When the obvious is staring me in the face, I so often look
everywhere but right at it. And guess what? I’ve done it again!

As long-time readers if Kickstart will know, I am a big fan of
private label ebooks. The idea that someone will write a book
that you can then take for mere pennies and turn into a product
to sell is beyond magical to me.

In fact, I love private label ebooks so much that I wrote the
first (and as I rather immodestly still think, the best) ebook on
the subject of how to make great money from using them. Unlock
the Secrets of Private Label eBooks has been on sale now for four
years and if I had to sit down to write it again, I wouldn’t
change a thing.

Well, there is one thing I would change (and probably will for
any future updates I release) and that is the section on where I
recommend my favorite source of PLR ebooks. You see, most of the
really good sources have dried up and I haven’t found anything as
good to replace them.

That became a real problem for me a few days ago.

I’m in the process of creating a big affiliate website. It has
loads of ClickBank products that I’ve reviewed and I wanted some
good PLR material to use as content for some of the pages, blog
posts, and tips. My site is themed, so each section is about a
different, but related subject. To encourage sales I wanted to
offer a different bonus book to anyone who buys a recommended
ebook through my link.

I also wanted a really good ebook to offer as an incentive for
folks to sign up to the newsletter I’m launching alongside the
site (actually more of an ongoing autoresponder series than a
newsletter, but you get my drift).

So you can see that suddenly I needed a LOT of good private label
ebook material and I needed it fast.

Trouble was that my favorite membership site has been having
difficulties lately and I couldn’t use them. And none of my other
sources were up to the job.

I needed a PLR ebook site that would give me access to a huge
library of ebooks from the very start – not drip-feed me material
over the months.

So many membership sites only allow you access to the current
month’s offerings and future stuff as it is uploaded. The back
catalogue is either closed to you, or only available at extra
cost. Not good.

The answer, when it hit me, was blindingly obvious.

When I first wrote my book, the #1 PLR ebook membership site was
called Nicheology. I loved it and raved about it whenever I
could. But there was a big problem – joining was very difficult
because they kept on restricting membership and forcing people to
get on a waiting list.

I was happy because I was already a member, but recommending it
to others was a frustrating experience all round.

Then two things happened simultaneously:

1. My credit card expired
2. The owner of Nicheology sold out to someone else.

I vaguely thought that the change of ownership would be a bad
thing (although I had no evidence that would be so) and so never
bothered to give them a new credit card number. My membership
expired.

Well two days ago it struck me that Nicheology might be the
answer to my problem if they are still half as good as they used
to be. So I checked them out.

And was blown away!

I was able to join with no problem at all, had immediate access
to the entire back catalogue and to my joy found that the new
owner has taken the Nicheology site to a completely different
level.

It is fantastic!

Within a few minutes I had downloaded 8 ebooks that fit the theme
of my site – some are fully-formatted ebooks, and some are what
they call ‘products in the rough’, text files that you can format
for yourself.

I have more content that I know what to do with and all the bonus
products I need.

And all for a trial price of just $1!

Of course, I will not be canceling my membership – Nicheology is
just too valuable to allow it to slip through my fingers again!

http://urlnex.us/nicheology

Related posts:

1. Nicheology Review #2martinI wrote about Nicheology the other day, but on reflection,...
2. Blogging to the Bank ReviewmartinFour years ago, a young man called Rob Benwell launched...
3. The Money Gym by Nicola Cairncross: ReviewmartinI love ebooks. I read them on screen, I read...

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In that case, you need to look at buying or acquiring the rights to the product. Depending on which ‘rights’ you buy or are given, you can then sell the product from your own site, in your own way, and keep all the money for yourself.

What are reprint rights, and how to profit from them.

When you buy an ebook or a program online, you generally buy the right to read it yourself, or use it on your own computer. Anything beyond that basic usage is usually forbidden.

That means that

- you cannot give it away to anyone else.
- you cannot change it in any way.
- you cannot sell it.

Even if there is no obvious copyright mark, the author of all published works (ebooks and program scripts included) is automatically awarded the copyright to their work as soon as it is published. The © mark acts as a reminder, but is not strictly required.

So how is it that some people can sell other people’s ebooks and programs, change them, rename them, give them away as free bonuses, and even sell you the rights to do the same?

It all comes down to the original author selling certain ‘rights’ to those works.

There are a few different types of ‘rights’ that you are likely to come across online. They are all quite different in what they allow you to do, so it is always wise to read the terms very closely to be sure you know exactly what rights you are actually buying.

Here are the most common ‘rights’ that you are likely to come across and what they generally mean. There can be variances though, so be sure to check the small print carefully.

Resale Rights.

The simplest of all. When you buy resale rights, you are given the right to sell the product on. While you can effectively do that as an affiliate, the difference here is that the product becomes your own. You have to handle the orders (through your own payment processor account) but you get to keep all the revenue from each sale.

