Public Domain Web Content

It started simple enough, a friend had an old book and was thinking about turning the contents into web based content for their website. For some reason I was the one who had to research the Public Domain/Copyright Expiration information as I had happened to mention that I heard you could repurpose old content as new material and resell it.

I had saved an article on a guy who took an old sales book on selling Model T Ford's and used the find and replace feature in wordpad to create a whole new book about selling modern cars and sold it as an eBook with a premium price tag. Only I gave the article to someone else.

Then I came across this amazing tidbit of information at Paul Allen's Blog:

• Payscale used public domain data from the federal government to attract search engines and go from 10,000 monthly visitors to 1.2 million, primarily through natural search traffic (and word of mouth) without spending any money on advertising. And now, it has wage data on 5.5 million US employees, nearly 5 times as much data as the leading traditional wage consulting firm. Using public domain data to attract initial customers, and user generated content to keep people coming back and signing up for your free salary comparison reports, so you can upsell them to your $19.95 for six months subscripton to more detailed reports that can help someone get a pay raise, is a brilliant business plan. I'm very impressed with this company and its model. It generated $5 million last year.

So using Public Domain Material is in no way the small potatoes or rare occurence that I had previously thought.

Unfortunately I don't have as much talent or resources as Payscale to boost my traffic like they did. I do however have some public domain material that I am currently working into fresh web content and have found a few sources for more.

The problem is that the public domain stuff available online has been picked up by at least one or two other websites; and more if the content is somewhat more relevant or useful or related to high paying keywords.

So I'm starting my Public Domain experiment with some I found Offline, working some other online stuff into the mix later.

It's crazy to think that this one source will create a several hundred page website of useful information which isn't available anywhere else online.