=== What is Private Label Content? ===

PLC generally refers to articles, e-books and manuals that are free for subscribers to use as they wish. There are a few restrictions, however: you cannot claim copyright to PLC, or submit it to article sites, unless you change the content significantly. (Interpret ’significantly’ as ‘unrecognizable as the original article’.) The cost of membership varies, but typically ranges from around $24 to $67 a month. For this you might receive anywhere from 150 to 300 articles per month. Some sites also offer graphics (e-book covers and site header graphics) and even ready-made sales letters.

To use PLC to the best advantage, you need to be aware of a few things.

=== 1. How Can You Use PLC Articles? ===

The most common use for PLC articles is to provide useful, interesting content for websites. There are other uses, however. Think about your immediate needs. If you require an incentive for people to sign up for your newsletter, you can offer an e-book or training manual made up from PLC articles. It’s easy to tweak these to be more relevant to your website and your clients. (As well as putting yourself in Google’s shoes, put yourself in your clients’ shoes. What do they most need to know?)

You could also create an e-course (anything from 6 to 52 articles – a short e-course, or one that offers an article for each week of the year). This gives you an excellent reason to stay in touch with your clients.

=== 2. How Can You Alter PLC Articles? ===

Submitting articles to public article directories along with your resource box is a great way to generate traffic to your web-sites. However, many directories don’t allow you to submit duplicate content – ie, you have to submit your own unique article. Therefore, when submitting an article that you obtained from a private label content resource, it’s advisable to first alter the article before submission. Here are a few tips in that regard…

(a) Change the title of the article. If you are using keyword-optimized articles, make sure you keep the keyword in the title – but be creative about the words that surround it. So if your article is based on the keyword “Mongolian Guinea Pig”, your title might be “Where to Find the Mongolian Guinea Pig” or “Taking Care of Your Mongolian Guinea Pig” and so on.

(b) Change the opening paragraph. All you need to do (usually) is make sure that your keyword appears once. Take a look at the rest of the paragraph. How can you say the same thing in a different way? Look for synonyms – using your thesaurus – or alter the tone. Perhaps you can adopt a more casual approach (this might work better for your readership anyway). You might prefer write a different introduction altogether.

(c) Work through the article. Add a sentence here; subtract one there. Present the facts in a different order. Expand by adding some new points. Break a long article into two shorter articles. (If you do this, make sure each article seems complete in itself.)

(d) Rewrite the ending. When you do this, think about what you want the reader to do. Is this a good place to put your own affiliate link, or write a lead-in to your own product or services?

=== 3. Blend Several Articles Into One ===

You can get a whole new look if you take two or more PLC articles on the same theme and blend them into one longer, fact-packed article. Sometimes you might find you HAVE to do this, if an article seems a bit ‘lightweight’. Not all PLC articles are created equal! Sometimes it’s obvious that the writer was low on inspiration.

=== 4. Think Outside the Square. ===

Most PLC articles are presented in batches relevant to one niche. For example, you might find that over the course of a month you get 20 articles on golf, 20 on cell phones, 20 on credit cards and 20 on travel. Let’s say that you are busy building a golf site. It might seem at first glance that only 20 of the 80 articles are relevant to your needs.

Not so! Golf vacations, for example, are very popular. Could any of your travel articles be massaged to fit the theme of golf vacations? It’s very likely that they could. And what about communication while you travel – or while you play golf? Does the golfer need a new cell phone that will easily adapt to overseas communications? How will the golfer pay for a new set of clubs or a golf vacation? Might he need to explore credit card options?

You see how it’s done. Be creative in your use of Private Label Content, and you will definitely get your money’s worth.

=== 5. One Final Tip – Hold Out For Quality! ===

Now that Private Label Content is becoming popular, more and more PLC sites are opening up. You can afford to be choosy. Check out the quality of the articles on offer, and especially the niches being targeted. Niche areas like golf and credit are popular, and that’s exactly what you want. You want to go where there is an *existing* demand. You do NOT want obscure niches where there is little activity. You WANT to go where there is competition. Naturally, the profitable niches will always have competition. Where there is competition, there are buyers! So you want to look for demand, look for competition, and carve your niche!

Finally, consider being a member of more than one PLC site. Is it worth it to you to spend $150 a month on quality, no-strings-attached content? That would get you membership of 3-4 sites and upwards of 400 articles each month. Even if you can use only 50 of those articles, you’re getting them for $3 each – a bargain!

The problem for many new online marketers is how to create all the quality content that search engines demand and visitors require. Coming up with even ten pages of content can seem daunting, let alone 100’s of pages.

If you have the money, you can outsource this task to others. A quick search for outsourcing sites will show people are offering several hundred dollars for only 20 or 25 articles. This method of getting quality content will burn up the dollars in a hurry.

For those not so blessed with money to burn, the alternative is to create the content yourself. But trying to find the time and ideas for writing all that content makes many marketers throw their hands up in defeat.

This is why many marketers turn to private label rights content. It seems so easy. Join a membership site offering private label content, find an article about your niche and slap it on your site. . .instant content.

The problem comes with the word quality. You want your website to offer unique information that will keep both the search engines and most of all, your visitors coming back. If you have the same content on your site that hundreds of other sites do, you are not offering anything new to keep a reader interested. As is usually the case in life, the answer lies in the middle.

Infogoround is a membership site offering private label articles and products. You pay a monthly fee and in exchange have access to a searchable database of articles. You also receive niche products every month.

Everything they offer comes with private label rights meaning you can put your name on it. The key to best using this site though is that you can also change any content to suit your needs and make it original.

When it comes time to write an article for your ezine or to create another content page for your website, just visit Infogoround. Go to their search page and type in a keyword that describes what you want to write about. Up pops articles concerning your subject.

Do not use the articles. Instead, take the time to read through the ones that seem to best focus on the content you want to create. Get ideas from these articles. Use them to create an outline of the article you want for your ezine or website. If you have Microsoft Word, copy the article to it and use the Autosummarize option under the Tools Menu to pull out the main points of the article. Now instead of having to start your article from scratch, you have good quality content to get the creative juices flowing.

If there are parts of the article you want to use as is, go ahead. Just rewrite the paragraphs before and after to keep things unique. Use a thesaurus to find synonyms for words and change the article that way. Add an introduction at the beginning using your own personal perspective. Create a summary for the end of the article recapping the highlights. Make sure you come up with an original keyword rich headline.

There are hundreds of different ways to say the same thing using the English language. Taking advantage of this and adding your own experience can turn a private label article into creative quality content. This gives you the advantage of appearing knowledgeable to your visitors and keeping search engines coming back for more.

Wait a minute you say. Was this not supposed to be about getting free private label rights content? Paying a membership fee every month is not an example of no cost.

This is where Infogoround is different then most membership sites. Every month you pay $24.95 to receive access to great private label rights articles and products. But every month you also have the opportunity to earn $24.95 paid back to you by writing just one article.

When you are ready to write an article for your ezine or website, just log into Infogoround and go to the publishing center. Create your article using the private label content you have already checked out in their database. Using the suggestions above, create your article.

Infogoround offers numerous tools to help you check your article for grammar and common errors. Once you have the article written and checked, hit submit.

Provided your article meets the basic requirements that every writer must follow, within two days Infogoround will have your article scanned and published into the database. Once it is published at Infogoround, paste it into your ezine or website.

Not only do you now have good content that you created, but you will also be paid $24.95 for writing just this one article. You are then free to take advantage of all the other private label content and products available at Infogoround at no charge for the rest of the month.

Most members at Infogoround that use your article for content on their site will use some of the above techniques to make the article theirs. This will keep your content yours. For those that do just copy and paste, this one article may lose some of its unique value.

But by using Infogoround private label content and the above strategy, you can create as many articles per month as you want. Even if you only write four other articles per month, your websites uniqueness rating to visitors and search engines alike would be at 80%. This 80% rating will get you much further in the Internet Marketing game then posting 20 replica content pages.

Not only can members of private label rights services use the articles and ebooks, but also they can publish the material under their own name. This gives them added authority in the eyes of their site’s visitors and increases the likelihood of a visitor making a purchase, or at least returning to their site.

But, one thing you should consider about publishing any private label rights article on your site is its potential to be considered as “duplicate content.” If you are publishing an article that can be found on another site, your article can be considered duplicate content. While translations of articles and short quotes are not considered duplicate content, major portions of, or the entire content of articles can be flagged as duplicate content.

Understand that search engines want to present a full spectrum of relevant information to their search users. If a number of items on the search results page contain essentially the same content, the search engine user will not be pleased with the results of their search. Such a user may well decide that the search results were below their expectations and decide to use other search engines in the future.

Google is one search engine that considers duplicate content negatively. Google penalizes duplicate content by trying to index only one version of an article. If Google believes you are trying to manipulate the search algorithm by using duplicate content they may also make downward ranking adjustments to your site.

