Do you have PLR articles stashed away on your computer you still haven’t put to use? Have you bought software and online tools for your business and never used them?
Well, yeah… me too.
I thought I might do something about that recently. Maybe I could get some nice quick content on here.
Here’s the story.
Free – Arun Chandran Gift
Arun Chandran runs the Flaming Hot PLR site. Calls himself “His Excellency. He’s a great PLR provider. I’d link to his site, but he’s doing a redesign, and he’s got the site shut down right now. Thanks for blowing my affiliate commissions there buddy. Maybe someone should tell him about staging sites.
Anyway, I’m on his list. He’s not one of those everyday mailers. Sometime he goes so long between mailings you can almost forget him. Well, truly no one forgets His Excellency.
Arun will often send out gifts in his emails. Pays to be a subscriber.
He sent out a gift article the other day called, Discover 5 Proven Ways to Monetize Your Blog. He included a DWHYW license with his article. Yeah, I never heard of it either. Here’s how he explains it:
Hello!
What’s a DWHYW license? Simple… it’s a ‘Do Whatever the Hell You Want’ license. Usually referred to as unrestricted rights.
Do note that if you’re giving it away or reselling it, you may NOT pass on the giveaway rights or resell rights to your customers.
There must be a benefit to being on my list/FB group and this little rule ensures it.
Pretty sweet.
So that’s the free.
I used it to publish the article called 5 Proven Ways to Make Money With Your Blog
I did a quick copy/paste of the article to this site. I changed the title a little, created level 2 headers where the original had a numbered list and where Arun’s article talked about some resource or tool, I linked out to them.
That’s pretty lazy right there. I didn’t even get affiliate links for those items.
What I Should Have Done
When you use PLR content on your blog, or really anywhere it’s freely available online, it should be changed, a lot. Changing a few words in the title doesn’t cut it.
His Excellency Arun has at least a couple of eBooks on the subject. But his site is down, so I can’t seem to link out to them for you.
I was just going through some old training material I bought from the queen of PLR, Tiffany Lambert. She said when she uses private label rights material, she reads through it, takes some notes, and then writes an article from scratch based on what she learned from the PLR content.
WHOA NELLY! That’s dedication!
Few people, and I have my hand up here, are willing to do that much. Maybe that’s why she’s the queen and we’re not.
For those of us not aspiring to royalty, but want to do good enough work with the PLR we buy, or get gifted to us, there’s work ahead.
Read it and weep.
- New title. You should probably put more imagination and energy into it than I did on the free article.
- Put something new at the beginning. Ideally this will be some sort of story telling of a personal experience or about someone in the news or a customer of yours. It needs to fit in with the scope of the article, maybe have an appropriate keyword or two mixed in there.
- Don’t overdo that keyword thing.
- Change up the existing content. Do some rewriting to give it your voice. Move sections around. Maybe combine PLR from a couple of vendors
- Change some formatting. I added H2 header tags where different sections of the article started. These are always good, because readers tend to scan your page and the headings draw attention.
- Maybe make bullet points out of several key points. It changes the article and is eye bait for scanners.
- Write a nice conclusion, an all original one.
The goal here is to make your version of this article different from all the other people that have the very same piece of content. Put some of your personality into the writing.
Oh, one more thing. All those links to various online services and marketing tools in the article should be replaced with affiliate links.
Cheap – Steve Chase Voiceover
Steve Chase runs Everything PLR. He’s also on Arun’s list. He got the same free article I did.
Steve is fairly new on the PLR creator scene, but he’s been doing voice-over work for years. He took the free article and voiced it. He then packaged the script, which was just the original article and an mp3 file of his audio version of the article and sold them together.
I bought a copy. It cost me $4.99.
That’s the cheap.
What Can You Learn Here?
Just because you got PLR in the form of a text article doesn’t mean you have to use it that way. Steve Chase didn’t limit himself that way. He used the article to make an audio product. You can too.
How many ways can you think of to get more content pieces out of that one article?
- Add pictures and graphics and turn it into a PDF that you can use as a lead magnet.
- Flesh that PDF out some more and turn it into a short report for sale.
- Using the info in the article, create a check list, mind map and resource reports. Turn them into PDF’s and bundle them with the report to sell at a higher price point
- Make an audio.
- Use it to make Powerpoint slides.
- Combine the audio and the Powerpoint to make a video.
- Use the material to come up with a planner and other items to sell as a printable.
- Break the article into sections and use each section as content for an email and make a series from them. This has the advantage of not needing as much rewriting as it will when you’re going to post it on your website. Google isn’t on your list and SEO isn’t an issue in your emails.
The goal is to get your money’s worth from your PLR budget.
Lazy – Vidnami Hands Off Video
I signed up for Vidnami many months ago. It’s a cloud based video production software. The main sales point is that you provide the script, and the Vidnami program can take it from there.
UPDATE: Vidnami has sold out to GoDaddy and are in the process of closing shop (July 2021).
According to the email sent to customers Vidnami will be added to GoDaddy Suite.
Big companies (GoDaddy) acquire little companies (Vidnami) for lots of reasons. They might want to:
- Acquire the companies customer base.
- Get ownership of the small companies special and superior technology.
- Get rid of the competition.
That first item on the list clearly wasn’t a factor for GoDaddy. The Vidnami product is being shut down and the current customers are just left out in the cold.
I have never used it. Yes, I’m a shameful slug and I embarrass even myself. Maybe I should try it out.
I took my script and mp3 audio file and logged in to Vidnami. I clicked create a new video.
I uploaded the script. Vidnami can provide the audio for the video with a robot voice. But I had the silky tones of Mr. Steve Chase to use for my audio, so I uploaded my mp3 file.
I let it chew on that for a while and it came back with the images it picked out to use during the video.
At this point, the Vidnami user is supposed to go through the individual slides and decide if the picture matches the message. You can make any changes you want.
The video that came back was just a shade over nine and a half minutes long. That’s a lot of slides to look at. There were certainly images that didn’t match the script and should have been changed for a more appropriate choice.
I picked lazy, and accepted what their creator software picked. I now had an HD video file after doing almost no actual work.
Improvement Opportunities
The obvious take away here is to take the time to make a better video. Editing through all those images would take a substantial amount of time. If I had been going to post the video on YouTube in the hopes of driving some traffic to my site, I would have invested the time.
Another approach I may take in the future is to divide the content and make multiple videos.
This article had five sections. Making a video for each section would let me post more individual videos to YouTube, and would look better on the website.
Extra Credit With a Little Work
I decided to go the extra mile on this one, so I took another step. I decided to make a PDF version of the article available.
I did this with another cloud-based program I bought and never used. It’s called Designrr. I ever upgraded to the pro version on this one, and still haven’t put it to use.
I chose to create an eBook. I picked out one of the cover templates they had available (there were a bunch to choose from). I then copied in my free article.
I then fiddled around with it a little. Mostly getting my title onto the book cover and my web site address on page footers. It was pretty easy.
I had it spit out the eBook and uploaded it to the site, then linked to it in the article.
Though not completely lazy, that was all pretty easy. I think it turned out right nice too.