Every marketer faces the challenge of producing enough content to engage their market, maintain their attention, and keep them primed with information. Take a look at these results from the Content Marketing Institute’s survey of B2B marketers from 2012:
Producing enough content is now the biggest challenge across B2B marketers, at 64 percent, as compared to producing the kind of content that engages, which was the top challenge reported in last year’s study.
While there certainly are marketers who are content machines, most of us need a little helping hand sometimes.
That’s where Private Label Rights content comes in.
Private Label Rights, or PLR for short, is content that is already created for you. It’s not exclusive, since it’s sold to others as well, but you can do whatever you want with it. Edit, cut up, rewrite, reorganize, mix and match, add to, or even leave it as-is.
In the right hands, PLR can be a powerful tool for creating unique, engaging content.
The trick is to think beyond the typical written word. Think beyond the traditional article, blog post, or email. PLR is the clay you’ll use to mold your own unique content artwork.
The word to focus on here is “quality”. And I don’t just mean something that was written by a native English speaker and uses proper grammar. A top-notch PLR product is also well-researched, interesting to read, informative, and preferably nicely formatted as well.
Now you have your raw material to work with.
You can start with a simple reorganization and rewrite of the article. That will give you a base to work from. Lynn gave a terrific step-by-step demo of how she rewrote a PLR article to be completely unique in her post PLR Article Rewrite Dissected and Exposed
Now let’s take it to the next step and start repurposing your content. Here are just 7 of the ways you can use that single article to create something valuable for your readers.
People love any type of tool that will make their lives easier, save them time, or help them put an idea into action. Any PLR you buy that has a learning or step-by-step aspect is going to be perfect for creating accompanying tools.
1. Worksheets
Worksheets give people a place to write down notes, answer questions, create categorized to-do’s, or just organize their thoughts on a specific topic. People read what you’ve written and then use the worksheet to decide what they’ll do with the content they’ve just consumed. The worksheets help them “process” that content and formulate an implementation plan.
Example:
Try taking an article that already has “steps” involved or is a “how to”. For example, Lynn’s article on How to Write a Product Review has 7 elements that can easily be broken down into a 7-part worksheet for crafting your product review.
Write each one of those steps as a one sentence instruction or question in a new document - Step 1: Will you use images and/or video? Where will you get them from?, Step 2: Write the detailed features and benefits of the product below, Step 3: Who is the target market?, etc. You can even break up each section into sub-steps if there’s a lot of detailed involved, like in Lynn’s article.
Then just add space under each step for people to write in their answers.
You can watch a brief tutorial where I walked through the live process of creating a worksheet over on my site at Repurposing PLR: How to Create Worksheets from PLR Articles. Here’s the worksheet that I created:
Pro Tip: Give people a brief example of an answer relevant to your market. Then leave plenty of space for their own answers.
2. Checklists
Checklists are a great complement to any article that contains guidelines, tips, criteria and best practices. It’s also helpful for people who need to follow a very specific process where all steps need to be covered.
Example:
If you have an article on how to set up a blog, you can create a checklist that gives people a list of all the steps along with little checkboxes to tick off after they’ve completed each one. They can even give that to an assistant to make sure that person is completing all the necessary steps, so you can be assured it’s done right.
If we take the example of Lynn’s article on writing a product review, that could easily be repurposed into a checklist of all the elements you need to include in your review. Then your reader can print out and put that checklist next to them as they write their review, checking off each box as they go.
Here’s what that checklist might look like:
Pro Tip: Keep it to one page if you can. Something that can be posted next to your computer and checked at a glance will be used more than a 5-page document.
3. Templates
Lay out the content into a reusable planning template or product template. This could be an action planning template for each part of a marketing campaign, an article template, a spreadsheet for planning emails, or any other document that you might use over and over again.
Example:
Say you have a PLR article that talks about planning out your blog posts ahead of time. You can create an editorial calendar template that gives spaces for your reader to fill in all the information you’ve told them they need, and which can be reused each month. Here’s an example from one of my own PLR packs on blogging:
Pro Tip: You can find PLR, such as reports and squeeze pages, that are already set up as a finished product. Use those as templates for your own content.
Visuals are the most frequently and widely shared content on the internet. It's the most likely to go viral and it stands out among all the noisy text and posts that batter people's eyes.
4. Mindmaps
Put an outline of the key sections and points of the article into a mindmap format. You can use a free software, like Freemind on a PC. My favorite tool for mindmapping is iThoughtsHD, an app for iPads. It has the benefit of being able to move things around with your finger, and you can export it to other programs and formats.
Example:
I already provide articles in outline format as a resource in my PLR packs, but you can easily look through any article for the key points and topics. The center node is the title of the article, each branch is a section or paragraph topic, and the sub-branches are your key points. Take a look at the mindmap I created from this article that you’re reading now:
Pro Tip 1: You can also use a mindmap to create a video by doing a screencast and talking through each branch as you expand and hide them.
5. Word Art
Take keywords from your article and plug them into a word art generator like Tagxedo or Wordle. With most of these tools, you can just type up a list of words, using Notepad or another text editor. Skim through your article and pick and choose as many words as possible that are related to the topic. The more words you have, the smaller they will appear in your image, but the better defined the shape will be.
Example:
Check out the one I did based on one of Lynn's articles on How to Start an Internet Business
Pro Tip: You can also put a url into a lot of these word art tools. It will generate the Word Cloud for you and you just pick your colors and shape.
6.. Quotes on Images
Take one great tip from the article and put it on an image or colored/textured background. Do that with a whole bunch of tips and you have viral content to share that's far more interesting than a snippet of text.
Example:
Here’s one I created by paraphrasing a sentence from some PLR for entrepreneurs. I used the free tool Quozio, picked an image and typed in my sentence as a quote. I then saved the image to my computer so that I could edit it a little further using Snagit.
Pro Tip: You can create these sorts of images just as quickly by using free royalty-free images and a free image editing tool like Gimp.
7. Infographics
Everyone loves a good infographic and you can simply take the key points from the article, grab some cute graphics, and use that content to create a graphic to post on your blog and share everywhere. You can use one of the free infographic creators, like Visua.ly or Piktochart, if you like to play around with that sort of thing. Or save yourself some time and pay someone on Fiverr.com to create one. You give them the text and a few directions, and they create it
Example:
I used one of my own PLR articles for this infographic, which was created by someone I found on Fiverr.
Pro Tip: Less is more when it comes to infographics. Summarize your text into no more than one sentence or a couple bullet points per section. And if you can find a couple statistics to add, all the better.
PLR can form the basis of almost any piece of content you want to create. Someone else has done the basic research and writing for you. And it’s up to you to mold and repurpose it multiple ways, spreading your message far and wide, reaching as many people as possible.
Now it’s your turn to try out some of these ideas. And to help you get started I’ve put together a big pack of free PLR that you can grab here:
FREE Internet Marketing PLR Mega Pack
What are some creative ways have you used PLR? Please share!
About the Author:
Sharyn Sheldon is an instructional designer who spent nearly 20 years consulting to Fortune 500 companies before moving online full-time. Now she provides professionally written PLR for savvy marketers and coaches who know the value of quality content. As always, Sharyn’s products focus on learning and results, so her customers can be the expert without spending all their time creating content.
Find more of Sharyn’s PLR and tips for using it at Business Content PLR. And, as a special offer just for Clicknewz readers, you can get 25% Off your first purchase with Coupon Code LYNNROCKS.