If you are using private label content, you can find out how many other sites are using that same content by selecting a sentence from an article, putting quotes around it, and entering that sentence into a search engine. Often you’ll find 10, 50, or 100 other sites with the same article.

I used the first sentence of a private label rights article in a Google search and found only 5 results. But, the duplicate content message was displayed: “In order to show you the most relevant results, we have omitted some entries very similar to the 5 already displayed. If you like, you can repeat the search with the omitted results included.” When I clicked to see all the items, there were 53 items, more than 10 times as many as originally indicated.

I did the same search on MSM’s Live Search and found 31 items.

Try this with a couple of private label content articles you have published on your site. Do your results indicate that your private label content articles may be flagged as duplicate content and thus not found by the average search engine user?

If so, how can you safely utilize private label rights content on your site?

First, you should add a new first paragraph to the article. This paragraph can relate the information that follows to the rest of your site and provide a smooth introduction to the new material.

Second, you should rewrite substantial portions of the first two or three paragraphs. Just state the concepts of those paragraphs in your own words. I like to read a few sentences in a paragraph and then reword them in my own style. Then I delete the original sentences and continue with the next sentences.

This process creates at least three or four paragraphs totally in your own words that are very unlikely to be duplicated elsewhere.

Just how may paragraphs you rewrite is up to you. The more your rewrite the better off you will be. And, the more you change, the more original the article will appear to both the search engines and your site’s visitors.

Third, write a new closing paragraph. Make this a summary of the article. You may also include a lead-in to another page on your site with a link to that page.

Private label rights articles can be very helpful. They can provide research that would take you many hours to perform. All you have to do to effectively use the results of that research is to state the ideas in your own words and thus, avoid the duplicate content penalty.

Basic resell rights only give you the right to sell the product. You cannot claim the product is your own and you do not have permission to offer the resell rights to anyone else. Basic resell rights are usually the cheapest, so it may be easier to make a profit. Check the terms for how much you can charge for the product or if it can be given away, perhaps as a bonus with something else. There may also be conditions for distributing the product from membership and auction sites. If you are buying rights to software make sure you know the product well enough to deal with any troubleshooting enquiries. Some software rights sellers are prepared to deal with enquiries themselves. The product may also come with a web sales page that you can use, but check for any restrictions.

Master resell rights often include a web page with the product. They give you the right to sell the product and you can also pass on this right to your customers. However that is as far as it goes. Your customers cannot give the resell rights for the product to their customers. The best master resell rights packages will include a zip file containing everything you need to put on your download page.

There are two types of resell rights that may be referred to as private label rights. One type is where you are given the resell rights for a finished product and you are also allowed to put your name on the product as the author. This type of product is a ready-to-sell information or software product. You cannot change it other than put your name on it.

The second type of private label rights is also known as source code rights. The product is not a finished ready-to-sell item. Instead it will be the raw source material that you can use to produce a finished item. Programs will be in the source code format; information products will be in a word processor format, like MS Word.

You can change the product in any way you want. You can add your name as author, add more content, omit parts or split it into several products. You may also be able to sell resell rights and even master resell rights. Terms and conditions should be posted, so check them carefully. Most private label rights packages also come with a web page and graphics that you can use for selling.

If you have found a resell rights product that you think you can sell you need to do some basic market research before purchasing. How many people are searching for this type of product? How many competing products are there? Have you seen the product available elsewhere?

If you are going to sell on the internet you need to have access to the following skills. You must be able to edit web pages, create payment links and upload the product and web pages to a server. If you are buying private label rights you must also be able to edit the product. This is especially important if you are buying rights for software.

There are many ways you can sell products on the internet. You can usually set up your own website or add the sales page to your existing site. You could invest in pay per click ads or ezine ads. You could write articles. If you have private label rights to a book you can use some of the content to produce articles or even a free report for viral marketing.

Resell rights offer the advantage of not having to produce your own material. However, you need to be sure the product is good quality and that you have a good marketing plan.

What to Look Out For:

Copyright – you absolutely must check on this – violating someone’s copyright is not clever and can be a really expensive mistake not to mention seriously damaging your reputation. Is it really public domain? All those lawyers fees can really mount up when checking into all this but believe me, you really don’t want to end up in court over it.

