How To Really Use Public Domain Content For Profit

It’s the end of one long and busy week and the beginning of another…

So today I thought I would share with you something else that makes my life easier.

Public domain content is often misunderstood and misused and yet, if you do use it correctly, it can be an absolute godsend as well as a wonderful source of great material you can take and use for absolutely nada.

In today’s newsletter I’m going to first share some excellent resources for you to find this magical stuff and then some more on how to use it the right way…

So let’s start with some of the best places to find literally millions of pieces of books, texts, photos and videos you can simply take and use as your own.

The place to go for media content that includes images and videos is Wikimedia Commons which contains over 56M files – access the search function for that and all that good stuff here:

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Main_Page

Then there is the Internet Archive which contains a huge variety of books, websites, software, texts, images and more. Not everything there is public domain although it is all freely available, so you have to check the licensing or use ‘public domain’ within your search term if you use their search bar.

Find the Internet Archive here:

https://archive.org/

The vast majority of the equally enormous collection at the Library of Congress online is also public domain but, again, check before reusing it.

You can access it here:

http://www.loc.gov/library/libarch-digital.html

If it’s photos you’re after then Flickr Commons has a wonderful selection of mostly vintage or older treasures from all kinds of collections across the internet and you can find that here:

https://www.flickr.com/commons

For ebooks and plain texts I recommend two more resources – Project Gutenberg which has a well curated selection:

http://www.gutenberg.org/

And Wikisource which is its online library of text and ebooks that are in the Public Domain:

https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Main_Page

For a great guide to what Public Domain and Creative Commons licenses mean plus a comprehensive selection of links to all kinds of audio, video and text content that falls within those categories, go here:

https://guides.library.harvard.edu/c.php?g=310751&p=2072820

Then there are some great ideas on how to monetize that multimedia public domain content here:

https://www.nichepursuits.com/do-public-domain-works-provide-a-good-business-opportunity/

And here’s how to profit from public domain images on Etsy and other sites, including your own:

https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/a3mmxg/how-etsy-sellers-and-big-business-make-money-on-public-domain-art

While this will tell you how to publish public domain books on Amazon the right way:

https://heyyoava.com/how-to-publish-public-domain-books-on-amazon/

Your TED talk this week is on how Amazon, Apple, Facebook and Google manipulate our emotions: