You've probably heard that one of the best ways to get free traffic to a website, as well as build an image as an expert, is by writing and publishing articles relevant to your product or service. This is known as article marketing.
Well, you agree that this sounds like a great idea, but you see problems with that.
Maybe you don't think you can write very well, your time is limited, or you just don't think you can come up with enough articles, and it does generally take more than just one, for your article marketing efforts to really be effective.
That's when you probably want to look at using PLR articles.
WHAT DOES PLR STAND FOR?
In this context, it stands for "Public Label Rights".
Sounds big, but it just means you can acquire the right to use a PLR article, or series of them, almost any way you wish.
Depending on the source, you may be able to use them exactly as written and claim you wrote them (not a good idea), or you may be limited to only using them in certain ways. If you acquire PLR articles, make sure you understand how they may be used.
Now, I have been using article marketing, writing my own articles on a wide range of subjects, for years, but I discovered two facts I could not change:
1. There was only one of me
2. I didn't know everything
So, I have been using PLR articles for years.
Some of the first, and best, articles I used came from a guy named Stefan who ran a website called "Niche Content". In fact, I still have articles from Stefan that I haven't even used yet. I liked his articles because most were professionally written, came with images and keyword analysis, and he only sold limitd numbers of each article.
More about that last point later.
I don't know if it's still run by Stefan, but Niche Content is still around and still has great products.
I paid for some articles from other sites, most of which are out of business, but, eventually, I got tired of paying for PLR articles.
It was for that reason that one day I typed, "free PLR articles" into a search box and hit the "enter" key.
Voila!
Tons of free PLR articles on just about every topic under the Sun!
However, whether the PLR articles you use are free or purchased, you cannot just cut-and-paste them into a website or blog and expect to start seeing results.
This is because of an issue which most search engines don't like...duplicate content...also known as "content spam".
The more sophisticated search engines such as Google, not only will probably penalize sites using duplicate content, but may even ignore your site in searches.
Another problem, also dealing with the duplicate content issue, is that most high-quality article directory sites won't accept duplicate content either.
Any way you look at it, while free PLR articles are of value, you are going to have to re-write them in order to use them. Even though my old friend, Stefan, limited the number of copies he sold of each set of articles, there were still several of them out there, so even HIS articles needed to be re-written.
ARTICLE SPINNERS
Some people, still hoping to get out of work, use an article spinners to re-write their free PLR articles.
What is an article spinner?
It is a software application which takes a given article and creates options, so that you can choose different wording to make the article different enough to get past the "duplicate content" issue.
The two major problems with article spinners are that the bad ones create crap, and the good ones cost money...which is why you're using free content in the first place. Oh yeah...sometimes the good article spinners create crap too.
One other problem with purchased or free content run through an article spinner: The software can only do so much, so if there are a lot of the same articles being run through the same spinners, the output may still be close enough to all the other spun articles out there to still be recognized as duplicate content. Additionally, since article spinners usually only produce possible word changes, the basic content of the article does not change very much.
THE SOLUTION
You probably aren't going to like this, but, to get the most mileage out of free PLR articles, or purchased ones, for that matter, is to re-write them as completely as possible. You probably don't need to do a word-for-word re-write, but it will have to be enough to make Google and other search engines sit up and think they have uncovered fresh content.
There you go: Using free PLR articles effectively just depends on re-writing them. In fact, if you can produce enough variation, you can re-write and use them over and over.
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