Posts Tagged ‘information’

One of the greatest treasure troves of works in the Public Domain is the National Archives (NARA). NARA’s “job” is to archive Federal records that are judged to have continuing value—about 2 to 5 percent of those generated in any given year. As you would imagine, this has resulted in a growing massive collection of materials, diverse in form as well as in content. There are approximately 9 billion pages of textual records; 7.2 million maps, charts, and architectural drawings; more than 20 million still photographs; billions of machine-readable data sets; and more than 365,000 reels of film and 110,000 videotapes. All of these materials are preserved because they are important to the workings of Government, have long-term research worth, or provide information of value to citizens (like making money from new products created with them).

While the materials currently available online are but a fraction of NARA’s total holdings, there is still tens of thousands of works available to you online right now. And…if you want to have even MORE fun, I would highly recommend making a trip to the National Archives in College Park, MD. With 6 floors of Public Domain goodness, you will be like a kid in a candy store. It is truly an amazing experience. What is great is that they even allow you to bring in your digital cameras, video cameras, laptops and scanners…all for the purpose of duplicating the “hard copy” editions of the content. One of my personal highlights so far was being able to scan original prints by Ansel Adams taken of our most popular National Parks.

The National Archives has a comprehensive Archival Research Catalog (ARC) available online. Search the ARC HERE. Click on “Search Options” and then click on the “Digital Copies” tab at the top. Now you’re ready to search through ARC’s online records. You can also explore the National Archives online exhibits HERE and HERE.

I have been somewhat underground for the past few months…especially when it comes to the topic of the Public Domain. Well, that’s all about to change. Beginning October 1st, I’ve committed to a personal challenge of blogging about the Public Domain or related topics every day through the end of 2010…a good 90 days. The seed for this was planted by my friend, Dave Lakhani, but also encouraged by others as well.

So get ready for some great content of ALL types. The posts may be written, audio, video or all the above…and no, I don’t have the full 90 days planned out yet…grin. So…in the excitement of getting things started until the official kickoff day on Friday, here is a sweet site I’ve been using to find some stunning Public Domain content:

GPO Access: This is the ultimate search tool for finding federal publications. The results include descriptive records for historical and current publications and provides direct links to those that are available online. We’re talking 100′s of thousands of publications here on just about ANY topic know to man!

You can check it out for yourself HERE!

I’ve been giving a lot of thought lately about what I would do differently in my business if I had to do it all over. I realized that there are some elements of my business that I would handle exactly the same, but others I would definitely change. So what I thought I would do is over the next several blog posts, I am going to walk through the lessons I’ve learned over the past several years of selling online (my first “sales” site was launched in 2002). I will share my successes and mistakes in every area of the business…from product creation and affiliate selling to JVs and traffic.

My hope (and goal) is to help you avoid the same mistakes I made and benefit from the strategies and methods that worked. I will share what I would do right now if I was starting over. The first post will be ready in the next day or two!

Now more than ever before, the key to reaching your audience is to provide them with high-quality, ongoing beneficial content. The day of junk articles and spun content are pretty much over (thank God!). If you think about, it makes sense that your reader would WANT to read something of quality…that’s what YOU want too, right? Of course you do! Nothing you hate worse than to find a website that “hopefully” has the answer you’re looking for, only to find out it’s a spam site designed to get traffic and siphon your money. There will always be those who try to scam the system (not to mention you and I) but you know better…especially when you consider that your content marketing has a great friend in the Public Domain!

When you consider that there are over 85 million books, 200,000+ magazine titles, 5.5 million patents, billions of images and more, content for your site (not to mention your articles, products, autoresponders, etc.) should be a no-brainer! Think about this…we are talking about PROVEN content! It’s already been written by experts and read by thousands if not tens of thousands of readers (just like your target audience). This content was subjected to peer-review, editors and publishers whose desire was to share the best writing on the topic at hand. WHY? Because they knew that if the articles in their magazine sucked, readership would drop and their advertisers would lose money. If the books they published were crap, no one would buy them. Remember, there was no Internet 50+ years ago…LOTS of people read so publishers HAD to produce quality content. Content marketing was just as relevant then as it is today!

Honestly, as a content publisher, you really have NO excuse to struggle with writing blog posts or offering quality content to your readers, prospects and customers! To gain further insight on how to use Public Domain content as a part of your content marketing strategy, be sure to check out these related articles found elsewhere on my blog:

Sell Quality and the Price Won’t Matter

The Previous Post Was a Lesson

Limitless Content

The Gospel According to Magazines

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, one of the BEST sources for great Public Domain content is the U.S. Government! Billions of dollars are spent each year to create programs, research, publications, websites, consumer education and much more. And guess what? YOU are paying for it…it’s your taxpayer dollars at work. Of course, the great news is that works created by federal employees during the course of their job are in the Public Domain. What that means for you and me is that there is a LOT of great content of all types, created by some of the brightest people, available to us right now to use for products, articles, blog posts and more!

The challenge is always finding the content. I always say that you can’t find what you don’t know to look for. That’s true “most” of the time. The trick that can overcome that rule is to understand HOW to look…and that usually involves some stealth research tricks…grin…or access to a good search engine. And when it comes to finding content from the U.S. Government, there are several “search engine” options you have available to you.

Below is a list of my favorite, government-related search engines. Each have different focuses for accessing different types of content, but all can lead you down the “Yellow Brick Road” (yellow meaning GOLD…grin) for great content!

http://www.usa.gov

http://www.searchgov.com

http://www.searchmil.com

http://www.google.com/unclesam (also…google.com: search for [keyword] .gov)

http://www.gpoaccess.gov

http://www.loc.gov (Library of Congress)

http://www.ntis.gov (Find docs advertised here and then search for PDFs on usa.gov)

http://www.business.gov

http://www.regulations.gov

http://www.voanews.com

http://www.archives.gov (National Archives and Records Administration)

http://arcweb.archives.gov/arc/action/BasicSearchForm (Archival Research Catalog)

http://www.archives.gov/research/alic/ (Archives Library Information Center)

http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/index.html (American Memory)

http://www.loc.gov/pictures/ (Prints & Photographs Online Catalog)

In closing, I’ll leave you with this thought…this content is yours…you paid for it with your tax dollars…so why aren’t you using what’s yours? Think of it as the ultimate tax rebate. Make products from the content your tax dollars helped create. Sell those products and enjoy 100% of the profit. Cost to you…NOTHING! (You already paid, remember?!).

Your only question should be, “What can I create next?” Go have fun!

Here is the next video in my “Free Tools” series that reveals amazing, free tools that help you establish and enhance your online presence. Social Media is key to establishing your brand, your relationships and your products. The tools that I share here help you take it all to the next level!

In this video, we take a look at:

• Blog Tools for establishing your online presence

• Website Tools for creating static websites and minisites

• Tools that allow us to create group interaction sites

• Social Networking tools

• Content Distribution tools

• And much, much more!

The tools I share in this video are vital to your online success, so prepare to explode your exposure (and success) online!

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There are some killer free tools out there that you really NEED to use in your business if you aren’t already! In this webinar, we will take a look at the FREE tools available for product creation. We look at tools for Text Creation, Image Creation, Video Creation, Audio Creation and more!

One of the things I LOVE about this series is that it removes another hurdle many face when getting started online…the need for quality tools. Just in the past little while, the web has seen an influx of amazing, free or open-source software that enable you to accomplish tasks that, just a few years ago, would have cost you hundreds if not thousands of dollars. Enjoy!

BTW…here is some great feedback for one of the future episodes of this series that I’ll be posting soon. The videos are a part of my Step-by-Step Info Products Membership Site:

I have watched one webinar video, #3 of the series on free tools…Tony, my membership is paid for, for the next three months at least. The value of what you provided – free auto-responders, free shopping carts, free utilities for research, keywords, I can’t even remember everything that was there. Tony, that was just one video in one series that you have…You have been hiding the value of this thing under a basket.

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Click HERE for more Step-by-Step How-to videos.

