If you are an internet marketer you are selling a product.  It can be your product, or someone else’s and many believe that you will do better by having your own product.  The problem is, what product can you create?

You have probably thought about creating a product but you just couldn’t come up with an idea.  On the other hand you may have had an idea for a product but just didn’t know how to create it.  Product creation can be daunting.

Public domain materials can make creating your own product very easy. The first thing you might ask is “what is public domain?”.

Public domain is defined as material that has no copyright or that has a copyright that has expired.  Anything that is considered public domain is free for any one to use any way they want to without restriction.

The king of public domain was Walt Disney.  All of his first successes, Cinderella, Snow White, Sleeping Beauty, were all public domain works.  In other words, those stories were already written and in the public domain.  Walt Disney just took those stories and made animated movies from them. 

Walt Disney had the right to use those stories as anyone could have because they were in the public domain.  Any material you find that is the public domain is yours to use.  One of the easiest ways to create a product is to find books that are in the public domain and turn them into ebooks.

You can take the material from a public domain book and use bits of it for articles.  You can publish the book as is and sell it.  You can modify the work in some way which then would give you the right to copyright it yourself.  One of the best ways to modify a public domain work is to add commentary to the work.  Just add your thoughts and comments about sections of the book.

By adding your comments you have materially changed the work so that you can now copyright it yourself.  The original is still public domain, but the one you created with your commentary is your proprietary copyrighted work.

How do you find public domain materials?  Here are some guidelines.  First, all work published by the US government is automatically public domain.  These works can cover a multitude of subjects.  Just search on the internet for government publications.

Any work published before 1923 is now public domain.  Whether it was copyrighted or not, if it was published in 1922 or earlier it is public domain. Any work published from 1923 to 1963 had a copyright for 28 years.  To renew that copyright, it had to be done in the 28th year.  If it was not renewed in the 28th year, it is now in the public domain.

I must add the caveat that I am not a lawyer so you must not rely on my information to determine absolutely whether something is in the public domain.  Always use proper expert advice in determining whether material is public domain before you decide to use it. 

The US copyright office is a great resource for that. You can look up copyrights online. You can even have them do a copyright search for you and they can provide you with a certified search certificate.  You can find them at:
http://www.copyright.gov/records/cohd.html

Now if you want to create your own product, just find some public domain material, add a few comments and you have a full ebook that you can call your own!

Find enough public domain works and you can create a complete portfolio of your own products quickly and easily. Don’t re-invent the wheel!