Effectively the product becomes your own except that you cannot change it.

You will sometimes see resale rights being sold that attempt to dictate the price at which you will sell the product. While this is generally a good thing from the product’s point of view (if people start selling a $97 ebook for $1, the value of the book will fast disappear and resale rights owners who are charging the full price will find it hard to compete) it is almost always illegal.

Price fixing in this way is not allowed.

However, it is usually in your own interest to adhere to the recommended price.

Buying the resale rights to an ebook usually costs 3-5 times the normal selling price, but you don’t need many sales to start to see a good return on your investment.

Reprint Rights

Reprint rights are similar to resale rights, but differ slightly in as much as they confer on you the authority to have the ebook printed out to sell as a physical product.

This right is not seen as often as resale rights (and indeed, sometimes the resale rights licence will give reprint rights as well).

It can be very useful to have this right to print as a lot of extra money can be generated by offering ebooks that you sell with a physical product option. Simply by printing out an ebook and putting it in a nice binder, you can often command a much higher price from your customers.

Master Rights.

Master resale rights, or master reprint rights are the next step up and usually cost quite a bit more. Typically, 10-15 times the original product’s asking price.

They are so much more valuable because they give you the right to not just sell the book and keep the profits, but to sell the resale or reprint rights too. And again, any sales you make are entirely your own with no need to share with the product’s original author.

Master rights can be a double-edged sword. On the one hand they can help you generate significant profits by selling on the resale rights, but on the other, by selling those rights to others, you are creating your own competition!

Private Label Rights.

The final ‘rights’ that we will examine here are the so-called private label rights. With these, you buy the text to a book, or the code to a program and can then do whatever you like with them (within the terms of the license – so be careful to check).

What that means in practice is that if you buy the private label rights to an ebook, you can then change the way the book looks, add more content if you choose to, take content out if you like, reorder it, change the title of the book – even put your own name as the author. In fact, pretty much anything.

The only thing that is usually forbidden in the licence (although by no means always) is reselling the private label rights themselves.

This freedom to do whatever you want with private label rights ebooks is incredibly powerful and potentially amazingly profitable. In effect, you can create unique ebooks, under your own name, with your own look and feel, without having to do any of the hard writing work! It is almost as good as going to Elance and hiring a ghostwriter of your own.

The only drawback is that private label rights ebooks tend to be distributed via membership websites who typically have around 500 other members. Potentially, that is a lot of competition.

But the reality is that barely 5 out of every 100 people who belong to those sites ever make use of the content they are given, so your real competition is minimal.

At the time of writing this, private label rights are massively undervalued.

Most membership sites that give private label ebooks to their members have two new ones created every month, and some have a back library available of 50 or more just waiting for you to make your own and start to profit from.

Although I sell many ebooks and products that I have the resale rights to, my personal preference is to use private label works. I’ve got several reasons for this:

1. With ‘resale rights’ you have to sell the book exactly as it is supplied to you. If you are unhappy with the format or the look of it, bad luck. You cannot change it. It there is something about the content that you are less than confident with, that’s a pity, but you cannot change it.

2. With resale rights you have no real idea how many people are in competition with you, and no way to protect your profits if they start to wildly undercut your price. Often, the only way to compete against deep price cutters is to build an amazing selection of bonuses to offer alongside your product. This may be effective, but it can be time consuming and expensive.

3. Private label rights give you the power to do so much more than *just* publish an ebook. You can use the content in many different ways to make profits.

“I’d love to start an online business but don’t know what to sell.”

Buying the rights to other people’s work is the fastest way to get a product of your own. There are literally tens of thousands of ebooks out there that you can buy the rights to – resale or private label – in an almost limitless array of niche markets.

Not having a product to sell is no longer an excuse to prevent you from starting an online business. Authors are falling over themselves to sell you the rights to their books – they’ve done all the work, so you can pick up the profits.

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The good thing is that most of these are not mutually exclusive. If you want to squeeze every penny or cent of value from the many private label articles that you will inevitably collect, there is nothing to stop you exploiting each article in a multitude of uses.

The only word of caution is that you should check the terms and conditions of your private label articles supplier – some are more liberal with their terms of use than others.

18 Ways to Profit from Private Label Articles

1. Mini Sites

Each pack of articles (usually between 10 and 40) can form a niche mini site in its own right. A mini site is usually a small website that is focused on selling one affiliate product – or an ebook that you’ve created yourself, perhaps from a private label ebook source.

2. AdSense Sites

Similar to mini sites, except here the primary monetization method is from displaying Google AdSense ads. This is by no means as profitable as it once was, but can still bring you in a good ongoing income if you build a string of such sites. With your content being provided by plr articles there is no real excuse not to!

