Ditch the PLR – You can Create Great Blog Content

Ditch the PLR, You can Create Great Blog Content

By David Eedle |

Ask any writer and they’ll tell you the worst moment producing any form of written words is sitting in front of the computer with a blank Word document open, fingers hovering over the keyboard, waiting for the stream of consciousness to well up and transform random synapse formations into a valid sentence of English. Vladimir Nabakov, the author of the infamous and oft-banned Lolita, stated much more eloquently that :

The pages are still blank, but there is a miraculous feeling of the words being there, written in invisible ink and clamouring to become visible

Gene Fowler, an American screenwriter last century famously suggested:

Writing is easy. All you do is stare at a blank sheet of paper until drops of blood form on your forehead.

I wish I felt a little more ‘miraculous ‘some days when time comes to write.

If you are planning to start a blog, or wondering how to blog, or have already taken the plunge and signed up a Blogger, TypePad or WordPress account, you’ll have experienced the momentary frisson as your ideas swirl around and you try, sometimes in vain, to reach up into the cloud of phrases and start pulling them onto the page in some semblance of order.

Here's me hard at work writing this post, photo courtesy of our eldest daughter Clea.

Here's me hard at work writing this very post, photo courtesy of our eldest daughter Clea. Excuse the clutter.

It’s not difficult top comprehend why writing blog or website content can seem confronting, particularly if you do not have a background as a wordsmith, or a Masters Degree in writing from college. If you are not used to writing each day (more on the discipline of writing another day), and do not have cause to write on a regular basis, doing so is understandably a challenge.

I suspect this is why PLR (private label rights) articles have become so popular in recent times. PLR articles are essentially blog articles written by others that you can buy to post on your website. They normally come packaged in bundles around themes, and there are a bunch of online services where you can subscribe to receive a steady stream of new articles.

The PLR pitch is easily digested – a regular feed of posts for your blog at a low price. Seems simple. But you need to think through the implications. A PLR package can be purchased and used by a large number of people – we love the PLR package merchants who promise, in exchange of course for a premium fee, to limit the number of people who can buy that package, to say 200. If you are one of the purchasers, that means you have 199 competitors.

Our favourite twist is that even the PLR suppliers acknowledge you’ll need to rewrite their articles so as to have completely unique content on your web site. And hey presto, guess what, there’s software that will scan your article and suggest a bunch of synonyms to substitute into the text so as to create the impression to search engines that your articles are different to everyone else’s. This of course ignores the extremely likely possibility that other web site operators are doing exactly the same thing, using the same software (it’s sold via links from the PLR operators’ web sites).

I actually think that, irrespective of the technology, or even manual re-writing, you’re going to be hard pressed to create a group of words that are actually unique given the sheer volume of words available online today. Ask any SEO specialist and they’ll tell you it isn’t the quantity or uniqueness that matters, what’s most important is incorporating search phrases – groups of words that people are searching for online. That is if you are wanting to ensure your post is found by people.

For a lighter hearted view, try reading 101 Things to do with PLR Articles (Or what to do with recycled content). My personal favourite?

Use them for lyrics to a whacky new song. (It’s funny, but some authors are poets – and they don’t even know it. Look for accidental rhymes and use them to make the latest hit. In a PLR article about Disneyland, we found “Disneylands Discover the Magic Tour…. may be the most popular of the four.” It’s not Nirvana, but it’s a start…)

Our advice is to ditch the PLR, because you can create great blog content yourself. We’ve published literally hundreds of thousands of articles through our internet publishing ventures. The content type has ranged from hard news to reviews, personal profiles, interviews, events and jobs information – you name it, we’ve probably published it.

The key realisation you need to come to is that you are not a writer, you are an EDITOR/writer. By which I mean you have to stop thinking like you are a word slave, and consider yourself more like the editor of your blog. That’s not to say you won’t be writing, you will. But stop thinking you have to write everything.

When we started Arts Hub in 2000 there was a staff of two – myself and Fiona. By the time we sold the business we had an in-house writing team of some five or six, plus 30+ sub-contractors, plus untold unpaid contributors, some regular others sporadic. But for a while there at the beginning we were the writing team, and that meant we needed to be pretty creative when it came to producing our content.

After nearly ten years in the online content business, here’s our top four sources of content that we’ve found to be ultra reliable – and completely achievable for a one-person blogger:

1. Those who want you to publish them

Recruiting guest post writers always ranks high on the list of advice from the sage and wise experts from the better quality blogs. It means tapping into your networks, and inviting people to write articles for your blog. You may be surprised who says yes. Their motivation will be varied, but so many people have something to say. Just make sure you are specific with them about your topic and audience.

2. Those who need you to publish them

One of the surprises for us at Arts Hub was the number of submissions each week from academics who wanted us to publish their articles. Then we remembered that many colleges judge the performance of their academics on the number of articles published each year. As unsolicited contributions their quality varied, but there were some pearls and we happily published the pieces.

3. Those who’d like you to publish them

Our problem at Arts Hub after a few months of operation was not a shortage of content, rather a surplus. Because once it became clear we were becoming the journal of record for our industry we wound up on every single publicists’ fax machine speed dial. Not a day went by without dozens of press releases arriving. If you are focussing your blog on a particular industry, or niche, try thinking like a media outlet, and ask relevant industry associations and other organizations to add your to their press release distribution list. If the press release is well written, and consistent with your blog’s theme and style, you have the basis of post right there in your hand.

4. YOU

OK, I’m not copping out – because the point has to be made. It doesn’t matter how much content your source for your blog from third parties, the best content comes from you. And that means you must knuckle down, tackle the blank page monster, and write. Guess what? Writing well is the same as becoming proficient in most common activities. You need to learn the rules and techniques, and practice. The more you write, the more you research good writing methods, the better a writer you will be.

There’s an enormous amount of content online. Some is fantastic. Some is awful. Most is somewhere in between. If you devote some time and energy to developing your writing talents – and, let’s be blunt, you have at least a modicum of latent ability – you can lift your blog’s content into the fantastic category.

So please, although daunting a prospect as it might seem, give the PLR merchants the flick, and start put keyboard to screen today.

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