Public domain gives you a head start creating ebooks, ecourses, newsletters, teleconferences, website content and email registration incentives you need to keep in constant touch with clients and prospects.

Public domain refers to information free from copyright protection. The two most important sources of public domain content are:

1.Books with expired copyrights. Copyright protection for many books written early during previous century has expired. In addition, millions of other books, published later, have lost their protection because their publishers did not renew their copyrights in time.

2.The second source is Government created materials. In addition, hundreds of thousands of government-published books, pamphlets, reports, and ‘how-to’s’ are available. Information published by United States Government and other governments is typically not copyright protected.

Basing your marketing materials on public domain content boosts your profits by saving you time and energy. This time and energy can be invested in more profitable activities like networking, selling or direct customer service.

In many cases, proper use of public domain content can increase your billable hours five to ten per cent!

This is in addition to reducing amount of time it takes to complete a marketing project. One client, for example, had been struggling for three years to write a website incentive showing attorneys how to prepare an effective marketing plan.

Within a week of learning how to search for, and use, public domain content, he had completed his special report and it was already attracting new business to his consulting firm!

Public domain content can be used ‘as is,’ or you can repurpose it into different forms. For example:

It’s not enough to prepare and distribute a monthly newsletter, one that offers information of genuine value to your market. You also have to make sure your newsletter gets opened and read! Covering letters provide reasons for recipients to open, download and read your newsletter each month.

Covering letters are ‘advertisements’ for each issue of your newsletter. In today’s time-starved environment, you have to provide good, solid reasons for recipients to stop what they’re doing and invest time reading your newsletter.

You should devote as much care to preparing your covering letters as you devote to newsletters themselves.

Covering letters provide a bridge, between recipient’s self-interest and contents of your newsletters. Covering letters should describe how recipients will benefit from reading current issue of your newsletter. Otherwise, your newsletter may go unread.

There are two types of covering letters: those distributed by email and those mailed in envelopes along with printed copies of your newsletter. Both types should begin with a ‘sales pitch.’

--Email covering letters. Use subject line of text or HTML covering letters to encourage recipients to read attached copies or direct recipients to your web site where they can download latest issue.

--Mailed covering letters. Include a ‘teaser’ on outside of envelope containing your newsletter and covering letter. Like subject line of an email, teaser should promise benefits described in covering letter and delivered in your newsletter.

Successful covering letters contain four essential elements: