AP 0296: Are Private Label Rights Still a Good Strategy?

AskPat 296 Episode Transcript

Pat Flynn: What's up everybody. Pat Flynn here and welcome to Episode 296 of AskPat. Thank you so much for joining me today. As always I'm here to help you by answering your online business questions, five days a week.

Awesome. Here's today's question from Mike.

Mike: Good morning, Pat. This is Mike Stevens again and this morning I have a question for you about private label rights or PLR. A while back you had done an episode with Nicole Dean where you had talked about private label rights and how she builds this, and how she makes this and how she sells this. I was curious to see if you thought that private label rights articles or ebooks were still a good strategy for the internet, a good strategy for internet marketing, and see if there were other folks you would recommend as well as Nicole and whether you'd ever used them before? Thank you so much.

Pat Flynn: Hey Mike, what's up. Thank you so much for the question today. For those of you listening to this PLR are private label rights, articles or books. These are pieces of content that you can actually purchase and then use yourself. You have every right to use them the way that you want to use them and you can just copy/paste them and put them right into your blog and use them the way that they are or like Nicole Dean recommended in SmartPassiveIncome.com session number 9, you can find that at SmartPassiveIncome.com/session9 you'll see that she talks about using them to just start whatever it is that you're trying to create. To get ideas, to create almost a template for what it is that you then put your own voice into. This was episode nine, so we're talking back in 2010 when then episode came out so Mike, thank you for bringing this back up.

I know a lot of people who still use PLR articles and eBooks and sell them to their audience and all different niches and you'll see that on Nicole's site. She has a site where she sells PLR or private label rights content at EasyPLR you can go to AskPat.com/easyplr for that. People are still using them and doing really well, but you have to use them the right way and you have to use them like Nicole mentions in a way that provides value to your audience. I mean we all know that already but the thing you have to be careful with, with PLR content is it's very tempting to just simply purchase those things and then just use them as-is, and that's the worse thing you want to do because a lot of people will do that. At which point you won't be the first one to do that and then you will just have duplicate content and it will be content that other people perhaps have seen before. You want to use those to help you write the piece that you really want to write in your own voice.

You can not only just change a few words here and there, I mean I would do much more than that. I would read the article and be like, “Wow, that's a great idea, it structures in a nice way. Okay, now I'm going to write this article in essentially the same format but in my own voice, with my own stories, with my own case studies, with my own links and examples and things like that.” Taking this sort of skeleton and really putting all the different pieces in there to make it something beautiful, and so I still believe PLR is something that is useful although I have personally Mike never used it myself.

Some people need that sort of starting point from somebody else in order to kind of provide that content and you'll actually see that. There's a lot of articles out there that are written by others that you could use, but again you've got to make sure that you use them in the right way as inspiration. As a skeleton, as a template for what it is that you are going to promote for your own audience. You owe them that, to give them stuff in your own voice and so you've got to really, there's fine a line there of course with PLR stuff but again for those of you who don't quite understand how this works yet, I would highly recommend checking out episode nine of the Smart Passive Income podcast, SmartPassiveIncome.com/session9. For more information on this because it could be useful.

Now a lot of people have used these articles in the past for things like article spinning and creating blogs that were simply there just to drive more links to your home blog or your money blog as they might call it, and those tactics don't necessarily, I mean they don't, they don't work at all. I haven't really seen anybody talk about article spinning in a quite a long time and that was a strategy that I did use. Not using PLR content but taking my own content and spinning them meaning you would put them into a program that would essentially re-write it just using synonyms and things like that which did work at the time but then quickly thereafter Google's been cracking down on that sort of thing. So you want to avoid those types of things and again with PLR it's very tempting to do such type of stuff. Just always making sure that you there in your own voice with your content and providing value. No matter where you get that inspiration from if it's from your own brain or with the help of somebody else, just make sure you do that and that's it.

So Mike, thank you so much for your question I really appreciate it and for those of you listening out there if you have a question that you would like potentially featured here on the show all you have do is head on over to AskPat.com and if you get your question featured like Mike you will get an AskPat t-shirt heading your way. So Mike you'll hear from my assistant in the next week or two who will get your contact information so we can send you that t-shirt.

Thank you so much and as always I want to end with a quote and today's quote is from Thomas John Carlyle and he says “Show me the man you honor and I will know what kind of man you are.” It's similar to those questions you might hear in interviews with, who are your biggest inspirations or who's really inspiring you today? Based on those answers you can really get to know the kind of person somebody is. So it's a great question to ask for those of you who are in podcasting. You know you might want to put that one in your repertoire every once in a while and speaking of podcasting I want to thank you all again for voting as I mentioned yesterday but if you go to PodcastAwards.com you can vote for the Smart Passive Income podcast to hopefully win the top business podcast this year. It's the third time we've been nominated. Never won yet but maybe we can do it this year. Thank you for your help. Go to podcastawards.com and vote for the Smart Passive Income podcast in the business section.

I love you guys thank you so much for the help and I'll see you tomorrow in another episode of AskPat. Cheers.