It's been quite a long time since my last post, but here I am, I'm still alive. I needed a while to rethink all my strategies trying to grow my (growing) online business because I realized how difficult is to create quality content. It's much more time consuming than I estimated.
It's all about quality content after all. If you want people to come to you (and leave you some bucks in the process :) ), if you choose the product creation route, you definitely need quality content, whether it's about eBooks, tutorials, courses, videos, software or any other kind of creations.
Of course the ultimate goal must be to turn this creation of yours into a marketable product, but this is another discussion, maybe for my next post.
There are basically two ways to create content
- By frying your own brains and creating your own content from scratch, and
- By using PLR content and branding it as your own.
Let's explore each one of them through some showcases.
Creating your own content
Your own creation is what adds value... to the world ultimately.
Creating your own content requires hard work, it's true, but if you are indeed passionate about what you are doing and feel like it's your second nature, the work becomes extremely enjoyable and rewarding.
Now I'd like to talk a little bit about my 13 years old son, Vlad, who has his own YouTube channel with 100% his own productions, including video tutorials on creating Minecraft contraptions and CGI animations. Only in a couple months he raised his audience to nearly 100 subscribers and one of his video generated more than 3000 views just in a couple weeks, without using any promotion techniques whatsoever, just his own hard work. When you are passionate about something, and most importantly, think out of the box, everything is possible.
If you are curious about it, you can visit his channel here: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC2Ui357HOQ0yOoSnywIDgNw
Speaking about passion: Last year I started to work on another product that I never got to finish. It's not that it was bad, but I got bored. It wasn't really my thing and in addition I had almost no experience at that time. So after months of hard work creating content in video and written form I kinda abandoned it for now. It was quite clear that I cannot get it done in a reasonable time-span.
What happened, though? Well, despite my hope that this product could be my ticket to the Big Boys Club, over time I lost passion, and this should be self explanatory.
This was my first attempt to create a product to be promoted within Partnership to Success program.
This was last year, but now I've got another beast to work on. I just finished coding a cool software for marketers and I'm now ready for the marketing part. It took me much longer than estimated, but the thing is that I enjoyed very much working on this project.
I'll reveal the details in one of my future posts, but for now I can say that it's about connecting services used by marketers in their every day business.
Whilst my job is in the IT, I never worked in software development, although coding is one of my hobbies and I want to keep it that way. A hobby getting to be part of your own business is an important ingredient of a success story. A lucrative passion, how cool is that?
But how about PLR?
As its name says, PLR or Private Label Rights is content distributed to many people having the right to re-brand it as their own. At first sight it seems pretty cool to take ready made content and pretend to be yours. That way, the creation part is reduced to a minimum.
Many marketers are using PLR content to create their own products quickly and easy.
BUT...
There's always a "but" when it comes to easy ways. If you decide to use PLR it has to be made in a wise manner. Don't just take the original content, change the name and graphics and voila. It won't go too far like this because many other people are promoting the exact same content under different names.
In my opinion, if you decide to take the PLR route, you have to use it as a resource, not as a source, meaning that you should consider revising and improving existing private label content before distributing it under your own brand.
Not all PLR are equal
People tend to use PLR acronym in a generic sense, but there is more to say about it. Under this acronym there are different types of resale rights (or resell rights maybe?). Let's examine each of them:
Resale Rights (RR) - besides the product itself you generally receive a mini-site so you could start selling it right away from your own domain.
Master Resale Rights (MRR) - in addition to selling the product you have the right to sell the rights as well, maybe with a slightly higher price.
Private Label Rights (PLR) - this type of right enables you to edit and customize the product in many ways.
Public Domain Content - this is very similar to PLR and basically gives you the right to re-work the original content to create an entirely new product.
So, what's the solution to increase productivity?
I ask myself this question every time I work on something that spans more than a couple months and fail to foresee the end. Now I think that I shouldn't totally give up on creating my own content, but just use PLR sources as an inspiration, just to get out of the writers block...
PS: What do you think? Which method is more suitable for product creation in your niche, your own content or PLR content? Or a little bit of both? I am anxious to hear your opinion.
Best,
Vladimir
This post was first published on my own blog at this address: https://marketingwithvladimir.com/your-own-content-vs-plr-content/