Buying Content: The Scoop on Private Label Rights

Private label rights or PLR refers to content that you purchase, to which you own the rights. This means, for one thing, that you can pass the content off as your own. It also means you can sell it, trade it, post it, modify it, and take credit for it. You can even create a fictitious persona and attribute your store-bought content to that person.

PLR content isn't even all that expensive, although it can get pricy if you try to run a whole online empire using it.

So if you can buy content, why not just buy it and be done with it? While PLR content has many good aspects to it, there are some reasons to be cautious about it.

Some websites or sales pages sell PLR content ... to many, many people. This means the little treasure chest of articles you just bought has been sold to lots of other folks who happen to be in the same business you are! Now the good news is that not everyone will use it, but the potential is there for something called "duplicate content."

The web is more tolerant of duplicate content than, say, bookstores. Imagine if you went to your local Borders and found six books on the shelves with different titles and format, but all the same words? Ostensibly by six different authors? The print world does not tolerate that, but the online world does. To a point. Duplicate content is never rewarded online, and it is best avoided.

Another way to get PLR content is to commission it. You go to a freelance writer or a website like Elance and buy a bunch of articles. These can be remarkably cheap; I've seen them as low as $1 an article. While you may be assured the content is good, original, and sold only to you, you don't know that for sure. The content may turn out to be poor; it can be plagiarised material; and the same author may sell and resell the same bargain-basement articles to lots of internet denizens.

Plagiarism is actually illegal and can get you in hot water. Low-quality content can cost you subscribers.

So what do you do? Should you avoid PLR content altogether? PLR content is an important component to any active online enterprise, but it has to be used the right way.

First, buy PLR from a high-quality source. Ask for assurances about originality of the material and find out how many people bought the content. (It doesn't matter if you're not alone, but you don't want content sold to 100,000 people, either.)

Second, rewrite PLR. I think the biggest value in PLR content is not using it straight but in mixing it in with your own business. Rewrite articles. Re-purpose content so that an ebook becomes a webinar and a series of articles can become a ebook. Put your own spin on the content. A lot of PLR stuff is dry, so infuse some personality into it.

Third, PLR stuff often works if you layer it with a specific market. Let's say you buy some PLR content on insomnia. Why not spin it to suit a more targeted audience, such as, say: insomnia and menopause or natural remedies for insomnia or the traveler's guide to insomnia relief? In other words, you buy PLR content but you never use it "straight."

Last but not least, it's always a good idea to rewrite PLR no matter what. Rewrite it?! Yes. Here is why:

• Rewriting the content will do a lot to put it in your "voice." The internet is all about relationships and people want to hear from you, not the writer you hired.
• Rewriting the content will let you emphasize the things that you want to say. Most internet marketers have a lot to say!
• Rewriting the content is absolutely required for you to spin it or re-purpose it.
• Rewriting it creates original content. If you're even vaguely concerned that all or even part of your content was lifted illegally by a writer or you're worried that too many other people bought the same PLR package ... this makes sure your stuff is unique.

The Evil Twin Theory of Providing Content

Providing content, or writing as it was quaintly called in most of the last century, is one of those things that seems one way but is actually another. Most of those unacquainted with content provision harbor romantic notions about how it happens. This idealized version is not exactly inaccurate. It runs in three steps:

1. Inspiration (possibly divine but at least involving something supernatural)
2. Creation
3. Adulation

Those three things really do happen. You do get an idea, create some content, and perhaps in a perfect or lucky world, you get some recognition or at least money. But every one of these three stages has a darker side. I call it the Evil Twin.

Inspiration implies that ideas are handed to you on a silver platter and that they are all wonderful. In truth, ideas either bombard you from the heavens like hail or evade you so completely that you need a bloodhound to find them. But ideas do occur and the more you know how to "get" them, the more you'll have.

The trouble is that not all ideas are equal. My ratio is about 10 or 11 to 1 which means I get 10 or more clunkers for every viable idea. The evil twin to inspiration is market research. You have to know what ideas to follow and which ones to let wither and die.

This can be harder than you think, since we tend to fall in love with our ideas. Hey, content provision is not for wimps.

