How To Use Private Label Content

By: Art Luff

Private Label Content has become more popular as people rush to fill their websites with high-quality information. Sure, you can have articles written by freelance writers at sites like Elance or Rentacoder, but it can get pretty expensive. For those who aren't making much via AdSense or affiliate sales, Private Label Content (PLC) provides a welcome alternative.

PLC is nothing more than articles, e-books and manuals that are free for subscribers to use as they wish. There are generally a few rules you must adhere to, you cannot claim copyright to PLC, or submit it to article sites, unless you change the content significantly. (Interpret 'significantly' as 'unrecognizable as the original article'.) The cost of membership varies, but typically ranges from around $24 to $67 a month. For this you might receive anywhere from 150 to 300 articles per month. There is usually a membership cap (from 150 to 400 members) to ensure that the same content won't appear on sites all over the Internet. Some sites also offer graphics (e-book covers and site header graphics) and even ready-made sales letters.

To use PLC to the best advantage, you need to be aware of a few things.

1. Look at it from Google's Perspective.

Google Looks For and Provides RELEVANT, USEFUL and UNIQUE content that can be found easily by those
searching for it. It makes sense then, that Google frowns upon seeing the same articles, e-books and manuals
repeated thousands of times all over the web. That's why using content from Article Directories is a problem - since this is an Easy way for webmasters to fill their sites with content, the same articles are seen everywhere.

A Word to the Wise for the user of Private Label Content: Do NOT be tempted to use these articles for your website(s) without doing a substantial re-write. Why? Because if you don't, you're not offering UNIQUE information to your visitors. Even if your PLC membership site has put a cap on its membership, you don't want to offer the same articles that could be found on 200 other websites.

2. Using PLC Articles Effectively

PLC articles are commonly used to provide useful, interesting and unique content for websites. There are other uses, however. Think about what you need. Ebooks and Training Manuals made up of PLC Articles are an extremely effective way to get people to subscribe to your ezine/newsletter.

Creating e-courses from 6 to 52 articles - gives you an excellent reason to stay in touch with your clients. If your a blogger, Posting PLC Articles relevant to your niche, with a link back to your site is another way
to gain subscribers as well as improve you SEO and page rank.

For more on blogging you can visit blogger.com and have your own blog set up in 5 minutes or less and it's totally free..

3. Re-Writing Your PLC Articles

Change the articles title. If your articles are keyword-optimized, keep the keyword in the title - and be creative about the words that surround it. If your article is based on the keyword "RSS Feed", your title might be "How To Use RSS Feed" or "RSS Feed and Your Website Traffic" and so on.

Re-write the opening paragraph. Make sure that your keyword appears once. Looking at the rest of the paragraph.
Think about how to say the same thing in a different way. Use synonyms - use your thesaurus - or change the tone.
Try a more casual approach, Your readership will appreciate this approach. You may just want to re-write a different introduction altogether.

Working through the article. Mix it up. Add a sentence here; subtract one there. Re-arrange the facts. Add some new points. Make a long article into two.Making sure each article seems complete in itself.

Rewrite the ending. Think about what you want the reader to do. Is this a good place to put your own affiliate link, or write a lead-in to your own product or services?

4. Turn Two Articles Into One

Take advantage of PLC articles that seem low on inspiration and combine it with another article of the same topic to create a better feel.

5. Be Creative.

Most PLC articles are presented in batches relevant to one niche. For example, you might find that over the course of a month you get 20 articles on golf, 20 on cell phones, 20 on credit cards and 20 on travel. Let's say that you are busy building a golf site. It might seem at first glance that only 20 of the 80 articles are relevant to your needs.

Not so! Golf vacations, for example, are very popular. Could any of your travel articles be massaged to fit the theme of golf vacations? It's very likely that they could. And what about communication while you travel - or while you play golf? Does the golfer need a new cell phone that will easily adapt to overseas communications? How will the golfer pay for a new set of clubs or a golf vacation? Might he need to explore credit card options?

You see how it's done. Be creative in your use of Private Label Content, and you will definitely get your
money's worth.