Private Label Products: What You Really Need to Know

If you are in any way involved in web marketing, you will be aware of the avalanche of offerings of what are called ‘Private Label Products’on the Internet today.

In a nutshell, a private label product is one that, after you purchase it, gives the rights for  you to rebrand it, edit it, change it and refurbish it to become your own. So far as anyone else knows, you become the author and creator – the original author waives any copyright.

You should, of course, check the terms of any private label product licence, because they do vary in what they let you do, but generally products that give you private label rights, or PLR, can be branded as your own. And herein lies the problem.

If everyone who purchases say, a particular private label ebook, then just inserts their name as author, without making any other changes, there’s likely to be a whole bunch of the same product on the internet, with many different people claiming to be authors. It would be like many different people all claiming to have written ‘Romeo and Juliet’ leaving poor old Bill Shakespeare lost in the yelling crowd. Nobody would know who actually wrote it, but everybody claiming to be the author would be under a cloud.

Private label products are indeed a valuable investment if you are looking to create your own product, but you do need to do some work yourself, rather than just changing the author’s name to your own.

Here are some guidelines to how you can make any private label product uniquely yours.

(1)   Private label products normally come with a word or other text file that you can actually edit. So, you can change the content however you want. Spending a little time reading through the text and changing it to suit your style and ideas, will make the product specially yours.

(2)   They say you shouldn’t judge a book by its cover, but not so with private label products. The cover of an ebook, for example, is very distinctive, and, unless you edit the graphic covers you usually get with PLR deals, there are likely to be a lot of the same book appearing under a lot of different names. You should substantially change the cover of a PLR book so that your version is unique among the crowd.

(3)   With private label articles and the huge popularity of Adsense, too many people have simply cut and paste their PLR articles onto a web site, plastered it with Google Adsense blocks, and published online. So much so, that many people are getting what’s called the ‘Google Slap’ and having their accounts removed. Google hates duplicate content and will hit you hard if you just copy and paste PLR articles. You need to edit each article to make it uniquely different. Yes, there’s no such thing as a free lunch, especially with private label products.

(4)   With private label ebooks, another method of making them your own product is to cut them up into individual chapters and use these in an autoresponder training series for your newsletter subscribers. Conversely, you could also gather some private label articles on a similar subject, and edit them together to make your own unique ebook. Just create your own cover, sales page, etc and you have a new product of your own to put to the market.

(5)   There are examples of private label software and even private label videos, but these all have the same requirements. You need to change them, edit them, add to them and adapt them so that they are unique, if you want to get the best value from them. With private label videos, it could be as simple as adding some text underneath, or some of your own banner ads. With private label software, there are some deals offering the source code, which means, if you are technically qualified, you can actually edit the code to make a completely new product of your own. Or, you could outsource this, and have an expert edit it for you.

(6)   Perhaps the ultimate private label product can be created from public domain material which has lost its copyright protection. You can use this content to package up a fresh book (it’s what many current book stores do), giving credit to the original author, but adding text to the effect that it was compiled and edited by you.

There are almost endless ways to customize private label products, but the key is, you must always change them substantially if you are to be able to get the best value out of selling what should become your own unique product.

So, don’t be fooled by the copy writers out there who promise you a fortune using private label products. There is always a catch and, with private label products, the catch is that extra work will be required on your part to properly customize any PLR product, if you want to successfully market it on the web.