Freaking Idiots Guide to the Public Domain How you can make money re-purposing public domain works of literature, art, and music (Freaking Idiots Guides Book 3)

Making Money with the Public Domain (A short 18 page guide)

I know what you're thinking! But, Mr. Nick - How can I make money with the Public Domain?

Have you ever heard of "Scrooged" or "Mr. Magoo's Christmas Carol?" Both, of them are take offs on Charles Dickens' "A Christmas Carol." The authors repackaged them into current day classics. The groundwork was already done for them by Dickens. They used many of the same characters and situations, just adding their own content where appropriate, to make the story their own, and slant it towards their modern day audience.

And the cool thing is - You can do the same thing.

What I want to do here is take a few minutes and share ideas on how you can make money with the public domain. The whole idea is to help you work smarter, not harder.

Web Site Content. If you have a website, you're always on the lookout for new or unique content, and the public domain can supply you with an unending source of content. One of my websites digitalhistoryproject.com/ is almost 99 % public domain content. I have nearly three hundred articles and well over 1500 pictures that are all public domain on it. Over the past eighteen months, it has received nearly 135,000 page views from 44,000 visitors. And, they're all coming for one thing - unique content that they have never seen before.

The great thing about older public domain items is Google has never seen it before either, so when their web crawler comes across it to index your content, it is looked at as new, and can rank high in search.

Digital History Project is like it says a historical website, and its goal is to publish everything related to history. I've published pictures, hundreds of old magazine articles, and lone chapters from books.

People love it, and its free content that I don't have to pay for. Because I have access to hundreds of thousands of public domain magazine articles I will never run out of stories or illustrations to publish.

Every website out there can use public domain art to spruce up their websites. You can condense articles for short fillers on Presidents Day, Memorial Day, and the Fourth of July. I've looked at Philatelic websites loaded with articles on stagecoach, train, and ocean mail. If you're an Art History website, there are tens of thousands of old art prints, art histories and biographies out there. Even if you're a porn site - you can spruce it up with an article on nudes in history.

The bottom line is - If you have a website, and you're not using the public domain, you're missing the boat.