Public Domain Content – If you have the money to have a lawyer look at copyright for you then fine, go ahead and get started. Where can you find this type of content? It can be difficult to find content that is free to use but here are a few links to get you started:

http://www.gutenberg.org/

http://www.wikimedia.org/

http://www.gpoaccess.gov/index.html

Master Resale Rights – If you can’t afford expensive lawyers what else can you do? One rather less pricey way is to buy Master Resale Rights to a product – this gives you the opportunity to name yourself as the author, use the content in another product, rewrite the whole thing – the possibilities are endless. Just be aware with this that you will need to look at the terms and conditions of what you are allowed to do with the product before you buy.

On a budget? – not to worry, there are still many ways you can find great content without spending a fortune or worrying about whether you can legally use it. Sites such as http://www.infogoround.com and http://www.thelostfiles.com provide guaranteed public domain or private label content for a monthly fee. You could also sign up to some of the well known internet marketer’s newsletters. Why? Well if you’re serious about internet marketing you should be checking out all the latest happenings anyway, but a lot of newsletter owners will have free ebooks, giveaways and articles to download – some of which you will be able to use as your own.

So you’ve got your content ready to go and you’ve checked your rights and permissions but there is one more thing to think about – sites such as http://www.copyscape.com can check for duplicate content on the internet and of course so can the search engines. This could mean anything from the search engines deciding they won’t rate your site as highly because the exact same content is available elsewhere to some smarty pants asking you if you really did write that incredibly good article because they’ve seen someone else claiming that they wrote it too, so you do need to be aware of this when looking to use content you haven’t personally created, but that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t go ahead and make the most of all that wonderful information.

What Can You Do?

You could just read the information to learn from it yourself; you could read it to get ideas for businesses, more articles, content, the list is limited only by your imagination.

How about:

Ebooks

Print Books

Presentations

Membership Sites

Face to face courses

Mini courses

Teleclass content

Webcast content

Podcast content

Blog content

Content for your Autoresponder

Ezine content

Articles for your site to build AdSense income pages

Viral Reports

Tips Lists

When it comes to using all the content you have gathered, you need to look through it all and decide what you want to produce. If you plan to use content from more than one source, such as 2 or 3 articles by different authors to be combined into a report, you will need to go through and change the content into a similar style, check that it is all written in the same tense, make sure the formatting is the same throughout, check for spelling and grammar (for example – spelling for some words is different in the US than the UK) and look through all the articles to see if any of the points made are duplicated.

Once you’ve done this, make a list of points you want to make in your report, read the articles through again and start combining them together to fit what you want to say – cut and paste to copy sections into the right place.

Next, look at the way your draft reads now and see if it fits your style of writing, your personality and your business. Reword it to fit with this – there’s no point in producing a very formally written, stiff sounding report for a hobby site.

At this point you could just tweak it, proof read it, and then go ahead and publish it but to take it a step further and make it really unique, why not look at how you might rewrite it so that all of the content is yours – now you’ve got the basic idea down and laid out, it shouldn’t take you long to reword things, add in some of your own ideas and keywords that fit your site, and maybe a few quotes and suddenly you’re looking at something that no-one else has got, that the search engines will love and that no-one can claim you copied.

Time to start creating!

Don’t waste a golden opportunity you may have by not taking full advantage of the PLR products that may be collecting digital dust on your hard drive. If you have obtained PLR rights to an ebook filled with affiliate links, and have not changed the links to reflect your affiliate information, then you are giving away a potential steady stream of additional income.

Many people are aware that it is permissible to use their own name as the author of works derived from PLR products, so they go ahead and list their name as the author of the work. Unfortunately for them, that’s all they do. Some people even know that it is best to change the product in some way to make it unique. That’s an important part of marketing with PLR products, but it’s not enough. If you have private label rights, you may change anything inside that product including affiliate links to other products and services. If your PLR license has limitations on what you may change, then it is not really a PLR license and you should avoid that product.

Inside of many PLR products are pages of content containing links to affiliate programs of all kinds. If these links are not changed to reflect your own affiliate information, you will not be able to collect any commission due if the link is clicked and a sale is made. Can you guess who will collect the commission on the sale of any products or services referred? You guessed it! The commission will go to the original creator of the PLR product. This is not to imply that there is something unethical going on here. On the contrary, the creator of the original PLR product was writing about a particular product or service. To include a link to that product or service is an act providing convenience for the reader. Someone will get credit if that link is clicked. It might as well be you, so make sure that if there are affiliate links in the PLR product that you are modifying, you remember to change those links.

You simply need to be aware that it is not enough to just slap your name on a PLR product without changing anything else. If you modify the content to make it unique and change the affiliate links to reflect your affiliate information you will get the full value potential of your PLR products.