PLR (private label rights) products can be hit and miss in quality to say the least. And finding good quality PLR can seem like hunting for a needle in a haystack,

At one end there’s obvious trash – a million articles for $5, that kind of thing and weirdly, people still buy that kind of offer. I’m not sure what they’re expecting to find – maybe that one article that hasn’t been used thousands of times already or maybe they’re just bought to be sold on to other unsuspecting internet newbies. But whatever the reason, it’s wisest to ignore any deal that seems to be too good to be true. It will just clog up your hard drive until you get round to deleting it.

At the other end there are limited edition licences that (according to the sales letters) you almost need a secret handshake to be able to find. Those tend to get sold at seminars and occasionally by direct mail but my experience is that finding them is a bit like finding hen’s teeth.

Most PLR falls somewhere between those two extremes.

There are sites like Master Resale Rights that have a large catalogue of products, some of which have reviews. A big plus with that site is that they usually have the date the product was launched – if you’re not in an “evergreen” market, beware of older products. I’ve seen PLR videos with things like how to speed up Windows 7 when the latest version is now Windows 10. Or how to use MySpace. So pay attention to the titles where they’re shown.

Fiverr can offer smaller packages and these might be OK for your needs. Bundles of 25 or 50 or even 100 articles might be OK but take the time to read the reviews and be wary of ones with few reviews or where the reviews are very similar and are bunched together in time because that usually means the gig owner did a deal with a few of their friends (or just ignored Fiverr’s terms and conditions and opened more than one account).

Or there are regular new PLR products released via privately owned sites like PLR Mini Mart where authors (Tiffany Lambert in that instance) sell their own writing or market places such as Warrior Plus and JV Zoo.

Most of the time, you won’t get a sample of the PLR product before you buy it.

So you have to take things on trust to a fair extent.

Sometimes there are ways you can search – if the article or product titles are shown then you can usually track them down in Google. Just put the title in quote marks before you search and there’s a good chance you’ll turn up something you can watch or read, especially if the product has been available for a while.

The other thing that’s well worth doing is using PLR as a starting point – a bit like having a first draft done for you rather than staring at a blank screen.

So long as the PLR licence allows you to re-work or re-purpose the product you’re buying, that can be an excellent idea. Most PLR tells you what you can and can’t do with it. The structure of your rights varies and it’s usually difficult to track down the original author unless it’s being sold by the author (if that makes sense) so the rights can be open to interpretation and you’re unlikely to be able to get clarification. So be careful if the rights are vague.

Re-writing articles and even complete books isn’t completely easy but you can get used to it quite quickly.

Expand on the various points, re-write things in your own words, tidy up the grammar.

Grammar can be a big footprint in PLR.

A lot of PLR is written by people who don’t have English their first language. Whilst their command of English is good, it’s noticeably not created by a native English speaker.

Whilst I know that even if I spoke a foreign language (I don’t) the quality of my writing wouldn’t be particularly good, it’s different when you’re aiming your content at people who’ve been speaking the language all their life.

Usually the quality is better than running a translation through Google Translate but by no means always.

One of the usual giveaways are sentence structure – the grammar rules of the writer’s native language get used, even though the grammar rules in English are different. So it sometimes takes a couple of read throughs before you can figure out the meaning of a sentence. Your readers won’t take the time to do that.

Another giveaway is some of the words used. There’s already a difference between English spoken by a Brit versus an American or an Australian.

Add in words that make sense when you look them up in a dictionary between (say) Urdu and English or one of the thirteen different main languages spoken in the Phillipines and it’s a recipe for incomprehensibility.

Another thing that PLR writers tend to do is write in the third person. That’s just not normal (and I specifically tell my writers on iWriter not to do it. But that’s a luxury you don’t have with PLR items because they’ve already been written. And the use of third person text is surprisingly common.

It can still be good quality but once you’ve read a few PLR articles you’ll start to pick up on it. And, like most things, it gets easy enough to change with practice.

Even just tidying things up so that it’s US or UK grammar can make a big difference. There are differences (even regional differences within the same country) which add up and help to make the final article or book more authentic.

The other thing to think about with PLR is what you’re going to use it for.

Most people squirrel it away and save it for a rainy day (which never comes)

In other words, they buy it and then never use it.

It just pile up on their hard drive or even just in a list of links ready to download “later”.

If that’s you, don’t buy any more PLR products until you’ve either used or deleted the ones you’ve already bought!

Be ruthless about this.

Whether you’re using PLR for your own website, as a giveaway product, in your autoresponder series or anywhere else, it pays to re-write it in your own voice.

People will notice if your “voice” changes from day to day. Maybe not consciously but something will niggle them and they’ll be less confident about you and the things you’re saying.

And make sure that the PLR product you’re buying is easy to re-work.

There are top quality PLR audio and video products available but they’re difficult to brand as your own because they are in someone else’s voice.

To do the job properly, you’d need to transcribe them and then re-write them in your own voice before re-recording them. If you’re going to go to those lengths, you might as well create your own digital product from scratch – it will probably be quicker, cheaper and better.

If you’re in the self help area, check out these two PLR products:

• Law of Attraction PLR – articles and other things related to the law of attraction
• 99 Evergreen Topics – a bunch of articles from Trevor Emdon

If you’re in the internet marketing niche, these could be useful:

• 10 affiliate marketing articles – these are one of my products

And if you’d like a full guide on how to use PLR for profit, click here.