One of the most productive and useful areas to locate information that you can use to produce your own unique, professional, specialist and above all, valuable products is the public domain.
There are huge amounts of information products just waiting to be snapped up by someone with the mind to do so. Books, music, films, scripts and specialist knowledge that’s been lost through the advent of time, it’s all there.
Once your interest is sparked there are many ways and places you can locate more information than you could ever need. Some of it will need bringing up to date and you can get someone else to do that, a lot of it is ready to go with very little work at all.
Let’s say you decided to focus on a playwright and collect as many plays as you can by them. It would be inadvisable to try to claim ownership of the plays as though they where yours and that would probably be counter productive anyway as most playwrights already have a following.
You could put together all the plays you can locate into a presentable format and then sell the whole thing on to fans, followers and anyone you can garner interest from. That would pretty much be a ready made specialist niche.
The best thing about this is that it costs you nothing to locate and collate this kind of information. You don’t even need to produce any of the products until a customer has paid so no money is coming out of your pocket.
Next you could locate some experts and ask them for more specific information about the playwright in particular. Produce another product from that information and sell that to anyone who bought the play scripts.
You could create audio products of the plays and sell them on as well.
A major product would be to produce audio files of all of the plays to sell with the life story of the playwright. You could either sell it as one big product or you could set up a monthly membership style delivery system where people pay you a set amount to receive one audio play and a little information about the life and times of the chosen playwright.
Of course you wouldn’t have to focus on plays; you could use music by a particular composer, films by a particular director or films with a particular actor/actress. Once you start getting creative the possibilities are endless.
Now here’s the amazing bit. If you were to set this up on a monthly mail order basis you could produce the products for a few pounds/dollars each and then sell them on for say 19.99 or so. On just a thousand orders, which isn’t really that much, you could be making an extra 20,000 a month. It’s very easy to get a specialist company to fulfil the orders for you so you wouldn’t even need to handle the product.
Can you see the potential?
The thing is once you have a project like this up and running you can leave it on auto pilot and start work on another. So now you’re doubling your profits and creating multiple streams of income.
All of this from a little creative thinking, a small amount of work and using other people’s knowledge and information to create a product of your own.
This is how many of the “Big Dogs” in information marketing produce the products that make them rich without ever having to work too hard at all.
Here are some places you can start to locate public domain information:
Info about the public domain and fair use policies: http://fairuse.stanford.edu/Copyright_and_Fair_Use_Overview/chapter8/8-a.html
Public Domain Central: http://www.publicdomaincentral.com/
Internet Archive: http://www.archive.org/index.php
Eldritch Press: http://www.ibiblio.org/eldritch/
Films: http://www.publicdomaintorrents.com/
Small Directory: http://www.booksforabuck.com/general/pubsources.html
Music: http://www.pdinfo.com/
Links: http://www.blinklist.com/tag/public%20domain/
Small site with links: http://www.pddoc.com/
Another Directory: http://www.savetz.com/pd/
Choral Music: http://www.cpdl.org/wiki/index.php/Main_Page
There should be enough info there to keep you busy for a while.