Okay, I admit it, I am a research addict! Being a good researcher can be a great strength…but at times, a weakness as well. It can be SO easy and tempting to get distracted by ALL the goodies you find! Because of this, I tend to rely on tools that help me find the content or information I’m looking for as quickly and as efficiently as possible. The tool I want to share with you today is one such amazing research tool. It’s a website that has become one of my favorites. As a reader of this blog, YOU have benefited from the research gleaned using this tool many times, and so, after today, you will gain the same benefit (and edge) that I have leveraged into content creation, articles and much more.

To be honest, I share this website with you reluctantly BECAUSE it’s such an amazing research tool. I don’t like giving away ALL my secrets. In this case, however, I’ll make the exception so that you can benefit from it as I have!

The website I’m referring to is SimilarSites (http://www.similarsites.com). It’s a search engine of sorts that enables you to find other websites that are similar to the website you type into the search box. I use this website’s search strategy in many different ways, but I’ll share one key method with you today as it relates to the Public Domain. You can use it to find similar and related content sites! Here’s what I mean.

For our example, I typed in the well-known Public Domain content site, Gutenberg.org. I don’t do much with the content from Project Gutenberg, but figured that there may be other sites out there RELATED to it that may offer more great content. BINGO! I was right. Upon conducting the search, here are the results I received…nearly ALL of them offer content from the Public Domain in one form or another:

Similar Sites to Gutenberg.Org

• ManyBooks.net – Free eBooks for your PDA, iPhone, or eBook Reader (manybooks.net)

• LibriVox (librivox.org)

• The Online Books Page (onlinebooks.library.upenn.edu)

• Free-ebooks.net | Download free Fiction, Marketing,electronic publishing ebooks (free-ebooks.net)

• Bibliomania – Free Online Literature and Study Guides (bibliomania.com)

• Online Books, Poems, Short Stories – Read Print (readprint.com)

• Bartleby.com: Great Books Online — Encyclopedia, Dictionary, Thesaurus and hundreds more (bartleby.com)

• FullBooks.com – Thousands of Full-Text Free Books (fullbooks.com)

• etext center: collections (etext.lib.virginia.edu/ebooks)

• Feedbooks: Food for the mind (feedbooks.com)

• Page By Page Books. Read Classic Books Online, Free. (pagebypagebooks.com)

• Free eBooks at Planet eBook – Classic Novels and Literature You’re Free to Share (planetebook.com)

• Munseys : A Bangsian Fantasy (munseys.com)

• DP: Welcome (pgdp.net)

• World eBook Fair (worldebookfair.com)

• World Public Library Association (netlibrary.net)

• Bookyards.com » Library to the world (bookyards.com)

• eBooks@Adelaide: Free Web Books, Online (etext.library.adelaide.edu.au)

• The Burgomeister’s Books: Truly free ebook download library (#1) (truly-free.org)

Of course, as you can see in the screen-capture image, you also have the ability to also conduct similar site searches on every result as well…meaning that you could find a LOT of related websites in a very short period of time. Told you this was an amazing tool! What make this tool even MORE fun is that SimilarSites also offers a toolbar (which I have installed) so that if you are out surfing the web and you happen upon a website you really like, the toolbar enables you to find sites similar to the one you are visiting right there on the spot. How cool is that?!

Now I just used Gutenberg.org as the example, but I hope that you’re picking up on the greater implication…like finding niche-specific content, for example. You can also use the search to find sites similar to the popular ones out there…like Facebook. There are new social media sites coming online all the time and there is no way you could possibly find them all. SimilarSites makes it easier…and as I always say, “easier is better!” Have fun with it!

It’s no surprise that there are a number of marketing folks who talk about Public Domain content. I don’t have the exclusive on the topic…expert or not. Of course, most give their primary focus to books…and rightly so…but books are just one branch in a massive tree of content possibilities. Other “branches” include images, magazines, patents, movies, audios…the list goes on and on. But in today’s post, I’m going to lead you to another branch that very few marketers, if any, are talking about with regard to the Public Domain. I’ve hinted at a few of the “leaves” of this branch in the past…today I’m going to focus your attention on a few more.

