Why Using PLR Content to Make Money Online is a Bad Idea

There are many times when I buy make money online products/programs and services where as a bonus, I’ll get tons of PLR (private label rights) content.

This content often includes things like: Information on various niches such as MMO, losing weight and the type of content itself can be strategies, tips, guides and/or other things.

Usually PLR (Private Label Rights) when given out is used for the following reasons:

• To get you to sign up to some email list. The content is then emailed to you in order to provide the subscriber value.

• You can re-use the same content (if permissions is granted which usually happens with PLR), use it on your website or also give it out to subscribers if your aim is to collect an email list.

Most of the time, the main purpose of ever using this approach is to save time instead of writing your own information.

• But can this approach ever be good?
• What about situations where it’s bad?

This is where I’m going to explain my position.

When using PLR can be a good way to make money online:

1) If the content within the PLR you get is up to date and provides good information that can bring not just value but benefits to your subscriber/s, then it’s worth using it. For example:

A few years back, I was involved with a vendor who promoted a weight loss website. Because I was one of her top affiliates (see what affiliate marketing is), she contacted me personally and provided me with some PLR books. One of them was about how to properly read food labels.

I used that eBook and gave it away for free to my subscribers because I saw that it had potential to offer great services to my subscribers. Not only that, but the eBook also contained my affiliate link which meant if the subscriber enjoyed the content and wanted to explore it more, they could click on the link, buy the product which was sold and I would get a commission.

Note: I would only recommend using good and useful PLR content in an email marketing campaign. 

When using PLR content can be useless to make money online with:

1) The first and most obvious is copying the content and putting it on your site. This can be seen as duplicate content and my personal opinion is not worth trying, no matter how good the content is. 

2) If the value is low. This is a bit obvious, but there’s a perfect example of this I’d like to share with you:

I once reviewed a program called Neucopia which offered many eBooks on making money online for $49.95/month.

These all turned out to be PLR content they purchased from other places and decided to re-sell it on their site. There were a number of problems I saw with them:

A) A lot (if not all) of them could be found for free so why would you want to pay for it in the first place?

B) The information within the product was vastly outdated, not to mention confusing because there were many different strategies within each resource provided and someone who is new to online marketing would easily be confused. 

In this example, even though the eBooks did possess a lot of information, the practicality of putting that information to use was highly unlikely due to their outdated information. This is an example of low quality. 

3) If the information within the PLR isn’t something you agree with, I wouldn’t use it. Let’s say I have a PLR book that talks about a weight loss approach I don’t agree with.

Why would I ever want to give that book away to my subscribers if I don’t agree with it? If it’s just for the sake of giving them “something”, then as far as I’m concerned don’t do it. This affects your reputation with your subscribers because if you give away information that says one thing and then you say another, it confuses people and will negatively affect you.

I have a lot of PLR eBooks filled with tons of weight loss and make money online content which I don’t even bother using. I’ve even erased a lot of them because I don’t agree with the information they provide. 

My final thoughts on PLR:

In my personal view, PLR should only be used in your online marketing campaigns if and only if it has great content (that you agree with) and will be used for email marketing purposes. Should it ever be sold? In my opinion no, not if you received the information for free at least.

As for buying PLR, I am not a fan of that because in in my experience doing business online, it’s much better to provide your own content to people. If for instance, you’re aiming to collect an email list and want to give people some sort of guide, I would forget about finding the best PLR content and just write your own eBook. It’s really not that difficult.

It doesn’t have to be long, but enough to provide the right information to people that you want them to know and give them good reason to sign up. I’ve written eBooks that have been up to 30 pages long and given them away on previous email marketing campaigns I’ve had and it’s kept people subscribed to my list. It obviously takes more work initially, but I personally prefer to create my own content.

Plus if there’s more things to share with my subscribers, I’d rather it be my own unique work. That will be a whole lot easier to create and share rather than look for PLR content that sticks to the topic you want to provide your subscribers. I want their to be consistency with the information I provide my visitors/subscribers and if the PLR content I find doesn’t do that, then I won’t ever use it.

To date, the only PLR content I’ve shared is the one I mentioned above with the weight loss guide on reading food labels. Aside from that, everything else I’ve come across, I’ve deemed not necessary to share. The rest as I said I’ve written myself.