Yahoo! has recently launched Creative Commons Search in Beta. This Yahoo! search service finds content across the web that has a creative commons license. While almost anything you find on the internet has a full copyright, the creative commons license allows an author to share their content with others, under certain conditions. This type of license is very beneficial to the article marketer.

The creative commons license is gaining wide acceptance across the internet. Yahoo and Google have now both incorporated creative commons search into their engines. The main creative commons search engine is located at http://www.creativecommons.org. A creative commons search has even been adopted into the Firefox browser.

Expanding your visibility

Every smart article writer concentrates on wide exposure. You want your articles to be on as many web sites as possible. By putting a Creative Commons License on your articles, you are allowing other web sites, e-zines, online publications and print publication to publish your article, therefore expanding your visibility.

Now, with a powerhouse like Yahoo! coming in with their new Creative Commons Search, you can have hundreds of your articles to be placed in a select search on Yahoo!.

To get your articles into Yahoo's Creative Commons Search, you must follow 3 simple steps.

1. Select the license that suits your preferences at http://www.creativecommons.org/license/ .

2. You will then be prompted to choose whether or not you want to allow commercial use of your work and whether or not you will allow modifications of your work. After you have set your preferences, hit Select License.

3. You will now be taken to the page that will let you cut and copy a piece of text to paste into your webpage. This text will indicate that your articles have a creative commons license.

You should choose the license that meets your preferences. However, if you are going to be using the license for article marketing, there are some preferences that would be more beneficial for you. It is best not to allow any modification of your articles because this could dilute their value. You want to brand yourself as a trusted resource in your area of expertise. If someone is allowed to modify your content, this could lead to negative branding for you and your web site. With than in mind, do make sure that you put a lot of thought into the type of creative commons license you choose. Creative commons licenses are non-revocable.

Once you put up the license on your web pages, it shouldn't take more than a couple of weeks for Yahoo! Creative Commons Search to find your pages as long as you have some well-placed back-links.

This strategy can create hundreds of very targeted links pointing to your site through the creative commons search engines. These are indexed pages in the Yahoo and Google specialized engines. The last time I checked at http://search.yahoo/cc , boingboing.net had over 39,000 of their pages indexed in the creative commons. ProBlogger.net had over 500. You can do the same simply by applying the Creative Commons License to your site and letting Yahoo discover you.

The Creative Commons license allows you to declare a certain amount of rights to your article, while still encouraging its duplication across the internet and ensuring that you are credited as the author.

However, while the creative commons licenses hold much value, there are still relatively few people who are taking advantage of it to gain more visibility for their articles and their website. Therefore, now is the perfect time to move into this lucrative market. With Yahoo Creative Commons Search leading the way, you know there is sure to be significant growth to come.