One way to do so is to use public domain material to profit from trends.
Remember Dan Brown’s ‘The Da Vinci Code’? The book was an instant success, and is a guaranteed best seller. Ever since it’s release, interest in the book, and especially the ideas and controversies it raises, has risen exponentially.
Even in April 2005, almost an entire year after the book’s release, the term ‘da vinci code’ generated over 5000 searches on Overture per day, and when you convert that number to Google (a rough estimate puts Google searches to be at a ratio of 8:1 to that of Overture, but we’ll take a conservative estimate of 5:1), you get almost 1 million searches per month. When the movie was about to be released, daily searches were up to 13,224, or 396,724 searches each month!
This number has been constant for the last few years and most likely was a lot higher when the book was released. Currently the competition for the website is roughly twice as much, but that is only due to the book’s popularity over the last 6 to 8 months.
But how could you profit from it? Simple; use the public domain to provide images and articles on the topics discussed in the book (the Priory of Sion, the ‘sacred feminine’, Leonardo Da Vinci and his paintings, to name a few) and use AdSense to raise income from the website itself.
With your content coming from the public domain, and your traffic coming from the search engines and PPC engines (even today the cost-per-click for keywords related to the book are between 10 to 25 cents), you also have the opportunity to sell the public domain information in the form of a product – perhaps you find an old treatise discussing Da Vinci’s treatment of Mona Lisa and The Last Supper, or maybe you find an authentic history of the master artist.
The lesson here is to keep your eyes open for major search trends launched by movies and books that prompt a massive interest in history, religion, geography or even science – it is quite possible find such topics freely and heavily available in the public domain.
