Using PLR

Introduction: Using PLR

Over the last few weeks I have been promoting some PLR materials – from one supplier whose stuff I like, Alice Seba.

I came across a statistic that says that more than 90% of PLR buyers never use what they have bought. Now I have bought quite a lot of PLR in my time and I am on a few recurring memberships where PLR is delivered to me monthly. I am in the 90% for sure.  Time to step up and start using PLR

Two steps

1. Change it to fit your personality and your audience

2. Commit to using it soon after your buy it – like next day!!

Change It For Your Audience and Style

The challenge with PLR is quite a few people buy it. Even if 90% do not use it that still leaves 10% who might use it. I am sure there is a Pareto principle in here too. Of the 10% who do use their PLR, 80% publish it without changing it. So it all looks the same. Now it is hard to stand out from the crowd if you publish the same stuff as other people in your niche.

I did some time back hire a ghostwriter to modify PLR for my Yoga blog. That was  important to do as the blog started life as an information blog to drive Google AdSense ad revenues. So the blog had to have unique content to avoid the Penguin and Panda slaps from Google. When my ghostwriter stopped doing work for me that was the end of that – right idea but never followed through.

Now you will find PLR on my computer that relates to most of the niches that I have blogs in. And I have not deployed most of it. Not smart BUT I can learn from not being smart. You can learn too by avoiding my mistakes. Time to start using PLR.

Using PLR Ideas

Of course the world has moved on quite a bit since my first PLR days. For one, the quality of PLR has improved dramatically and is a lot more than a package of 10 or 15 articles and a clunky website. It now includes things like email swipes, suggested tweets, and graphics, even editable graphics. The publishing landscape is a lot wider too with life less dependent on blogging and the risk of a Google slap. What it takes is being creative in how and where to present the PLR.

This got me back onto a journey of exploring how to use PLR. I found a YouTube video which had some good ideas – terrible video but some good ideas. So I took a lesson from last week and made a video using Vidnami (was Content Samurai) about 7 ways of using PLR.

Here is the video – it is just one minute long (designed that way so I can post it on Instagram).

What is PLR?

First a quick step back as to what PLR is (Private Label Rights)

Defined: When someone buys the rights to use someone else’s work as your own.

Critical Step: As there are multiple buyers, the most important step is simple:

Be sure to change the work somehow to be different. Make it your own.

This is not hard – it just takes time and effort. In the Yoga case, I hired a ghostwriter to write it in our style. Of course you can do the rewrite yourself too. There are a set of Spinning tools that will do the work too – or give you a half decent framework to work from. I promote one which I quite like. The guideline is to change at least half of the text. The easiest way to do that is use half and add half – add your own story or your own examples and job done.

7 Ideas for Using PLR

1. Create your own product from the PLR. Make a sales page and sell it as your product.  Example: turn the PLR into a course with workbooks or a video course.
2. Add to your membership site. Add your own spin to it and drip feed it into a membership.
3. Offer as a bonus in Affiliate promotions
4. Give it away as a lead magnet (basically as a bribe) for opt ins on your landing pages
5. Use as the base for articles or blog posts (or videos). Just add your story or your spin or your style (or just spin it)
6. Break into chunks and add to your email sequence in the autoreponder. I have done a bit of that on my emails about journalling. You will see some newsletters coming from the most recent batch I bought
7. Break into smaller pieces for social media posts – always works better when you add an image or a video clip.

Above all be creative – add images – make videos – make audios – combine and mix it up

Here is a sample I did on the Newsletter PLR that I received. I took one article, made a script and created a quick video all about SMART goals. someone else did the thinking and I did the creative stuff.

Using PLR Execution Process

Of course, I have known about this all along. It brings me to the 2nd part of Using PLR steps I outlined above

2. Commit to using it soon after your buy it – like next day!!

This needs a process for deployment. What is that? A set of defined steps you are going to follow. Then do it.

Let’s see an example: I bought a subscription to done for you social media posts. I paid a one off fee and arrives each month is a folder of images for posting to social media. I defined a process. I wrote it down and once a month I execute.

• Download
• Add watermark of my logo
• Schedule as posts to two sets of social media channels – my words, hashtags and the images

Here is a sample tweet with my logo watermarked.

Surround with positivity #personaldevelopmenttip and #thoughtstarter
to shape your #entrepreneurialmindset to build your #affiliatemarketingbusiness.
.
.
.
.#millionairemindset #entrepreneurlifestyle #icebergeffect#socialmediamarketing #mentorship #mconline #markscarrington pic.twitter.com/90KfMtfiK8

— Mark Carrington (@Stratocharge) December 9, 2019

Now that the steps are written down I can outsource the task. It will take an outsourcer a few hours to set up a month’s worth of posts. Then all I have to do is check the quality of the work before posting begins and then monitor engagement on the posts once they start.

A Strategic View for Using PLR

As you know I take a strategic view. My Internet Marketing activity is part of an overall strategy of creating a passive income (well it is not that passive as it takes quite a few hours a day) that will supplement investing markets activity. This last week in markets was a stark reminder of the need for that. The challenging part is that I have had good success at driving traffic but not had much success at getting people to buy. I keep exploring avenues for improving  that. Promoting a few PLR products is part of the idea – offer a broader range of products. The 7 ideas for using PLR contain some
key elements that can be brought together to make a bigger idea.

I started to work on one in the week – memberships.

There are two parts of the ultimate funnel that my mentor, Dean Holland, talks about. Getting access to big commissions is one and building recurring income is the other. He has both of those available to Internet Profits partners. Membership sites are an important opportunity for recurring income – I read a statistic some time ago that average life span in a membership is about 18 months. I know for one that I have been in PLR memberships for quite a lot longer than 18 months – 18 months times $10 is as much commission as I got from a recent major product sale. Would be quite neat to get that working on 10% of a list

How hard is it to set up a membership site?

I know I already have shiny objects sitting in my computer that include membership sites. I could use one of those. Fusion HQ is a fully fledged funnel system that includes membership features. I do have one funnel operating there. That is a candidate. I know that along the way I have bought another – Memberhub Pro was its name. I have not created anything there. It looks very much like a course builder and has all the membership features and payments and mailing integrations. I was just not ready at the time I bought either of them to deploy for memberships.

Of course, you know what happens when one starts to get ready for an idea. Somebody pitches one in your inbox. That somebody was a survivor of the big unsubscribe thing I did over a year ago. The offer was for a prebuilt membership site covering 5 topic internet marketing areas and built on ProductDyno as the platform. I know ProductDyno as I already have two products delivered using it – Cook Azon and Affiliate Oracle, from my friend Adam Payne. First thing I did was to check out if Adam had a product review – he did. He likes it as a tool. That was enough to get me to say yes please. What I also like is it has integrations working with my main page builder, Convertri. There are a lot of Convertri users using Product Dyno. The funnel did have a bunch of OTO’s one of which was for another 5 topics. Those 10 topics overlap very strongly with what I am trying to achieve.

The strategic idea is to use memberships as bonuses to differentiate my Internet Profits offer from others BUT also to start selling my own memberships. It also provides a central hub for all the PLR that I have access to. Mostly, PLR rights include the rights to add stuff to a membership as long as it is a paid membership or given as a bonus on a product promotion that was paid.

Using PLR for Bonus Offers

Now using PLR as an affiliate bonus is also a strong idea. I have been doing that but not in a very sophisticated way. The reality of affiliate promotions is that buyers have worked out the system. They go looking for the best bonuses and do not necessarily buy from the person who introduced them to a product. The most successful promoters have neat pre-selling pages that present the offer being promoted and the bonus offers together. Hook the buyer on the bonuses to ensure they do not go looking elsewhere is the art form. The challenge is working out how to do that – it is easy enough to build it into a WordPress post – but each one has to be bespoke. I know that is how Adam Payne does it. I started to explore ways of doing that and picked a product from the membership software team to help with that – it includes access to some of their bonus products too. More about that once I have it deployed.

So the strategy is set. Build out a membership site. Offer memberships as bonuses. The challenge now is to work out a differentiation strategy for the membership site – I started with branding. Chosen brand colours. Chosen brand font family. Created a membership logo. The hard part is working through the details of the membership site to see where they use images, where they use branding (in the text) and deciding if I want to change it – OR fly with what I have and change it progressively. I must say the site is not as parameter driven as I would like.

This would be a solid job to outsource now that I have the basic branding stuff sorted. Mr Outsourcer: work all the way through the elements and make them brand specific.

That feels like it has been a huge week – lots to do but a clearer direction set.

Resources

Vidnami (was Content Samurai) is a tool for creating videos from slide packs. It includes a large library of free to use video clips and images and also music. There are AI based voice effects but I prefer to do my own voice overs – they work better. There is a free trial period – you will not be disappointed. Try it here

Newsletter PLR is the PLR from Alice Seba I have been promoting and from which I grabbed the SMART goals words.  You can grab the same free sample I got and use that as a base to explore further.

UsePLR.com Rachel Youngson has some useful resources for using PLR – that is her usePLR logo in the middle of the featured image. The PLR Profit report was especially helpful for me in getting my head straight.  Download it free.

Article Spinning: I have bought a lot of PLR in my time. I use an article spinner some of the time. SpinRewriter does a great job in creating multiple variants that work well for SEO and avoiding Google penalties. Get SpinRewriter here

Video Marketing Insider is a membership site run by Adam Payne focused on video marketing. Adam has built a standalone business in video marketing promoting video related training. As a former teacher, he has a good teaching and coaching style. I like his stuff. Take a tour.

Credits

The videos contain images that were used under a Creative Commons License