3. Portal/Content Sites

Content sites are normally much more complex than basic made-for-AdSense sites. A content site will build up over time until it can have scores or hundreds of pages. A recent strategy for such sites, that works well with the search engines is siloing. In a siloed content site, you would place themed private label articles in their own directories and link them together vertically – with the last article in each directory (or silo) linking to the first in the next folder (silo). We will look at such internal linking strategies later in this course.

4. Creating eBooks

If you can collect together a sufficient number of well-written, tightly-themed articles, there is no reason why you should not then use them as the basis for an ebook. Naturally you will want to augment the content by adding information of your own and rewriting the articles to expand on their themes. The overall result will be that you can produce an ebook a lot faster by using the articles as a starting point than you can if you have a blank screen to begin with.

5. Adding to existing eBooks

One of the most important things when creating your own products using private label ebooks as your starting point is to add new sections, improve existing sections and generally make the book ‘your own’. Private label articles can easily form a big part of that added material.

6. Special Reports

If you don’t want to go to the effort of creating a whole ebook, or if you feel your private label articles are not of sufficient depth for an ebook, then why not consider using them to create a series of short special reports. Five or six themed articles can be put together and surrounded by a commentary from you and then sold as special reports in their own right.

7. Autoresponder series

A great way to get subscribers to sign up is to offer them an ongoing series of tips and ideas as a free autoresponder series. Needless to say, many people have a great deal of trouble writing such autoresponder courses, but using well written plr articles can shortcut the process. Many private label articles are of the ‘tips and strategies’ format and so can  be adapted to the autoresponder series format with minimal effort.

8. Ideas bank

I often benefit from plr articles without ever using them! I just read through them looking for ideas and inspirations. You’d be surprised how often I find it too – if only to spark my thinking into a whole new sub niche.

9. Keyword research

One thing is for sure – in order for someone to have commissioned plr articles for you to use, they will have had to have done some good keyword research first. And by looking at the theme of each article in a pack, you can soon get a useful list of profitable keywords to use in other sites and blogs.

10. Adding to web pages

Even if you are adept at creating content on your own, private label articles can be used to add depth and content to your web pages. By adding a  carefully chosen plr article to your page you can increase your wordcount (if your niche needs ‘meatier’ pages) introduce LSI words and ideas and increase your main keyword’s on-page count.
 
11. Sound bites

Not many people do this, but it is very easy to read a private label article into a microphone (using the excellent free sound editing software from www.audacity.com) and then let people listen to the content on your pages.

12. Blog posts

Just as you can use the articles to build web sites, you can also use them to build blogs. And because they are plr articles, you won’t have to show someone else’s resource box at the bottom of each one. You are perfectly at liberty to post them as if you are the author. A blog that is constantly fed new content on a daily basis will very quickly get the attention of the search engines.

13. RSS feeds

RSS (or Really Simple Syndication) is a method by which other people can take your content and put it on their own websites and blogs. By creating an RSS feed for your plr articles, and adding links within them back to your sites, you can get a growing number of backlinks. We will look at RSS feeds later in the course.

14. Forum posts

Be careful here. many forum owners don’t like people to post articles, and those that do expect them to be of a high quality and written by you. Having said that, there are forums that are less picky and may allow you to put up the occasional plr article. The benefit is that you will also usually be allowed to add a ‘signature’ line to your post with a teaser ad to attract people back to your own URL.

15. Your own members

Some private label membership sites make no restrictions on the way you use the articles – including reselling them on to your own customers and or membership site subscribers. This can be a very welcome and useful service to provide your membership, but make sure you check your supplier’s terms and conditions first.

16. Article Directories

In general, article directories don’t like to see private label articles posted. however, if you use the plr article as the basis for creating a new article of your own, then the objections often disappear. The secret is to make sure that you change substantial parts of the original by rewording and rewriting throughout. At first glance this may seem to be a lot of work, but it quickly becomes second-nature and is a lot quicker than writing new articles from scratch.

17. Ezines

Let’s be honest, most ezine publishers run out of things to say every now and again. When those dry patches appear, private label can prove to be a great source of inspiration – or even of pre-written filler articles.

18. Offline Newsletters

There is a huge, and still largely untapped market for real paper and ink newsletters. The number of markets that can support monthly newsletters is vast and the number of people filling the demand is tiny. Private label articles not only help you to find suitable niche markets to consider creating a mailed-out offline newsletter for, but they can also help provide some of the content.

There are lots of other ways that PLR articles are being used every day by canny marketers. Think around the edges and see what you can come up with.

But here is the golden secret – and the dire word of warning.

Private label may be a short cut, but it shouldn’t be seen as the easy way out. You do still have to make sure that everything that goes out in your name is of the best quality that you can make it. Your reputation is your number one resource and it is incredible easy to lose. Whatever you do with private label articles, take a step back and ask yourself how you can improve it, how you can add value, how you can make it visually appealing, and how it can help grow your reputation rather than diminish it.

