The fact is at this point you are probably losing vast sums of money through copyright.
Copyright may be strangling your business.
Copyright may be stealing money from you
I’m not talking about copyright violations.
I’m not talking about pirates stealing from you.
I’m talking about copyright ENFORCEMENT.
Now, if someone said, “I am going to give you thousands of dollars of free advertising…”
What would you say?
You’d say “Yes.” You’d say “Absolutely.” You’d say “I would LOVE that free advertising.”
But what do we do…
if the question is asked slightly differently?
If someone says “Do you mind if I share your ebook on Kazaa?” or “Do you mind if I put this on my compilation CD of ebooks?”
We say “No! I want my money.”
Do you know what happens?
Nothing.
More often than not, we don’t get anything.
The ebook doesn’t go on the CD, or on Kazaa. We don’t get any free advertising. We don’t get our message placed in front of viewers at exactly zero cost to us. We don’t get any business we might have otherwise received. We get nothing.
Would it have hurt you to give away your articles, your ebooks, your downloadable audiobooks?
To answer that question, let’s consider an extreme case. Let’s consider the absolute worse case: if your content were pirated by everyone on the entire planet, what would happen?
If everyone, everywhere, violated your copyright and “stole from you, what would happen?
Odds are, something very very good would happen.
You’d get crazy publicity. FREE publicity.
There’d be people coming out of the woodwork EVERYWHERE, looking for your services, because you’re someone that EVERYBODY has heard of, a well-branded expert, a household name.
That would be a good thing.
But too many of us automatically think that we are being “ripped off” when anyone “steals” our work.
That’s insane.
That is completely insane.
If you were to spend thousands of dollars on advertising, why wouldn’t you spend basically nothing to give away your work to a few places?
Now, a lot of us, give our content away to free publications – websites, e-books, whatever.
What I suggest is that we give our articles – at least, some of them – away to those that are selling things – compilations CDs selling on eBay, paid websites, subscription-based print newsletters, whatever. Many very savvy marketers are already doing this – we should be doing it too.
The same could be said of eBooks. Send them to everybody. Offer to let people give away free copies with eBooks that they sell. Give them to website owners. If do consulting work, give them to prospect clients. Use them, not just as a product, but as a MARKETING TOOL.
For that matter, I suggest we go even further. I suggest we place our ebooks, our articles, and our audiobooks on P2P networks. We don’t have to put them all on there – we don’t have to give away all of our information products – but we should put some of them there, because P2P networks are an incredibly powerful resource.
You can start with places like winMX, Kazaa, eDonkey, and so forth – places that are geared towards illegal filesharing.
Why not use those places to our advantage?
There are people out there who have made their presence and made a lot of money SOLELY through the use of P2P networks as a promotion tool.
If there making money, why aren’t we doing it too?
In fact, it is an amazing advertising venue, a huge tool for publicity that costs us exactly nothing to use.
P2P networks are an incredible way to reach an AMAZING amount of people.
We should take advantage of them. Indeed, we should be LOOKING for opportunities to give away our products, our knowledge, our content.
We should – we must – we HAVE to take advantage of this.
There is so much free marketing out there, so much potential income, for so little work and so little investment –
It’s a crime not to do this.
David Berube is a writer, software developer, and speaker.
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