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:
- EbooksPrint
- Books
- Presentations
- Membership Sites
- Face to face courses
- Mini courses
- Teleclass content
- Webcast content
- Podcast content
- Blog content
- Content for your Autoresponder
- Ezine contentArticles 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!
