There’s so much public domain content available all over the internet, with Master Resale Rights available and sites springing up left and right with Private Label articles you can use to create your own products, but what do you need to bear in mind, what is the best way to use all this content and what can you create with it?

What to Look Out For:

Copyright - you absolutely must check on this - violating someone’s copyright is not clever and can be a really expensive mistake not to mention seriously damaging your reputation. Is it really public domain? All those lawyers fees can really mount up when checking into all this but believe me, you really don’t want to end up in court over it.

Public Domain Content - If you have the money to have a lawyer look at copyright for you then fine, go ahead and get started. Where can you find this type of content? It can be difficult to find content that is free to use but here are a few links to get you started:

http://www.gutenberg.org/
http://www.wikipedia.org/
http://www.gpoaccess.gov/

Master Resale Rights - If you can’t afford expensive lawyers what else can you do? One rather less pricey way is to buy Master Resale Rights to a product - this gives you the opportunity to name yourself as the author, use the content in another product, rewrite the whole thing - the possibilities are endless. Just be aware with this that you will need to look at the terms and conditions of what you are allowed to do with the product before you buy.

On a budget? - not to worry, there are still many ways you can find great content without spending a fortune or worrying about whether you can legally use it. Sites such as http://www.infogoround.com and http://www.thelostfiles.com provide guaranteed public domain or private label content for a monthly fee. You could also sign up to some of the well known internet marketer’s newsletters. Why? Well if you’re serious about internet marketing you should be checking out all the latest happenings anyway, but a lot of newsletter owners will have free ebooks, giveaways and articles to download - some of which you will be able to use as your own.

So you’ve got your content ready to go and you’ve checked your rights and permissions but there is one more thing to think about - sites such as http://www.copyscape.com can check for duplicate content on the internet and of course so can the search engines. This could mean anything from the search engines deciding they won’t rate your site as highly because the exact same content is available elsewhere to some smarty pants asking you if you really did write that incredibly good article because they’ve seen someone else claiming that they wrote it too, so you do need to be aware of this when looking to use content you haven’t personally created, but that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t go ahead and make the most of all that wonderful information.

What Can You Do?

You could just read the information to learn from it yourself; you could read it to get ideas for businesses, more articles, content, the list is limited only by your imagination.

How about:

Ebooks
Presentations
Membership Sites
Face to face courses
Mini courses
Teleclass content
Webcast content
Podcast content
Blog content
Content for your Autoresponder
Ezine content
Articles for your site to build AdSense income pages
Viral Reports
Tips Lists

When it comes to using all the content you have gathered, you need to look through it all and decide what you want to produce. If you plan to use content from more than one source, such as 2 or 3 articles by different authors to be combined into a report, you will need to go through and change the content into a similar style, check that it is all written in the same tense, make sure the formatting is the same throughout, check for spelling and grammar (for example - spelling for some words is different in the US than the UK) and look through all the articles to see if any of the points made are duplicated.

Once you’ve done this, make a list of points you want to make in your report, read the articles through again and start combining them together to fit what you want to say - cut and paste to copy sections into the right place.

Next, look at the way your draft reads now and see if it fits your style of writing, your personality and your business. Reword it to fit with this - there’s no point in producing a very formally written, stiff sounding report for a hobby site.

At this point you could just tweak it, proof read it, and then go ahead and publish it but to take it a step further and make it really unique, why not look at how you might rewrite it so that all of the content is yours - now you’ve got the basic idea down and laid out, it shouldn’t take you long to reword things, add in some of your own ideas and keywords that fit your site, and maybe a few quotes and suddenly you’re looking at something that no-one else has got, that the search engines will love and that no-one can claim you copied.

After an uneventful flight back, I have returned from vacation.

A few lessons learned:

• You’ll always run into problems when you’re least prepared for it.
• The spam filter on your main computer that you’ve spent months training is infinitely better than whatever you can cludge together on a laptop for your vacation.
• Unfiltered email is impossible to sort through
• And, Air Canada is the worst airline, ever.

I’ve also got some interesting insights on marketing to share, but I’ve got a ton of work to catch up on first.

On Friday, my vacation was about to begin. I packed up the midget, packed up our clothes, and got ready to take a flight to Edmonton.

Unfortunately, the weather did not cooperate… but more about that for a minute.

First, I’d like to take a minute to rant about Air Canada. We arrived at the airport an hour and a bit before the flight was to leave. Well within the guidlines Air Canada suggests for getting on the plane in good time.

So we stood in line. To check in to our flight we had to use a checkout counter in section C.

Section C was busy. Very busy. And getting busier by the minute.

But there was usually only one person working there. Every now and then a second person would appear to check in one or two people, then they mysteriously disappeared again.

Section A and Section B were not busy. They were staffed with four or five people each. There were more Air Canada staff than people checking in.

It made me wish longingly for the efficient service of Westjet.

Ah well, live and learn.

In any case, it took an hour to check in, then we raced through security and ran through the airport to find out gate, only to discover that the flight was delayed. Not that this had been indicated on the TV screens near the checkout, or anywhere else, but it had been delayed for about 40 minutes.

So, the midget and I coloured, and played games, and ate pizza until the new flight time… only to discover that the flight was cancelled.

So we had our names transferred to the standby list for the next flight… and when there were only five seats and 140 standbys, we decided the chances of getting two side-by-side seats were next to none, so we called home, and asked Ian to see what he could rig up for us.

We played, and coloured, and moped around a while longer.

Once we determined for certain we weren’t going to be able to get on the next flight, we went to the flight after that… and the gate after that, and followed the crowd during all the gate changes.

Ian managed to get us a booking on a 10:05 pm flight, but we decided to float around for an earlier standby seat anyways, and we got on a plane, finally, at around 8 o’clock. The original flight was at 2:00 pm

It was a long haul for an amazing 3 year old, but he stayed awake and happy during the whole airport stay, and only fell asleep after an hour in the plane.

Now I’m officially on vacation, and we’re enjoying the nice Edmonton weather.

And while I’m thankful the airline managed to get my luggage to Edmonton and had it waiting for me, I’m not so enamored with airplane trips any more.

A welcome addition to Google’s blog collection. While I expect some of the best tips and tricks will come on the usual webmaster message boards, it’ll be good to get some words ‘from the horse’s mouth’ so to speak.

You can look forward to posts around 2-3 times a week from an assortment of Googlers involved in the operation of AdSense – engineers, product managers, product marketing managers, and operations staff. We hope you’ll visit often.

adsense.blogspot.com

I’m not a flash-card-toting, teach-em-to-read early kind of mom, but I have to admit that I’m incredibly proud of my wee man for learning his alphabet, letter sounds and numbers so young.

He’s also had very good fine motor skills, so I had anticipated that he would want to start writing letters early too. But until now he’s shown no interest at all in learning how to write his name, or any other letters, for that matter.

But suddenly today he grabbed the Caillou book that came with his letter game CDROM and started tracing the letters on each page. Then writing copies of them all over the pages.

And although his method wouldn’t be approved by handwriting instructors (he tends to make his lines starting from the bottom line to the top), all the letters looked like letters by the time he’d finished each page.

Like I said, I’m not a pushy mom when it comes to learning things, but I have to admit I was gushing and praising his efforts to exhuberantly, it probably contributed to his continued efforts.

But now it seems that he’s done with his letters for the day, and has decided to play with his rubber stamping set.

The best kid in the world has a very proud mommy today.