Our discussion for this post and posts to come draws from a curious paragraph found in Copyright Circular 40 on Works of the Visual Arts. It’s no secret that I LOVE the visual arts in all its forms, but today we’ll look at them with a spin…NOT considering content that was once copyrighted but is now in the Public Domain, but rather, content that was NEVER copyrighted (and never will be). It’s content you use everyday and likely never considered it for product creation. And that’s the exact reason why I’m mentioning it now.

The paragraph I referenced earlier from Circular 40 reads as follows:

Copyright protection for an original work of authorship does not extend to the following:

• Ideas, concepts, discoveries, principles
• Formulas, processes, systems, methods, procedures
• Words or short phrases, such as names, titles, and slogans
• Familiar symbols or designs
• Mere variations of typographic ornamentation, lettering, or coloring

Now I am not planning to focus on all these “non-copyrightable” options in this post…I just want to spurn you to think about just ONE bit of content differently today. We’ll get to others in future posts. As a matter of fact, I’ve already written a post previously about IDEAS which you really should read HERE.Today, however, I want to take a look at the last option: Mere variations of typographic ornamentation, lettering, or coloring.

One of the reasons I wanted to look at this type of Public Domain content is because it’s the exact type of content that I discussed briefly in my previous article on Aeropostale. Defining this content is rather easy because you are “using” it right now…letters, numbers, ornaments and colors! Now, about now, you might be thinking, “Okay Tony…book content I can see for products, even images and magazines…but letters? Like A or T or Z?

Yeah! Letters! Letters and symbols are the basis for all our written (and in some cases visual) communication. They represent specific concepts to us regardless of our language or worldview. And so, while the letters, “Z”, “P”, “A” and “I” may seem to offer no possible relevance to us for product creation, the word, “PIZZA” instantly conjures memories of images, tastes, smells and experiences…at least it does for me. More than that though, you and I have the legal right to use that word, pizza, or the letters that make it up, to create ANY type of product we choose…as evidenced by the yellow-stripped shirt I’m wearing right now with “A87″ embroidered on the pocket (yes, I bought it at Aeropostale)! To you and me, “A87″ means very little if anything, but to Aeropostale, it means a multi-million dollar business and brand!

Here is another question to consider…what does “STOP” mean to you? And in how many ways have you seen those letters in that configuration used in products of all types? What about the color “red” as it’s used with a stop sign? The color “red” carries meaning to it…think about it…you don’t see “green” stop signs! Why? It sends the wrong message…and that message is conveyed with a color and four letters.

Let me offer one more example (I could provide thousands) in the form of another question…when you see the numbers 0, 1 and 9, they don’t mean too much right? But what about 9/11/01? Every American knows what THAT number combination stands for…and those numbers in that combination has generated tens of millions of dollars! How about this set of numbers: 12-25? Merry Christmas! I hope you are beginning to get my drift.

You know what this means, right? A very common symbol online…a smiley face…that has been worth millions in one form or another!

It’s likely that you have not consciously considered what possible products could be created with the combination of letters, numbers, symbols and colors. My hope is that this post will challenge you to consider new possibilities in your quest for best-selling products. Think outside the box and brainstorm how a letter or two might be able to transform your business!

One of my favorite local powwows happens today, the Lawilowan American Indian Festival, and I’m excited to see friends, vendors and dancers whom I haven’t seen in a while. Of course, I’m also excited to see my girls dance again. So in honor of the powwow, I thought I’d share some great sources for “Native American” related content from the Public Domain. There is some great content out there…hope you enjoy!

The first place we’ll begin is at Google Books…the growing source for all kinds of fun things in the Public Domain. The BEST way to find Native American-related resources on Google Books is by using focused keywords…for example, not “Native American” but “Cherokee” or “Dakota tribal.”

Another favorite source for Native American-related images is the Beineke Rare Books & Manuscripts Digital Library at Yale. Here you can find a LOT of great images…many in high resolution…including photographs, fine art and illustrations.

The Internet Sacred Text Archive is a terrific source for information on tribal stories, religious ceremonies and much more. This is definitely on of my favorite sites!

Of course, this post would be incomplete without mentioning Edward Curtis resources at the Library of Congress. You can view those resources HERE and HERE.

To wrap up this post, I’d like to share a quick video of my girls dancing at this powwow three years ago. Enjoy!