I have a friend that has a highly profitable offline Information Publishing business catering to a very tightly focused market ~ Veterinarians.

She has no website, she has very little overhead, she has no employees (in her info publishing business anyway) and yet she produces a product using 100% Public Domain content that she sells to this market month after month.

The story (as she tells it to me) started in the town where she lives and in this town there were five different competing veterinary offices. My friend owns one of these offices (yep, she’s a vet) and due to the fiercely competitive nature of the veterinary services market in her town, she began looking for ways to make herself standout from the other four vets in her community.

She had one very big advantage over the other four vets – she understood that in order to bring in more customers, she had to differentiate herself, her staff, and her services from the competition.

She had to make herself unique, get the attention of her marketplace, and express to her potential customers why they needed to be bringing their animals to see her instead of the others – in other words, she needed to employ powerful marketing techniques in her business to bring in the customers and keep them coming back.

She started closely studying materials by master marketers like Jay Abraham and Jay Conrad Levinson and applying the marketing techniques that she was learning (that her competition had no clue about) to her business and within 4 years, she was the ONLY vet left in town. Ouch!

My friend says that there were many factors and techniques that contributed to her success but there were two things she did in particular that absolutely worked wonders to greatly increase her visibility in the community, bring more traffic into her office, bring back repeat business, and develop loyal customers…

1. She built instant credibility and super-star status in her community by self-publishing a handful of pet-care related books with herself as the author. She has books on very specific subjects like dogs, cats, birds, etc. each one catering to a different type of pet owner. She’d then give these books away for free to her customers when they came in for an office visit. For instance, if her customer brought in their cat to see her, after her services had been performed, she’d hand them a copy of her cat book and say, “Have you read my book on cat care? Here, take a copy home with you.” Nothing, I mean NOTHING establishes credibility faster than being able to hand somebody a copy of your book – it’s the ultimate business card! Some people are so impressed by this that they refuse to even consider seeing one of the other vets in town! After all, those other vets hadn’t written any books. Why risk taking your beloved family pet to anyone but the expert? She’d written a book on the subject so she must be the expert!
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2. She creates and sends out a monthly newsletter to both customers and prospects. The newsletter is usually no longer than 3-4 pages and covers various pet related topics but it serves a very important purpose – it keeps herself and her services fresh in her customer’s minds and acts as a great introduction of her services to new prospects. It also acts as the perfect vehicle to let her customers know about special time-sensitive promotions and such. There’s printing and mailing costs involved with this of course, but my friend says that the new and repeat business it brings in far outweighs the costs. She counts it as an advertising expense and says that the impact and return on investment are far greater than what she sees by paying to keep her ad in her local yellow pages.

Here’s the cool part…

The reason I am telling you about this is because ALL of the content for the books and the newsletters she distributes is taken straight out of the Public Domain – other than rewriting some material little bit where needed, she hasn’t written a single word herself.

These two tactics have worked so well for her that her business boomed and now she has a full time staff of vets and assistants working for her. Now she goes into the office 2-3 days per week (she says she doesn’t have to, she just enjoys doing it) and life is GOOD.

Now, here’s the really interesting part and how it could relate to you as a business opportunity in your own local market…

A few years back, my friend decided that with the success she had and all of the marketing wisdom she had gained that maybe her true calling was in helping other vets learn to market their businesses properly and outmaneuver the competition just like she had done in her own local market.

She put together various packages at different price levels that include things like a “how to market your veterinary services” course, private consultation and coaching, etc. but it’s the Public Domain based products she offers that I want to tell you about and how they relate to the two powerful tactics we discussed above…

1. Using books to establish credibility, and…
   
2. Using newsletters to stay in your prospect’s mind.

The products and services she is offering to veterinarians all over the country are classic examples of Niche Information Marketing…

One package she offers involves setting up vets with their own line of “authored” books. She just takes the books that she has already created for herself using Public Domain material and “rebrands” them a little for her clients. She puts her client’s name on the books as the author and replaces her picture on the covers with that of her client.

Within literally days, her client becomes the instant author of a whole line of pet-care books! She calls these “Instant Authority Establishers”.

My friend charges a lot of money to produce these packages and actually does very little to produce the end product – a few tweaks, an order with her Print-On-Demand publisher and her client becomes an author. Remember, this works because these are local businesses. It’s like PLR for Veterinarians!

SIDE NOTE: My friend says she never works with more than one vet in any given town or city for obvious reasons.

Another package she offers is a recurring revenue product in which she puts together monthly newsletters for her clients. She makes a few tweaks to brand the newsletters (which are the same ones she is sending out to her local community every month anyway) and then delivers the newsletter in pdf format to her clients via email. Her clients then send the pdf to their local printshop, have them printed, and then mail the newsletters out to their customers and prospects every month.

The benefit for the client is that they get instant, valuable content they can send out every month to stay fresh in their customer’s minds for a very reasonable fee. The benefit for my friend is that she has hundreds of vets all over the country paying her every month to produce this content for their newsletters (which is the same content she is already distributing herself anyway!).

My friend says that between leveraging Public Domain material to produce the content for each newsletter and outsourcing the actual assembly and final branding and delivery of each issue, putting the newsletters together and getting them out the door to her clients every month is “a snap”.

She says that the most time-consuming part of the entire process is sifting through all of the pet related Public Domain content out there (because there’s just so much of it!) to determine what she’s going to use in each newsletter release. She tells me that she’s now outsourced much of this.

I wanted to share this story with you here because it represents a unique and creative (not to mention profitable) way of leveraging Public Domain content as a local business opportunity.

I also thought it was interesting because it doesn’t involve the Internet at all (well, other than the fact that she delivers the newsletters to her clients via email) and it’s something just about anyone can do in their own local community.

It’s a true Business-to-Business selling opportunity, all you have to do is pick a niche that something like this would work for.

Start in your own community by finding a business niche that you could offer “Instant Authority Establishers” for and / or monthly newsletters put together using Public Domain content and then work on finding clients in other cities once you find success in your own hometown.

Another quick thought…

What if you partnered with a local business to offer information-based products to your local community and share in the profits?

For instance, let’s say there’s an independently owned and operated hardware store in your community ~ you put together a series of physical books on some topic related to projects that a hardware store’s customers may be interested in…

• woodworking
• lawn care
• painting
• remodeling
• pick a topic!

You then offer to let the hardware store owner stock and sell the books in their store for a percentage of the sales price.

It’s a beautiful thing ~ you provide the product, the hardware store gets to offer a new value-added product to their customers that’s easy to sell, they have to do nothing and have no risk and no investment in inventory, and you both get to enjoy the profits!

What business owner wouldn’t agree to an arrangement like that?

You can accomplish the same thing with local gift shops and tourism establishments by tweaking your product offerings to cater to that business’s customer base.

And the products can be created easily using Public Domain content.

These are all good examples of strategies that can be used to combine the Public Domain with local and offline marketing.

Get out there in your community and make something happen!

About The Author:

Logan Andrew is an online entrepreneur, information publisher, and author that has been using Public Domain material to create profitable products and businesses since 2001. He is also co-author of "The Public Domain Treasure Hunter's Survival Kit" available here. For more info Logan, click here.

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