PLR

One of the best parts of my misspent youth was having a group of friends (several times), in which you could get a really good drip-feed of jokes and of course, whoever found (or made up) the joke or gag of the day was temporarily Kingpin.

The downside was that if you told a joke that one of the gang had already heard, you got fobbed off as virtually a second class citizen. Vicious, but it's the law of the jungle with adolescent males.

And, you know, it's just as vicious with the search engines these days. Duplicate content isn't particularly appreciated. They want to serve up good, relevant information for their customers. That's not to say you can't have duplicate content, Article Marketing depends upon it! No, it's just that duplicate content isn't particularly appreciated.

The next video isn't completely relevant, in that it deal with the other side of the coin, which is unintentional duplication but it's still interesting, laterally thinking, because it indicates Google's position on duplicate content.

Matt Cutts, Google's unofficial spokesman talking about

duplicate content (1.30-2.30) & syndication (2.30-3.15), June 2007

A Brief History of PLR

The development of Internet Marketing has truly been like the Wild West so I can't be sure that I've got all the facts right but the history of PLR goes something like this...

In the first few years of the new century, the big push was to make your own INFO products and make a fortune. Internet Marketing superstars like Marlon Sanders Armand Morin (who mass-marketed the pop-up) were all the rage.

Unfortunately, very few people actually made any quality products that could address the needs of a great number of people and Niche Marketing, which, by definition, addressed the needs of a small segment of the market came to the fore.

Niche Marketing was certainly championed by marketers like Ken Evoy of Site Build It...but the problem was that content for making multiple Niche sites was difficult to come by.

Internet marketers wanted a system that could be duplicated, in which you could have many sites with lots of products. Thus PLR was born, in which ghostwriters would be paid to create Niche products, which would then be sold to marketers, usually through a famous Internet Marketer's membership site. The members would then sell these INFO products, which often came with graphics and a sales page, as their own work, via Adwords, eBay or wherever.

Then, in 2004, with the introduction and quick acceptance of Google's Adsense contextual website advertising system, a new industry was born, Adsense Article Marketing.

Through specialized Niche Building site-builder software, sites with hundreds or thousands of pages could be created almost instantaneously via Article banks. All you had to do was provide the keywords for the site's architecture and your Adsense dollars would roll in.

Article Site Builder: the craze of 2005

Article Site Builder: software for building article sites

Well, that boom didn't last for long and those internet marketers soon found that their Niche sites were being de-listed almost as quickly as they were being put up. There was a brief respite with the Blog & Ping boom and then mega blog-farms and the like but again, that boom soon went bust.

Eventually webmasters discovered that what both their customers and search engines needed more than anything else was original content. With that, PLR sites really began to take off and there are now numerous sites churning out monthly content (or varying quality) from which you can recieve:

Niche products with graphics & sales pages (for sale as your own or a nom de plume's INFO products) or
Niche products for Adsense or
sets of Niche articles or
sets of unrelated articles

...which are then used in whatever way you think fit. In fact, many canny marketers use the same INFO for several different markets simultaneously.

PLR Sites I Recommend

PLR isn't a large part of my present modus operandi and I'm presently a member of only one PLR site. However, I'm negotiating to gain access to several PLR sites and review them for you in 2008.

The one that I'm a member of is Article Underground, primarily for it's incredible traffic creation system (via SEO). It's well worth you checking out.