Starting yesterday, everyone can go to Google Book Search and download full digital copies of out-of-copyright books to read at your own pace. You’re free to choose from a diverse collection of public domain titles — from well-known classics to obscure gems, Adam Mathes blogs from Google.

With the help of Google’s library partners, Google can provide PDF downloads of such books now. Google works in partnership with University of California, Harvard University, University of Michigan, The New York Public Library, Oxford University and Stanford University.

To find public domain books, select the “Full view” radio button when you search on Google Book. An icon below the thumbnail of the page allows you to click and download PDF.

The first page of the book include “Usage guidelines” and other information. Downloaded books also include Google’s watermark logo (”digitized by Google”) on the bottom right hand corner of every page.

Although the quality of the book is acceptable, I find them hard to use because they are not searchable.

I am not a lawyer, but I suppose a public domain book is public domain.

If that is the case, it is an ecstatic news for web publishers. Now we can repurposes old content for our sites.

So there, find the content that would enhance your site visitor experience and see both repeat and new traffic stream to your site.

Matt Cutts, a senior engineer at Google, endorses niche marketing. In a post that tries to enlight web publishers on how to be resourceful and its relation to being a good SEO, he explained that carefully choosing keywords, blog categories and keyword variations are important, but it ends there.

Writing good and on-demand article is what matters. The techniques mentioned above are just ways to get noticed by the search engines.

What’s more interesting is that Matt mentioned about niche marketing in the process. He suggested against starting in the porn, pills, casinos, mortgages, and I assume others competitive niche markets. Instead, it is better to start with a smaller niche.

If you become known as an expert on (say) configuring Linux or hacking gadgets, you could build that out with things like forums to create even more useful content. Look for a progression of niches so that you start out small or very specific, but you can build your way up to a big, important area over time.

There are a lot of niches that just take sweat equity. You could be the SEO that does interviews. Or the SEO that transcribes Matt’s videos. Or the SEO that makes funny lists. Or the SEO company that provides webmaster radio. Or the SEO that makes podcasting easy. Or the SEO that specializes in a certain content management system or shopping cart. Or the SEO company that specializes in Yahoo! stores. Or the SEO that specializes in accessibility. Or the company that mocks Silicon Valley and its companies. Or the SEO that specializes in AdWords API ROI tracking. Or you could be the SEOs that write-up a summary of every panel at every search engine conference. Or the company that does cartoons. Or the SEO who pays attention to Google Base, Google Co-op, Yahoo! Answers, or Facebook. Or the SEO that provides Firefox plugins. Or the company that provides metrics and tracking for blogs. Or the SEO that talks about patents. Or the SEO that specializes in dynamic sites. Eye-tracking. Beginner SEO tutorials. Making maps mash-ups. Ajax SEO. SEO for non-profits. SEO for Second Life or MySpace. SEO to repair a company’s reputation. SEO for MySQL, Python, Ruby on Rails, WordPress blogs, or .NET sites. The SEO that surfaces databases or Flash sites. SEO for self-publishing authors. The SEO that does radio ads.

Another sound advice is to ask yoruself where you want to be, and see if you can find a path from a tiny specific niche to a slightly bigger niche and so on.

Take a read of the blog post.

Amazon.com’s associates now have access to a new program called aStore beta. It enables affiliates to create a custom Amazon storefront.

Just recently, Amazon had launched Omakase Links beta that will automatically optimize product offerings based on what the associate has been successful in the past, what the user has been interested in as well as what the site is about.

Up until now, there is no easy way to pull a set of Amazon products and build product pages where you can refer your visitors to. aStore seems to be the answer to this.

I decided to try out aStore to see if it lives up to its promise by saying that associates could set a store up and running in minutes.

The first aStore page features an introduction to the tool. It allows you to select Amazon products to feature, include specific categories or all products and customize look and feel.

But, that’s not all. You can even offer a professional shopping cart, show product details like product descriptions, Amazon Editor product reviews, recommended products, and others.

This is a screenshot of how the page store building page looks like. None of the products appear on the boxes yet.

You can either enter a keyword or ASIN/ISBN if you know it. For example, I am going to enter some of the books I read in the past, including recommendations from others that I haven’t had time to read — and still on my Wish List.

A search for “long tail” — to locate a book authored by Chris Anderson — revealed both versions of the hardcover book. Clicking on each of the link should give you an idea if this item is really what you want to be added to your store.

Reiterate the steps above to include more items.

Each time an item was added to the featured products, the item would replace the blank spots. Optionally, you can add description or click on the item image to add it later. Descriptions will be added below the title, by line and price tag in the Associates store.

In the Category pages section is where you can add category pages and edit featured products page. The category will be displayed on the upper right corner of the store. You can add all the categories or check only the categories you want.

On the next page — Edit Color & Design — you are allowed to select from different color schemes — which are georgeous — but I choose to select my own colors to suit the look and feel of my blog. The next step is to give your store a name and specify logo URL.

