Private Label Products

If you are involved in any way with web marketing, you are aware of the flood of offers of what are called "private label products" on the Internet today.

In a nutshell, a private label product is a product that, after being purchased, gives you the right to rename it, modify it, change it and renovate it to make it your own. As far as we know, you become the author and creator - the original author waives all copyright.

You should, of course, check the terms of any private label product license, as they vary in what they allow you to do, but in general, products that give you private label rights, or PLR, can be branded as your own. And therein lies the problem.

If everyone who buys, for example, a particular private label ebook, simply inserts their name as the author, without making any other changes, there is 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 claiming to have written "Romeo and Juliet", leaving poor old Bill Shakespeare lost in the howling crowd. No one would know who really wrote it, but anyone claiming to be the author would be in trouble.

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

Here are some guidelines on how you can make a private label product unique.

(1) Private label products normally come with a word or other text file that you can edit. This means you can change the content as you see fit. By spending a little time reading the text and modifying it to fit your style and ideas, you will make the product your own.

(2) They say you shouldn't judge a book by its cover, but this is not the case with private label products. The cover of an ebook, for example, is very distinctive, and unless you modify the graphic covers that you typically get with PLR offerings, it is likely that the same book will appear under many different names. You should substantially modify 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 pasted their PLR articles onto a website, plastered it with Google AdSense blocks and published it online. So much so that many people are getting what is known as the "Google slap" and having their accounts deleted. 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 unique and different. Yes, there's nothing like a free lunch, especially with private label products.

(4) With private label ebooks, another method of making them your own product is to break them up into individual chapters and use them in an autoresponder training series for your newsletter subscribers. Conversely, you could also collect a few private label articles on a similar topic, 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 market.

(5) There are examples of private label software and even private label videos, but they all have the same requirements. You have to modify, edit, add to and adapt them to make them unique if you want to get the most out of them. In the case of privately labeled videos, this can be as simple as adding text underneath or adding your own banner ads. With private label software, some offerings offer source code, which means that if you are technically qualified, you can modify the code to create your own product. Or, you can outsource this task and have an expert edit it for you.

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