29 years after the work’s original publication date. (Remember, works published between 1923 and 1978 had to have their copyrights renewed for a second term in order to remain out of the public domain.) The records are divided into two sections for each year: January to June, and July to December. You should search both sections for all three years, regardless of the copyright date listed on the work.

Another free method that may yield results is to write to the author, his or her agent or estate, or the last known publisher of the work and ask directly whether the copyright was renewed. You can often find this information on the copyright page of the book or work, or in the author’s acknowledgements if there are any. You may not be able to get in touch with any of these parties, and if you do they may not be interested in

cooperating, but it’s worth a shot. Several people have found success with this method, and the results are at least conclusive.

HELPFUL HINT: There are thousands of works already proven to be in the public domain you can choose from, for which you will not have to perform any copyright search at all. Check out the resource section in the back of the book for links to sites listing and cataloguing known public domain works.