The Truth About PLR Articles.

When you run a website (or several), there is one problem that you are sure to run in to.  That is the need to supply new, fresh content on a regular basis.  That can be very difficult to do, especially when you work on your websites in the evening after spending a long day working a regular job.  That’s why PLR articles seem so appealing.

For those of you who don’t know, PLR stands for “Private Label Rights.”  Quite simply, PLR articles are articles that you purchase the rights to use without having to credit the author.  You can simply put the articles on your website, blog or in your e-book.  Most of the time, you can even list yourself as the author as long as you don’t claim the copyright.  It sounds good, doesn’t it.  Well, it can be under the right circumstances, but, improperly used, it can be disastrous.

Let’s consider this example.  Say you operate a website on computing and you purchase the rights to use an article called, “Getting the most out of your operating system.”  It’s a great article.  It’s keyword rich and packed full of useful information.  You’re sure that your readers are going to love it and that the search engines will just gobble it up.  With that in mind, you post it to your blog.

Now, let us assume that the search engines do index your article and it even gets good marks on Google.  That’s great.  Or is it?  Let’s continue on with the example.  Imagine that a potential customer is searching the web for advice on operating systems and they see your site’s listing.  There’s the article with your byline.  It sure does look impressive, but there’s trouble.  A few lines down, there is another site with the same article, but someone else is claiming the byline.  It gets even worse.  There’s another site with the same article down further still.  The potential customer is now curious and clicks a few pages on the search engine and finds several more pages with this article, all with different authors.  Suddenly, this article that was supposed to make your site look good has done the exact opposite.  Your credibility is shot!

How can you avoid this?  It’s simple.  You can write your own articles or you can hire someone to write exclusively for you.  If you simply must use PLR content, get it from quality sources that don’t resell the same article hundreds of times.  Of course, this last option can get rather expensive and it’s tough to convince yourself to pay $20-30 or more for one article when there are websites offering hundreds of PLR articles for pennies each.  Just remember the old saying that you get what you pay for.

Another thing to avoid are sites that promise large quantities of new PLR articles on a monthly basis for a small fee ($25 or so).  Usually these sites rely on other members or low-end paid writers to create their content.  The result is that you end up with articles that are either written by novices who are simply writing editorial content with no real informative value or you get articles written by people to whom English is a second (third, fourth, fifth) language.  Either way, you’re usually wasting your money.

Also, don’t fall for tricks that some sites use where they offer to rebate your membership fee if you write an article or two a month for them to distribute to other members.  Sure, many of these sites are honest, but, honest or not, this is not in your best interest.  Many of these sites will make your article available to their membership right away and then later decide that the article was somehow not acceptable so that they can avoid paying you.  Whether these site owners do this intentionally or by oversight, the results are the same.  You end up with articles being used that bring you no benefit.  You don’t get any publicity and you still have to pay your monthly dues at the PLR site.

A much better outlet for your writing talents would be to write articles and submit them to article directories such as ezinearticles.com.  At least webmaster who get your articles there agree to leave your byline and resource box attached.  By the way, a “resource box” is a box at the end of the article that tells about you and gives a link to your site.  You’re still not getting paid for the article, but at least you’re getting some publicity.  Best of all, most of these article directories cost little or nothing to join.

So you see, when it comes to PLR articles on your website, the best advice is to use them very sparingly, if not avoid them totally.  I know of no hugely successful webmasters who rely on PLR content to fill-out their sites.  Neither should you.