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Use Public Domain Information to Start

                             Your Very Own Clippings Agency

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Clippings are what the name suggests, and they are usually articles and images, ‘clipped’ from newspapers and other publications.  Once clipped they are offered to clients requiring them for any of many very different reasons as you will read about soon.

Clippings can be modern or old but be aware that modern types are quite easy for people wanting information to locate for themselves.  It’s far harder for someone to locate really old information about their favourite subjects. 

Also bear in mind that modern publications are copyright protected and you may have to pay a licence fee to distribute them for profit, and that can eat very heavily into your business profits. 

Use clippings from the public domain, however, and you don't pay fees of any kind to their original creators and copyright owners.  Hence the reason I'm suggesting anyone wanting to start a clippings agency is better placed to create their clippings from out of copyright items, not recent publications. 

This business is ideally suited to anyone with just a basic knowledge of the public domain and the many profitable openings it offers. 

So you can clip items from publications in the public domain - find them in abundance at boot sales and flea markets - and store them in physical format in envelopes or digitally on your computer in folders sorted by name and subject ready to distribute to paying clients.

Rather than clipping items for hundreds of thousands of different subjects for which you may never find clients, and ending up with thousands or millions of pieces of paper cluttering up the home or office, you might consider creating information packs on specific subjects and events and asking a standard price across the board.  My daughter does this on eBay, selling what she calls ‘Doggy Bags’ which include pictures, articles, newspaper cuttings, puzzles, and lots of other printed bits and pieces about individual dog breeds.  She only needs one copy of a particular item, as long as it’s in the public domain, which she can then copy to add to hundreds of doggy bags she might sell on eBay each year.

Here are more markets for you to consider for your standard magazine and newspaper clippings bundles:

-  Target private individuals and families requiring information relating to family members in years gone by.  This is usually for genealogical purposes, but you’ll also find people specialising in creating clippings packages for first name or second name research. 

Focus on people sharing a common first name or surname and compile as many cutting and clippings as you can find on each marketable surname.  People are interested in others bearing the same name as themselves, even where there is no actual blood relationship.  Name research is a highly profitable venture, especially in the United States, where the business takes several forms, including analysing the origins of names and highlighting stories about others, preferably famous individuals, bearing the same name. 

You could start with fairly common first names like Peter and Joan, and surnames like Wright and Jones, and keep everything you find relating to these names filed in large envelopes with the name marked on the outside, or scanned and stored on your computer in individual folders.  When you have enough - at least 20 different cuttings - compile them into some appropriate format: book, scroll, picture book, postcard or greetings card.  Someone I knew who operated this kind of business had a direct mailshot produced telling prospects what sort of things people could read about in this book and what time period those clippings covered.  Then he sent the letter to everyone with that name in the local telephone directory.  Later on he branched out into non-local telephone directories, and subsequently he expanded his venture overseas.  This is also the kind of business you could franchise to other areas.  As soon as you’ve finished work on one name, send out everything franchisees need to market the product to people in their area, while you move on to creating products for other common surnames. 

You could start a ‘People Like You’ series of books including people living and dead, famous and infamous, real and imaginary, and all sharing a common surname.  Taking Wright, as an example, your book could be filled with pictures, stories and anecdotes about people like Orville and Wilbur Wright, the American aviators, and Frank Lloyd Wright the architect who built the Imperial Hotel in Tokyo and the Gugenheim Museum in New York.  For titles, use something like Wright Through the Years, or The Good, The Bad and The Ugly of the Jones Family as a generic title for books featuring other names in your series.

-  Target business owners and industrial research companies needing historical information about specific businesses or featuring commerce or industry in general.  This information is often required to create mementos for visitors or as historical memoirs to celebrate some major business milestone.

-  Target writers of articles and novels, and other genre, all of whom need research material, some more often than others, and not all have time, inclination or facilities to do research themselves.

-  Other potential clients include: scientists, genealogists, teachers, antiques specialists, hobbyists, etc., etc., etc.

-  You might specialise in certain subjects like genealogy, astrology, fishing, gardening, recipes and cooking, and so on.  Your service can be marketed through magazines targeted at your specific audience.

-  Write compilations which almost all magazines and newspapers require, sometimes in profusion.  For example, ‘100 things you didn’t know about X (a specific location)’, can be compiled from clippings and rewritten in minutes and targeted at publishers of magazines and newspapers in the appropriate area.  The same exercise can be carried out for countless locations all over the world. 

-  Copy and package advertisements by subject or profession.  For example, I found dozens of advertisements from butchers, dressmakers, soap manufacturers, and more, in a pile of old Illustrated London News publications from the early 1900s.  The entire bundle of twenty plus magazines cost £3 and included ten or more full-page prints and posters per issue almost all of which sold at between £5 and £30. 

-  Here’s another great idea for out of copyright advertisements, especially smaller classified ads.  I made my very own book, a best selling marketing book both on and off eBay, which I called HEADLINES THAT NEVER DIE.  This was simply a collection of headlines I had taken from out-of-copyright sources which I then typed into a Microsoft Word document under categories, such as Travel, Children, Soaps, and so on.  I also scanned some of the best advertisements into the Word document to make the book look more visually appealing. 

Avril Harper Titles

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