Public Domain Materials as a Source for Your Business

There are many potential business opportunities that you can launch with public domain  works. Government publications are one of the popular categories where the public  domain is very strong, where you can find your own niche within and build a thriving  money-making business out of it.

The core process here is to brainstorm – once you understand what the public domain is  about and get a clear idea of the sort of information available in the public domain, you can  then sit down and brainstorm the different sort of niches suitable for public-domain driven  businesses.

Here, instead of finding a business idea first and then finding the right public domain  resources, we will look at finding public domain works and creating businesses out of  them.  But, you'll need to make sure that the right market exists for any of these topics  before you start running with the idea!

The US government routinely releases information on taxes, health care and other  government policies into the public domain. If you are involved in providing consulting services in any of these areas, using the public domain as an important resource for your  website will help build trust and more importantly, increase both your traffic AND your  conversion rates.

There are two important lessons when working with the public domain, though:

The public domain is a resource – not a business itself. Use it as one of the supports in  your business, but using just the public domain won’t get you anywhere. Even if you have  to do something as simple as do some minor editing, repackage the product and write a  sales letter, you’ll still have to put in some effort and strategy into the business – it’s not  instant coffee, although in a lot of cases this is instant content.

There are two ways to make money from the public domain. You can have a business or  business idea and then use public domain works as a source of content, or you can search  the major categories of the public domain and brainstorm new business ideas. Use both  techniques to make money from the public domain.