Making information products was fairly easy back in the days when all you had to do was convert a Word document to a PDF. But life has become much harder for aspiring product creators since customers came to expect video content. Making quality video takes a long time and there is a long, steep learning curve.
As a software trainer with experience of making online courses, I saw that many professionals were spending months making video courses when they could have been working with clients or building their businesses. And that’s where I saw I could help
My solution is to offer you done-for-you, off-the-shelf video courses that you can either rebrand or use ‘as is’.
There are times when your clients need to see your face and hear your voice in your videos. But there are many other situations when they don’t and that’s where I can help you:
- Are you a web designer whose clients manage their own WordPress sites, but then come back to you frequently to ask basic WP questions? I can save you the hassle of recording your own WordPress tutorial videos.
- Do you want to test out selling online courses without spending a lot of time or budget on it just yet? Why not grab one of mine?
- Do you have a membership site or online coaching program and need video content for your members? You can buy mine ‘off the shelf’ and dramatically reduce the number of videos you need to record yourself.
Can I see some examples?
If you’d like to try out some done-for-you articles, you’re welcome to download my free pack of WordPress articles here.
For an example of how my done-for-you courses look when uploaded to an online training platform, click here. To get access to the course for free, enter the code TOTALLY. I’ve uploaded these videos ‘as is’ and if you bought them for your own site you would be free to edit them however you like.
Here’s a video from my WordPress Essentials PLR course:
You use the letters ‘PLR’ sometimes, what do they mean?
These days, you need a lot of content if you’re going to promote your business online, for example blog posts, social media images, videos and downloadable reports. And that’s just the marketing, if you decide to create an online course, e-book or membership site you need to create a whole lot more.
Many small businesses simply don’t have the time to create all this content, or the budget to outsource it. Private label rights (PLR) content gives you the best of both worlds – content you can edit to suit your own needs and branding, but at a fraction of the price it would cost to outsource it.
In short, private label rights is a licence used for some digital products including videos, reports, ebooks, courses, templates, checklists, sales pages, graphics and more that allows you to rebrand and resell them.
I still don’t quite get it, what exactly do you sell here at Totally Courses?
I mainly make tutorial videos and additional course material (worksheets, checklists, transcripts, source slides) that you can use as your own, plus I recommend good quality done-for-you content from other producers.
Let me give you an example of how that might work for you. Let say you want some photos for your website. You could go and take them yourself, which would take time. Or you could pay a photographer which might be fine now and then, but most small businesses don’t have the budget to do that on a regular basis. The third option is to buy stock photos online, then crop them yourself and maybe add some text to them. Other people will also buy that same photo, but the Internet is such a big place that the chances are nobody will notice and it’s a fair trade-off considering it’s quicker than taking the photos yourself and cheaper than paying a photographer to take them for you.
Think of my courses as ‘stock video courses’. Because many people can buy each pack I can sell them at a much lower price than if I was making them for an individual. Buyers can edit parts out, join videos together, create their own intros and anything else that fits within the terms of the licence. They can also add their own material to my courses, break them into smaller parts or add multiple courses together to make a large course or membership site.
Isn’t there a problem with duplicate content?
Possibly, in some situations. But this is not as big a problem as it may sound at first. Read on to find out why.
First, there are places you cannot use done-for-you content (PLR) because it’s against the terms of the platform. For example in Kindle books, at Ezine Articles and at Udemy.com. Always check the terms and conditions of a platform before uploading.
Next, we have search engines and content on blogs. If you edit your content then the content won’t be a duplicate (you’d be surprised how little you need to change to make an article look totally different). If you post the article ‘as is’, the article won’t have a positive effect on your SEO, but it’s unlikely to do your site any harm, either.
But many people don’t buy PLR to use on blogs, they use it to put in membership sites and other digital products. This content isn’t crawled by search engines, so SEO isn’t an issue. And many of these products are pretty similar even when they are created from scratch by different authors anyway. There are only so many ways to teach a beginner to use WordPress, for example. Even bespoke content would be similar to that from another expert, just with the individual expert’s branding and opinions added in.
Finally, many people buy PLR and never get around to using it. So for every 100 packs sold, far fewer will actually be used. Obviously I want customers to squeeze as much from their content as they possibly can but sometimes it ends up gathering digital dust on their hard drives instead.
If you have any more questions, please just drop me a message and I’ll get back to you as soon as I can.
Helen Lindop