Copyright symbol, red. Image via Wikipedia

Private label rights, or PLR, is what they call it when you can do anything you want with the information item you’ve just acquired.

Let’s say you’re just read something terrific in a book under copyright and would like to post it on your blog. You can quote it, or you can write about it. But you can’t just copy it and say it’s yours.

Without going through the various levels of copyright — which is a topic for a book and not a blog post — with PLR, you can copy it, sell it, give it away, claim that you wrote it (if you really want to).

The offsetting truth about PLR is that you’re never going to read a PLR article and think, “That’s terrific! I want to post it on my blog.”

The worst PLR articles are incomprehensible blather. The best are so generic as to hardly say anything.

Many people go to France every year. There are many cities in France. There are many interesting sites in France. If you want to go to France, you will probably go by plane or train or car. Here are some ways to travel to France.

OK. It’s an exaggeration, but not by much. You get the idea. A few lines of that, and I’m nodding off, and I’m supposed to be the writer.

That’s what I hate about PLR.

But that’s not the best way to use it. The other right you get with PLR is to rewrite it in any way you please and do whatever you want with it.

If that’s what you’ve got in mind, then a library of PLR articles can be a gold mine. Let’s say you really do want to write an article about France. Open that lump of vanilla and start rewriting it into something better. Pretty soon, you’ve wandered off into the Louvre or Notre Dame or Provence and you’ve got an article that’s got spice and character. It really is you. You can close the PLR now, because it’s done its job. Open it again at another time, and it might take you off in a different direction.

You can’t do that with a really good piece of writing because its character lingers after you’ve rewritten it. It’s too much itself, and plagiarism hovers in its perfectly turned phrases.

PLR is so generic that it’s everybody, which means that it’s nobody (there’s a marketing lesson there, too, but that’s for another post). And that’s its gift to the writer in search of a topic.

And if you sign up for my list on the right side of this page, I’ll send you a zip file of 6,350 good (see above for definition of “good” as it applies to PLR) PLR articles. Yours to rewrite, give away, or post directly to your blog (if you dare).

Related articles by Zemanta

• Using PLR in a Pinch (bloggingtips.com)

This entry was posted on July 30, 2010 at 11:00 am. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

Posted in Article Marketing Writing craft by Jan Bear 3 Comments