The creative process is supposed to happen in some dreamlike trance where talented writers just let the stuff "flow" from their keyboards. Many non-writers ask writers if they know what they're going to write before they sit down at the keyboard. Here is the answer: YES.

The evil twin of creation is doing research, gathering facts and sub-ideas, organizing it, and building a structure. Most of writing is actually done prior to making contact with a keyboard. You need to find something to say and lay out the architecture as to how you're going to say it.

Ouch, that's work. The actual putting of words on paper or pixels on screen is the final step and it's more of a flourish.

Finally, there is adulation. People think good content will be admired. It won't be. You have to get over that part. The evil twin of adulation is that content is functional. You need to assign it a function and assess it by how well it performs that function. Does it persuade? Does it inform? Does it sell?

Becoming an able content provider means that you have to make friends with the evil twins.

Three Myths You Might Believe About Writing

Three of the most pervasive myths about writing could be holding you back from creating the kind of content you need for your online enterprises. These myths are not only widespread, they're nearly convictions.

Myth Number One
Some people are natural-born writers. This has a corollary that holds that writing is a talent that some people are born with and others lack. Now it is true that some people have more of a knack for writing than others and it is also true that some people naturally like to write. But natural-born talent? Writing is a learned skill and even those "born writers" you may envy actually work at it. That brings us to Myth Number Two.

Myth Number Two
Writing is hard, grueling, terrible work. Writing is work, but it is not work the same way that cleaning out a sewer is work. Writing requires some discipline and some skills and it takes time away from your other pursuits (like watching TV) but it is not some odious task that will cripple your body and numb your mind. When done well and fluently, writing is actually kind of relaxing.

Myth Number Three
Writing is all about inventing new things. The corollary to this myth is that writing is a creative endeavor and creative people are constantly making things up out of thin air. Good writing is actually formula writing. Formulas are structures or skeletons. They're not things you copy, they are more like architectural plans. There are templates or skeletons for everything from business plans to sales letters and good writing respects these forms. Most of the time, a good writer is pulling out an established template and then reworking it to meet his or her needs.

Now this is not to say that writing is effortless. But when you understand that you're working with existing structures, filling in the blanks, and that it takes a bit of effort, polish, and thought to get there ... it really is not that hard.

The Inner English Teacher

I am convinced that the main reason most people are so intimidated by writing has to do with one or more traumatic events in high school associated with a high school English teacher.

To the best of my knowledge, no high school English teacher ever won the Nobel Prize for Literature. None ever won the Pulitzer Prize for journalism. They're not the folks who write the screenplays for the blockbuster movies or the people who write the novels that keep the airport bookstores busy.

You know why? English teachers can't write.

Now don't get me wrong--they're a fine breed, English teachers, except for the fact that they try to teach people to write.

On their best day, English teachers are good editors. And an editor is about as far from a writer as a pitcher is to a catcher in baseball. They're on the same team, but they're not exactly interchangeable.

The writer is the person who performs the heroic act of creation. The writer puts the ideas on paper.

The editor is the craftsperson who comes along later and polishes, fine-tunes, checks, and cleans up.

Later on a proofreader will check that it makes sense and that the words are spelled correctly.

The problem with English teachers is that they have so drilled into us the craft of editing that we think it's writing. In fact, your inner English teacher may be telling you that writing is all about not misspelling words, never making a mistake with punctuation, and knowing a gerund from an indefinite article.

Writers are communicators. It's our job to take an idea and put it into some sort of package that can be interpreted and easily understood (embraced, really) by our reader.

The biggest hangup I see in people who "can't write" or "hate to write" is that they are trying to edit first and write second. Just like in baking cookies, the messy part comes first. Writing is first and writing involves being messy. It involves crossing stuff out, adding stuff in, moving stuff around, and (yes) jotting things in place so fast that you have incomplete sentences and misplaced modifiers.

That's first. Later on you edit, which involves cleaning up the whole spiel.

If you have to outsource, outsource the editing. A moderately decent writer with a good editor can produce a great product that is ... in the end ... true to the writer's vision.

But if you sit down to write and are immediately struck by anxiety that you'll make a mistake, that's your inner English teacher. Kill her.