PLR Articles: Why Use Private Label Content
by Linda Van Fleet

One of the fastest and least expensive ways to add content to your site is to find good quality, Private Label Rights articles, aka PLR articles. You need hundreds of articles if you are going to build an authority site.

Not only do you need material for your main website, you will also need content for the feeder sites such as your blogs, ezine directories and autoresponders.Content is still king.

Most people think you have only two choices when creating content for their websites: do all the time-consuming, gut wrenching research and pound out those articles day in and day out.

Or, hire someone else to do it for you.

If you have the time and simply cannot stand the thoughts of outsourcing your content creation to someone else, then by all means, pull out your research books and get cracking. All it takes is time and talent to churn out an article every hour. If you work at it eight hours a day you could possibly write 8 - 10 articles.In five days that would be 40 or 50 original articles you could post on your network of sites.

The other option might be more up your alley: outsourcing your content to article writers. You can join a site such as Need-an-Article.com and pay as little as $5.25 per article to get your articles written.The same 40 - 50 articles would cost you a mere $210 - $276 per week.

You can also search for your own writers at any of the freelancing sites such as getafreelancer or elance. You can actually find people to write for as little as $1.00 per article; however, the quality is, in a word, crappy. If that's what you choose to do you have now lowered your cost to $40 - $50 per week for 40 - 50 articles. In my opinion the headache is not worth the savings. Believe me when I tell you that outsourcing your content is stressful, to say the least.

The best choice is neither of the above. There are places where you can get quality, well-written, keyword rich private label articles for a fraction of the cost of hiring it done. These are private label membership sites that limit their memberships to a certain number and, exchange for a low monthly fee, provide you with 200 - 300 (or more) articles every month. The price you are now paying for articles is reduced to 15 cents to 25 cents each! What a deal!

The way the sites keep their membership price low is to spread their content across several niche topics to meet the needs of all the members. This is a drawback of article membership sites as in any given month you might not have sufficient content to work with. For example, in one month you may get article topics in candle making, personal loans, wedding favors or work at home moms.Your niche might be weight loss so you might not benefit at all from the articles for that month.

Sometimes people will join a PLR membership site, take a look at the content provided that month and cancel their membership right away because their niche isn't covered. It might seem like a waste of money to you but you should stick around awhile to make sure the site is right for you. It takes about 3 months to find out the quality and context of the content. Also, most PLR providers have an option whereby members may suggest article content subjects.

If you are really serious about providing fresh content to your visitors and getting your name out there with article marketing then you should join more than one Private Label Rights article site. Why? Because you may not get the niche articles you need by belonging to only one site.

By belonging to 2 or three private label articles membership sites you have a much better chance of getting the articles in your niche market.Since the prices for private label memberships range from $30 - $100 per month, in comparison to the other two choices (hiring a ghostwriter at a place such as NAA or hiring a freelancer) you are still getting a tremendous bargain.

Another option is to search for PLR sites that provide niche specific articles. There are several such sites popping up and you should be able to find one in your niche if it isn't too narrow.

How to Use the PLR Articles without Duplicate Content Penalties

PLR content sites keep their membership prices low by providing the same articles to many people. If you join a site that says they limit their membership to 500 people, then know that 500 people are getting the same articles you are getting. That's why it is best to join sites that have the lowest membership limitation possible even if it does cost a little more. However, even the lowest membership sites usually have 200+ members who are getting identical material.

The only way to avoid the duplicate content penalty that search engines will slap on you is to rewrite the articles.

This is not as hard as it sounds, and in fact, is much easier than writing your own articles from scratch. You can do it in Word by using the Thesaurus and by adding or rearranging sentences.

There are also tools that make the project even easier. One such tool is a free tool called the Jet Spinner. Using tokens to spin the content, Jet Spinner will spit out an article that can be as much as 70% different than the original.

At minimum you should change the article title and add introduction/closing paragraphs. You can also incorporate RSS feeds into your page, thus making the article unique to the eyes of the search engine.

I use a program called Content Composer to make my articles unique. It is a great tool, but comes with a price tag so you might want to choose one of the free methods to get started.

You should strive to make your articles at least 30% original. The folks who created the Content Composer also have a great free tool called Content Checkup that will show you the percentage of change of your rewritten article. I love this tool and use it all the time.

Another option is a free tool called Dupe Free Pro that will measure the difference in your spun article but it is a bit more difficult to use than the Content Checkup tool mentioned above. In fact, if you don't have the settings right DupeFreePro will fool you into thinking your content is 100% unique. However, if you will tweak the settings it is a super tool that I have used a lot. It has a few unique features that Content Checkup does not have and these may appeal to you.

The bottom line is that you need to do something to make those private label articles uniquely yours. Strive for a minimum of 30% uniqueness, but if you really want to call the article yours and put your name on it, it should be at least 70% unique in my opinion.