The fourth step involves choosing the sidebar placement and widgets. There are ample of options to choose from. If you don’t what to do here, just accept what were originally checked for you.

The final step is to get the link to your store, of which you can link from your site or blog.

Upon previewing my store, I found that the title was too long, which took two lines of header title spaces. Not good, so I made it shorter.

The great things are all the look and feel of the site including the product detail pages will suit the color scheme you chose.

Unfortunately, I can not reorder the item I want to place on each spot.

Also at the bottom of the page is an invitation to join Amazon’s associate program, complete with my associate ID. Amazon may or may not use this information in the future.

Probably just to track which affiliates signed up from which links, or they may launch a program to pay for referral fee or two level affiliate programs in the future. Who knows?

Take a look at what I built with Amazon aStore.

The data from U.S. Small Business Administration (SBA) showed that over 50 percent of small businesses fail in the first year and 95 percent fail within the first five years.

In his book Small Business Management, Michael Ames gives the following reasons for small business failure:

1. Lack of experience
2. Insufficient capital (money)
3. Poor location
4. Poor inventory management
5. Over-investment in fixed assets
6. Poor credit arrangements
7. Personal use of business funds
8. Unexpected growth
9. Competition
10. Low sales

The last two was added by Gustav Berle in The Do It Yourself Business Book.

Owning a small business clearly has its own advantages compared to working for other people. The benefits often outweigh the risks. But still for many of us, the obstables are big enough to discourage us.

This is when I actually feel lucky that I am doing a business on the Internet. Much of the risks that are once available for conventional small businesses simply do not exist online.

Working as a web publisher waives at least 7 of the reasons above, or at least turns them into much smaller risks. Have I mentioned that the start-up cost is actually minimal? Yes, I can start virtually any website for free or very cheaply.

For profressional settings, less than $300 get you a decent hosting and some basic design. If you decide to go simple, unlimited domains hosting account costs as little as $7 - $10.

To quote from SBA:

Do you have the physical and emotional stamina to run a business? Business ownership can be exciting, but it’s also a lot of work. Can you face six or seven 12-­hour work days every week?

This simply is not a problem for web publisher. Many of fellow online business owners work part time, a couple of hours a week. Of course, if you want faster result, you want to invest more time on it, but that is not a requirement.

You can start as a solopreneur, and work at your own pace.

On the contrary, online small business owners and solopreneurs often have to be self-motivated. Resistance or lack of support from their partner or family member is also a common issue.

Working at home means they have to master the art of time-management. Juggling between multiple and conflicting tasks and schedule.

Being close to the family also means unnecessary interruptions from the kids and others. Lack of a system to manage the tasks and keep working hours undisturbed could introduce another form of pressure.

But, I should say that the benefits still outweigh the issues. Every one of us has their own challenges to conquer, in any kind of job and business. I would see those as an opportunity to develop myself because owning a dream to work independently from home, doing what I love is just too good to let go.

What is your challenge in starting an online venture, especially those who are working from home as a web publisher or independent professional?

Believe it or not, the first major stumbling block for those who are just starting an online business is to find a niche. Frankly speaking, this also happens to me. Finding the right niche where I have some passion or at least a bit of interest to learn about is important.

Probably most importantly, it has to be less competitive so we can get at least some results easily through some form of marketing without spending a fortune.

For this reason, I always look for a way to find the tools that can help improve this process. The trend is appropriately called trend monitoring tools. They monitor the conversations happening on blogs and chart a graph of the trend month by month.

Not only do this data could help you get more ideas about your competition, but also how crowded the conversations are going at a specific time over a period of one, two to three or six months, depend on the tool you are using.

1. IceRocket.com’s Blogs Trend Tool

IceRocket is one of the popular blog search engines. You can enter up to three keywords or topics and get a trend comparison chart for the last one, two or three months.

The feature allows you to compare up to three keywords, which are very useful to compare how many blogs are there actively talking about the topics.

2. BlogPulse Trend Search

This tool is my favorite. Both IceRocket’s and BlogPulse are very similar in design. They even have the same example (digital camera) on the top of the text box.

Both allow up to three keywords and labels. But, BlogPulse allows charting up to 6 months worth of data. You can also click at the vertices of the graph to reveal the search results of the actual conversation.

The graphs for BlogPulse has more edges, but more or less the same accuracy as IceRocket.

Please note that the blogosphere is growing very rapidly. It had just doubled seven and a half months ago to 50 million blogs, so you may see increase in number of blogs because new blogs are started in those topics.

Don’t get discouraged by the number though as not all them are potential competitions. They may have mentioned the word because they talk about it. New blogs also play at the same level if you start your site or blog rightaway.

That’s it. Play with them. See how much fun you can get.

While we are on the topic about trends, Topix.net has just added news trend tracker and Google also has its own called Google Trends, but they draw graphs using news and search data, respectively.