PLR, or Private Label Rights, usually come in the form of eBooks, articles, or autoresponder series. They are completely editable, and you are allowed to claim them as your own work. You can use PLR for all sorts of stuff, like for website content, your own eBook or report to sell, an e-course etc.

There are lots of factors in determining if PLR can actually benefit you, here are a few things to look out for:

Quality

Honestly a lot of the PLR materials I have dealt with have been pretty below average, so if you decide to sell a PLR eBook or something, you better make sure it’s good or you may have a pretty high refund rate. If you use bad PLR as website content, you may have more search engine food, but the human visitors won’t like your content, and therefore you will probably have low conversion rates for affiliate sales or advertising.

Make sure you read through any PLR you decide to use, and try to edit it and give a little bit of your own voice to it. This will really show through.

Quantity

No, not the quantity you have, this refers to the quantity out there. If you can get your hand on PLR that has only been distributed to a limited number of people, this is a huge plus. You will likely have to do less editing to make yourself unique.

If you’ve ever heard of Google Duplicate Content penalties, you’ll know exactly what I’m talking about. I’ll be talking more about that tomorrow, and I’ll also have a couple of great rewriting strategies.

Some PLR has been distributed to thousands of people, many of which will use it as web content. That means that if you do the same, there will be hundreds of other pages just like yours; why will people land on yours? Chances are they won’t.

How much is out there?

Here’s a good strategy to get an estimate of how widespread your PLR materials are; take a random short sentence that is “core” to the subject, something with terms, keywords, and words that probably wouldn’t be rewritten. Really any phrase will do, but some people will change words, so the more “technical” the sentence, the better.

Then, do a Google search for this phrase in quotes “”. This is the phrase match. If you get only one result, you’ll probably see a “omitted results” link, click on that, and you’ll see the total number of results in the top right showing how many people have used your article. (You’ll see in the results they all have the same content.)

Most people are too lazy to edit anything but the title, so this method is very effective.

Another way is to publish the unedited PLR article on your page, and use CopyScape to see how many copies it detects. Unfortunately, this only shows the top 10 results without a premium membership. Instead, you can use this to see if your article has been rewritten adequately. (It is a bit strict though in my opinion.)

Cost

PLR is usually pretty cheap, and there is a lot of free PLR out there if you’re willing to rewrite. I would say to only pay for PLR if it comes in a HUGE pack (so that you don’t have to hunt for it yourself), or if it has a limited distribution (ex. sold to 100 people only).

Overall, PLR can be used effectively, but I only use it on more “experimental” projects. If I were working on a serious project, like this blog ^^, I would always use unique content that I myself wrote, or outsourced. (Don’t worry, I’ll always write my own stuff for this blog :P)

Tomorrow, I’ll be talking about the dreaded duplicate content penalty, and some strategies you can use to rewrite PLR materials.

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