Private label rights (PLR) content can be a lifesaver when you are short on time or you hate writing with a passion. Done-for-you content can be used on your blogs or you can bundle them and sell them as your own products.
If youโre a beginner to online marketing, PLR can shortcut your journey and have you establishing a web presence and making sales in record time
While PLR is a means to an end, itโs not an end in itself and has its downsides and limitations. The 4 pointers below will help you steer clear of the pitfalls of PLR.
Fact checking
Hereโs a brutal truth โ not all PLR is made equalโฆ and NOT all PLR vendors are reputable. There are two types of PLR vendors.
The first type, are not just marketers, but are writers at heart. These PLR vendors do their own research and write almost all of their PLR. So, you can expect consistent quality and a uniform โvoiceโ throughout their content.
They tend to take a lot of pride in their work and itโs usually safe to purchase PLR from these vendors.
At the other end of the spectrum are PLR vendors who are ONLY in the business for money. They outsource the writing to cheap writers on freelance sites. The content is then cobbled together, given a pretty sales page and sold as the next best thing since sliced bread.
Here’s what you need to know: Freelancers are on the clock. The more they write and the more gigs they accept, the more money they make.
This immediately puts a constraint on their time. Guess where they cut corners on?
If you said research, youโre absolutely right. When a cheap freelance writer is tasked to write content, most of the time they just get online and pull facts from different websites and create a Frankenarticle.
The problem here is that you never really know if the facts are accurate. Thereโs so much misinformation online that โfake newsโ has become the norm.
You may wonder, โWhy doesnโt the PLR seller hire better writers?โ
The answer is simple. Better writers cost more and this eats into the profit margins. So, they go for the cheap ones.
If youโre in the health niche and youโre using PLR content, itโs especially important to cross-check all facts and stats you find in your PLR articles/eBooks. You donโt want to be dishing out inaccurate information.
The goal is to be an authority in your niche, and not a disseminator of wrong information. Always fact check your content. Period.
Plagiarism
Another common practice by third-rate freelancers is to just rip off content from different sites and squash them together to form their own article. Once again, the writers are either hard-pressed for time or theyโre just lazy and looking for shortcuts.
Run your content through a site like Copyscape.com to see if your PLR content is plagiarized. Do note that since others may have used the same PLR as you, several results may show up.
This is not plagiarism โ youโll notice that their content is almost the same as your PLR content because theyโve used the same PLR.
What you should be looking for are sentences and paragraphs that show up oddly on sites where the rest of the content is totally different.
When you see such results, almost always, the writer has either plagiarized the content or is using a content scraping software to create the content.
Duplicate content penalty
A duplicate content penalty occurs when youโre not organized with your PLR content. There are so many misconceptions about this penalty.
Letโs keep things simple โ using private label rights content will NOT get you penalized by Google. It doesnโt work that way. If it did, all syndicated news sites, etc. would get penalized for using the same content.
You ONLY get penalized by Google for duplicate content when several of your blog posts contain the exact same content. Google thinks youโre trying to game the system and rank your site higher.
For example, if you take a specific PLR article that you have, come up with 3 catchy titles for the article and post the same article 3 times on your blog, now you have duplicate content.
Youโre only changing the title of the article but the rest of the content is the same. Some marketers do this intentionally thinking theyโll get away with it (they wonโt) โฆ and others accidentally make a mistake because theyโre disorganized and donโt know which PLR content theyโve already used and which they havenโt.
So, keep a separate folder for content that youโve already used on your sites. This will prevent you from being hit with the duplicate content penalty.
Adhering to the PLR license
So many PLR buyers just canโt seem to understand the license terms that come with the PLR packages they purchase.
While the terms state that you can sell the content as your own, you canโt actually sell it as your own PLR. Itโs easy to get confused here.
What the terms really mean is that youโll need to convert the PLR into a final product, personalize it and sell it as a unique product to end consumers.
You canโt sell it as your own PLR content because thatโs the original vendorโs job. Be clear about the license terms when using your PLR so that you donโt step on anyoneโs toes.
If in doubt, always seek clarification from the vendor.
Keep these 4 points in mind whenever you purchase or use PLR. Itโs best to err on the side of caution.