Like many of my fellow Internet marketers, there was a time when I was very enamored with the thought of owning and operating a large PLR business.
It seemed like a great way to make money.
Other people did the work of creating products (mostly e-books) and all I had to do was gather them up, feature them on a large "catalog" type e-commerce site, and sell them to a hungry crowd of business owners looking for content.
Or so I thought ...
I purchased my share of digital resale rights products; and to this day, most sit on my hard drive collecting fairy dust because I never did get around to using them.
There are some notable exceptions, mind you, but that is a discussion for another day.
I love the PLR model of selling digital information. Think about how perfect it is . . .
- You don't have to create products
- You don't have to make graphics (typically)
- You don't have to write a lengthy sales letter (sometimes)
- You don't have to identify a hungry market (usually)
- Everything is basically done for you ... all that's left is for you to do the selling
- It's easy to come up with many related products if you want to "bundle" several together
- You can set your own price point - and you can claim incredible "total value"
I didn't really think much about the negatives of this PLR business model ... but I learned over time that there are several big ones.
I'm getting ahead of myself, though. Let me explain ...
In case you don't know, "PLR" stands for Private Label Rights. It is a phrase that has come to be quite popular. The idea is simple.
Someone else (not you) creates a digital product, for example, an e-book. The product could be a video, an audio recording, a set of images, or just about anything else.
The creator then sells that product for whatever he chooses, not once, but over and over again. The way this happens is through licensing.
The buyer of the product is sold a non-exclusive right to basically do whatever he wants with the product - he can sell it "as is", modify it, split it up into parts, add his own name as the author, change the title, pretty much do whatever he wants with the original product.
Resale or resell rights is a similar concept except that you can't usually change or modify the product - you sell it "as is." Thus PLR is a more flexible solution - you can make it your own private label and differentiate the product for everyone elses product.
It is a novel idea and one that appeals to a lot of folks simply because it gives them something to sell without having to go through the pain of creating the product themselves.
Product creators do well (usually) with a top quality product. Imagine creating an e-book over the course of a week's time, then selling the license to use it (PLR) to 250 buyers.
If the product sells for $39, that gives the creator a nice payday of nearly $10,000 ($9,750 to be exact).
Some smart marketers have learned that they don't even need to do the labor of writing the e-book since it can be outsourced to a ghost writer for a few hundred dollars.
So, why didn't I follow through with implementing this business model?
I learned over time that there are some major disadvantages to PLR products:
- Once sold, you can't control the distribution or sales price of the product - which means it gets devalued almost immediately. Why? Because everyone selling the same product tries to undercut the other sellers. What you sold for $39, you will now see selling online for $7.
- Almost no one modifies the product. Most PLR sellers are only interested in adding the product to their e-book line-up as quickly as possible. Nobody likes to rework PLR books or other products (even though that's really the best way to make money with them.)
- Digital products have a typically short shelf life. That is something I learned quickly online. New products are surfacing all the time and PLR creations don't seem to have a very long life in most niches. That means you must get them "live" and selling fast as they will be cluttering the market very soon.
- Everyone is competing selling the same thing. Remember, very few sellers will modify a PLR work - not even to change the title and add a new e-cover. Since there are so many competing sellers, the price drops and drops and drops. Soon you will see folks giving the PLR product away freely (or as a bonus for another product.)
- Finally, this is the biggest disadvantage I have seen with PLR creations - most of them are poorly written pieces of junk! Sure, there are some great products coming along every once in a while, but for the most part, the industry is full of re-hashed, copied, stolen garbage.
It's typical that a buyer will not get to read the copy of the product until after making a purchase ... so you can't determine before hand what is good and what is useless dribble.
It is a lucrative business to create products, a great and motivating sales pitch, then sell the PLR rights very quickly without further commitment for follow-up, customer service, etc. Then it's on to the next quick product.
But this lucrative business has led to a lot of outsourcing of authorship to people who don't have command of the English language and certainly aren't experts in the niche they are writing about.
Let me ask you ... who is going to review the content in these PLR books? I know as a PLR buyer that I rarely read the contents (even though I should - and probably would if I ever get around to selling PLR). But I know that most PLR buyers immediately try to sell these creations without even reading what they say. Remember, speed to market is critical.
So, junk content flies under the radar and sellers push this garbage on to their customers without a clue about how good or bad the content may be.
So here are my "take-aways" if you want to get into the PLR game:
1- Only buy top quality PLR products if you possibly can
2- Look for "evergreen" products - those that will stay current for a long time to come
3- It's best if the number of licenses available is controlled and small. If you're 1 of 25 others that can sell a product, that would be great. Since most sellers won't do anything serious with their product, you may be competing against only 5 or 10 other sellers.
4- Don't delay in getting your product to market - being the first to offer it is a real advantage.
5- By all means, modify the product, especially the title and cover graphic so that it looks unique and no one will be competing with your branding of it.
6- Think of a way to target your product to a specific crowd, a subset of the overall market. If, for instance, you have a product about how to get traffic to a web site, put a twist on the product and make it to specific to a subset of the larger universe ... like how to get traffic to a real estate agent's site. You will lose all or most of your competition that way.
7- Combine a number of similar or related PLR products into a bundle or into a larger composite product. All the original products will lose their identity and you will come away with a more comprehensive and higher quality single product.
I will tell you that there are a few marketers that make a very good living selling PLR products. But there is a much greater pool of sellers that can't figure out why their PLR site doesn't do a good business. If you stick to the suggestions I have given you, and try to avoid the disadvantages we spoke of, you may be able to make a living with PLR.
