(Updated: 25 Feb 2019)
Many people are quite wary of using done-for-you articles on their blogs, and I can understand why. In an ideal world we’d all write our posts and courses ourselves, every time. But if you’re running a small business you have to make every minute count. Blogging is time-consuming so it makes total sense to look at ways of speeding the process up, so read on and I’ll show you an example of how to use PLR on blogs.
There is a time and a place for done-for-you/PLR content (here’s my post describing exactly when you shouldn’t use it). And if I’m posting articles on my blogs I certainly edit them first to add my own ideas and stories. But you may be surprised at how much online content isn’t written by who you’d expect. 🙂
To give you an example of one of my done-for-you articles edited and posted on someone else’s blog, here’s a post by Debbie O’Connor. She took my done-for-you article on ‘Six ways to create content with free tools’ and made it her own:
Six free ways to add sparkle to your blog posts
You can download the article to use yourself – plus four more on content marketing – here. It’s free.
Debbie says “So I just changed a few words, added in a little bit extra and added some images (and in this case some demonstrations of the tools you were taking about). Took me less than half an hour for what will be a very useful blog post for me.”
If Debbie was writing a very personal, opinion-based post then done-for-you content wouldn’t have been appropriate. But for a ‘how to’, tips or tutorial – style post then it’s perfectly fine to use my post as a starting point then add your own ideas, images and even videos. It’s very much like using a stock photo, cropping it and adding your own text to make a social media image.
If you’re worried about the SEO implications of having duplicate content then, yes, this is something to be aware of but it’s not as big a deal as most people think. I’ve written about this here.
Hope that helps you overcome those niggling worries about using PLR on your blog!
I am a big fan of done for you / PLR content. I started up my own site a few years ago (but haven’t added new content for a while).
The benefit of using these articles is that someone else has done the research for you. You just need to edit so that it sounds like your own voice and you are good to go. Excellent resource when time is short or you don’t enjoy the writing process.
I have used plenty of PLR articles for my affiliate sites and will continue to do so. Great post 🙂
Thank you Victoria, I couldn’t agree more!