At first glance, PLR (private label rights) products seem like the answer to making money on the internet.
They’re ready made products – the internet marketing equivalent of a TV dinner – and that’s the first sign that they’re maybe not just going to be something where you can just flick a switch and make some cash.
The first thing to do when buying PLR is run some background checks.
It’s unlikely that you’ll get a sample of the product on the sales page.
But you can run a quick check in Google for the product title – most people are lazy and don’t modify the title or anything else in the PLR. Put the title in quotes and check the results.
If the product has been around a while, which is often the case if you buy it from a PLR and resale rights site, then there’s a good chance someone will have maybe broken the terms and conditions and put the book up as a free download.
Swap your email address for the download and read a chapter or two.
Give the product a score in your own mind. If it’s half-way decent then I’d say go out and buy the PLR rights.
But first…
Check the PLR rights
PLR can be confusing but it normally comes with a lot of ticks and crosses that say what you can and can’t do with it.
Ignoring the fact that those terms are rarely enforced, you should focus on PLR with the least restrictions.
Ideally, you should be able to edit the PLR product, re-work the sales letter and graphics and generally make it as close to your own product as possible.
If the PLR rights are too restrictive then that becomes more of an issue.
Check the price you’re being asked to pay
I’ve seen lots of PLR on various sites where the price is below $10 (often well below) yet the sales page claims that there’s a suggested retail price of $27.
Ignore the suggested retail – that’s just there to help the PLR site make the sale.
Instead, if you’re intending to sell the product, do a quick bit of research to see what the current typical price is in the niche you’re about to enter.
Most of the time you get the quality you pay for with PLR.
So if the item is $1.99 then figure that it’s either not very good or it’s been sold thousands of times which means you’ll have to make quite a few changes to it.
Make some changes!
The quickest change is the title of the PLR product.
Use a free headline generator to come up with some ideas for the main title and the subtitle of your new product.
Even if it’s video based.
That stops people putting your title in quotes in Google and finding it cheaper than you’re selling it for.
And it stops the samplers who grab it as a free download if that’s the route you decide to go down. PLR can be a good option for cheap or giveaway products but you’re hoping to get people on your list who are interested in your niche, not people who just want to get a free sample of a product they’re thinking about using themselves.
If there’s a sales page, change that.
A lot of the sales pages for PLR products are formulaic.
They don’t normally pay top copywriters, so that’s to be expected.
Writing a sales letter doesn’t have to be complicated.
With my products, I often just do short paragraphs about each section.
Bullet points work well with sales letters.
Including a guarantee can help with sales and you may decide to include one of those glistening guarantee images to help reassure people. That’s your choice – I think that it can scream out “sales letter” too much but that could just be me,
Add content
There’s nothing to say that a PLR product has to be the whole product.
If there are ways that you can add content to it, do so.
Video is an easy way – demo the ideas if it’s that kind of product; add a couple of extra “how to’s” to fill in the inevitable gaps in the product (all products have gaps or things missing).
I’ve used PLR books to add “weight” to products – I’ve added audios and videos depending on the niche.
Recording a 10 minute video or audio doesn’t take long.
Do two or three of those and you’ve added a lot of content and value to the PLR product.
Create a quick start guide
Sometimes less is more.
Especially in the world of PLR ebooks where the author has been paid to write 50 pages and they’re happy to include lots of padding and fluff.
One easy way to subtract content is to add a cheat sheet or quick start guide.
That’s usually easier than re-writing lots of content (especially if the main book isn’t easily editable) and adds a lot of value.
You can add a lot of value to the PLR products you’ve bought by adding a quick start guide.
If you can number the points as well, so much the better.
Odd numbers work better than even ones – so your 7 point quick start guide will be a useful addition to the sales page.
Bundle several PLR products together
Again, you’ll need to check the specific PLR rights to make sure that you’re not breaking any terms but bundling several products together to make a bigger product is often a good way of adding value to the various PLR products you’re selling.
Make sure that the products fit together and aren’t just duplicating the same content several times over.
And, as I mentioned earlier, re-work the titles so that people can’t easily get a comparison just from a quick Google search.
If you want to show a cover for the books, Fiverr is one place to look. Just make sure that any graphics they use are royalty free and allowable to be used.
If you’d like more ideas on using PLR products to make money, check out this useful guide.