An Introduction to Private Label Articles | Kickstart Your Internet Marketing with Martin Avis

Part 17: An Introduction to Private Label Articles

Private label articles are a huge buzz at the moment. And with good reason. In fact, the buzz surrounding private label articles, in particular has been around now for the last couple of years. And it is getting louder!

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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