Keep that in mind and you’ll profit from PLR for a very long time.

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Some people forecast that private label articles would quickly go out of fashion, but there is absolutely no sign that this is happening. If anything, they are getting more and more popular.

The good ones, that is.

As with anything that is effectively outsourced, you do have to be vary careful that you are buying quality – there is a lot of trash out there and is very much a ‘buyer beware’ market.

Having said that, I’ll tell you about the place I rank as the #1 source for quality private label articles a little later on.

Why is private label so popular?

The search engines are on the lookout for sites that contain minimal or poor content and will de-index them when they find them. That’s because in the competitive world of providing search results, and especially now that so many of the major search engine companies are answerable to shareholders, it is no longer enough to just give customers pages of sites to look at. The *relevance* of those sites has become the watchword.

As a result, most of the search engines – taking their lead from Google – are looking for a particular quality of content on the pages that they serve up in their search results.

Among many other things, they are looking for:

* the number of words on the page
* the relevance of each ‘block’ of those words to the overall keyword that the page is indexed for
* well-written ‘human readable’ content
* confidence that the page has a purpose in its own right – even if all ads are removed
* the presence of secondary keywords and phrases that complement the primary keyword of the page (this is called Latent Semantic Indexing and my special too – at http://www.keywordlsispy.com – will find those words that the search engines love for you at the click of a button. You can even take a free trial right there on that page.)
* a logical and useful linking plan

As you can see, the content of each page of your site has never been more important!

Beyond these ‘on page’ factors, the search engines are even more interested in the quality (and number) of sites that link back to your page. But that is beyond the scope of this book to go into in any detail.

Back in the day (long before AdSense was even dreamed of) the phrase ‘Content is King’ was on every Internet marketer’s lips. But good content was hard to come by and writing your own was time consuming at best, and downright impossible for many people.

Then came AdSense and although a few voices in the wilderness kept saying that content was king, the reality was that for many online marketers content became an irrelevance.

It was far easier to build quick and dirty websites with thousands of pages based on lists of keywords, where the only ‘content’ was scraped listings from the search engines themselves. Website generation programs proliferated, ranging from a few dollars to many thousands, that created these essentially content-free websites at the click of a button.

Making money from AdSense sites was easy.

Until the search engines cottoned on to what was happening and started to fight back by de-indexing every ‘spam’ website that they could find.

So the wheel turned full circle, and content dusted off its crown again.

The difference now is that with so many people needing fresh, effective, well written content, a whole industry has grown up to provide it.

If you were to go to a ghost writer you may be lucky and get articles written for you for around $6 each. If you wanted to build a website with 40 pages, that means you’d need to spend about $240 on content.

Which, if you are hoping to build a series of ten or more websites, could soon mount up to being a large outlay of cash!

Private Label neatly gets around the problem.

Now, one person can go to the ghost writer and pay for a set of articles and then resell those articles to 100, 200 or more people for a fraction of the cost. Everyone is happy!

* The ghost writers are happy because they’ve never had so much work
* The people commissioning the articles are happy because their initial outlay can be multiplied many times
* The article purchasers are happy because they get packages of articles at a fraction of what it would have cost to have them commissioned
* The search engines are happy because the articles become part of content-rich themed websites that satisfy their searchers far better than the empty spam sites ever could
* And, hopefully, your site’s visitors are happy because they are presented with interesting and relevant content.

I’ve belonged to all kinds of private label article membership sites over the last few years and have come to the conclusion that there is only one that I can consistently recommend for well written, general articles that are supplied to a limited number of people (each group in the membership site has a maximum of 200 members – and as less than 1 in 20 will use the material effectively, that means minimal competition for you). That one is PLRpro – http://www.plrpro.com/martin – where you can join for a 14-day trial period for just $1!

[Incidentally, some people have been confused by the $1 trial price - although the site does show the normal price, when you get to the final payment page, the $1 price will be charged.]

Does it matter that everyone has the same articles?

Not at all.

In the first place there is still no real evidence that search engines penalize duplicate content in the way that was once thought. They do dislike seeing the same article appear on multiple pages of the same domain, but at present, don’t seem to worry much about it appearing on different  domains.

Secondly, there is a lot you can do to make the articles you use different. My Keyword LSI Spy tool will help you greatly there.

And let’s be brutally honest – most people are not using the private label materials they have access to, so you are not in competition with 200 other people who theoretically get the same articles that you do. The chances of more than a handful actually putting them anywhere online is slim.

Private label articles are a great way to make money online with the minimum of effort and in the next installment of the Foolproof, No-Nonsense, Kickstart Guide to making Money Online I’ll tell you about many of the different and creative ways people use them.

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