If You're Going To Rewrite Your PLR Anyway, Why Use PLR At All?

Well I think that you hit the nail on the head when you said time saving. PLR - yes you have to re-write it but the structure and content is already there for you so you have most of the work done for you. When you're looking at writing dozens of articlles this makes life a hell of a lot easier.

On the flipside - a ghostwriter will normally produce better and more original content but the expense is comparitively huge.

So - it comes down mainly to what you're going to use the finished copy for. If you are using it for backlinks etc no wworries - if its central web content then you might need something better!

Here's how I encourage people to look at it... Think back to your school days and writing term papers. How much easier would your life have been if someone had handed you all of the research and a rough draft of your paper, so that all you had to do was make some minor changes so that it fit your "style"? You would have saved hours in the library and hours typing away at a rough draft.

PLR gives you that convenience (well, when you buy the good stuff, of course!) Good PLR will come with solid facts and it will be well-written - meaning it's the perfect rough draft.

Or, if you want to look at it from a dollars-and-cents perspective... In many cases, it can actually be cheaper to buy a PLR pack and pay a professional to rewrite it than it is to buy completely custom content.

I almost always rewrite the PLR that I buy. It's nothing to do with any false ideas about duplicate content, it's because PLR articles tend to be written fairly generically and need a little tweaking for what I want.

I may want to alter the article to direct it towards a product that I am promoting, I may want to change the angle of the article from 3rd to 1st person, I may want to change the slant of the article to give a different opinion to the original.

I also like to add my own voice to the article. Sometimes they can be too formal and I want to adapt the article for my target audience and change the language to a language that is better for them. Sometimes I don't need (or want) to be so formal and so I make it more conversational.

It's also down to cost. I have paid anywhere up to $80 for an ghostwritten article. If I can get 10 great articles for $10 give them a quick rewrite or a spruce-up, I save a lot of money. Also, if I want, I can outsource the rewriting of the articles to a ghostwriter to rewrite it at a quarter (or less) than what it would take to write the article from scratch.

If I'm rewriting the article myself (as I do most of the time), I can just use the article as a framework and be staring at a new article in just 10 mins - instead having to spend time researching, structuring and writing an article from scratch.

PLR is quick and cheap.

Excellent points, talk about adding value to a discussion!

I love the term paper analogy Nicole! How good is it that we're in this online space where we can literally buy content and modify it to reflect our own voice, personality and experiences. I can just see my professors frowning already...

Nathan, you paid $80 for a ghostwritten article? Watch out, there are going to be swarms of ghostwriters beating a path to your door!

I re-create back the PLR to my own unique style because

1. I get the research and the content handed to me in a silver platter
2. I get to see the "big picture" scope of the whole topic, and that gives
me an idea on what is needed to be added, removed, updated etc
3. I use it to build my knowledge base on that topic-sometimes
when i go into a specific market, i might not know my way around the
important topics. So, PLR gives me an idea on what i need to know,
and what i should be looking for.

Well, thats 3 thats right off in my mind.

That is precicely the reason that i use public domain PLR or free PLR if I do rewrite them - if I am just going to rewrite them, then why pay for PLR?

PLR content has it all fiured out for you. You do not need to do research yourself and come up with content ideas. They already have done it for you.

Main thing that PLR does for me is cure 'blank screen syndrome'. It's somewhere to start instead of staring at an empty Word document, or agonizing for hours about what to put on that first PowerPoint slide.

I use PLR as content for my email lists. That way, I don't have to worry about keywords or how unique the content is.

Think of it this way. Would you really have to re-write the PLR if you were one of the first to buy it and post it up online? Then wouldn't everyone else's be a "copy" of yours?

But how many times do you get that kind of "jump" on everyone else? Probably never, unless you have an "in" with the provider and they give you first dibs for a premium price.

That said, rewriting PLR is super-duper-easy. If I need an article on say, "weight loss for moms" which is a topic that I have absolutely zero expertise in--then a PLR article hits the nail right on the head. Simply rewrite in my own way and I've saved a lot of time.

I think one of the reasons people stay away from hiring a ghostwriter is because it takes a lot of 'management' & 'work'. You've got to find someone good, go through their work, come up with specs (not everyone knows what they're really looking for), wait for the person to get back to you with a draft... and so on.

PLR, on the other hand, is more or less, 'instant gratification'. Even if it sucks, I know it immediately.

And yes, it does help solve the 'writer's block' problem that you may run into often.

The research is already done, the topics are there. All you need to do is rewrite. A ghostwriter costs more per article so you save money by rewriting. In addition, if you're not using a writer that you have used before, you can easily get burned.

New writers often disappear without doing the job.
New writers often have a great article as a sample and then horrid English skills when they actually get a project.

It takes time to vet new writers so that you end up with quality articles. It doesn't take me long to rewrite a well written, well researched article.

I often use PLR for my websites.

I can use it as is in emails, I compile a bunch of them into a free report, there are a lot of things I can do.

When it comes to using the articles as articles... I am a professional writer, it takes me anywhere from 15 minutes to several hours to write an article depending on how well I know the information and how in depth the article is. It takes me under 5 minutes to rewrite PLR to fit my website.

For instance, I have a "get back your ex" website. That website is aimed at females so I simply rewrite these generic articles to be about "how to get back your boyfriend" and it takes me 5 minutes or less to get each article. It is much faster and the content is still unique and valuable. It helps buy high quality PLR so the articles are already good before you rewrite them, it saves even more time.

I too wondered that. Most of the PLR I've seen are very general articles (not saying that all PLR is like this, just the ones I've seen) that don't teach a lot to the reader. I can get a more detailed article from a writer for just a little bit more than it costs to pay someone to rewrite PLR and make it high quality.

I definitely still see the value. As well as writing PLR I also buy and use a lot in my own sites. I can rewrite an article extremely fast, much faster than it takes to write from scratch, and for much less money than it'd take to hire a ghostwriter.

I also like to do extra things to personalize it to my site. E.g. add in my own opinions, add relevant images, or just pick and choose parts of the content that relate to what I want to say. It doesn't take long to get it unique enough for my liking.

Using PLR articles definitely saves a lot of time. You don't have to think about the content or how to structure it as the person who wrote it has spent all the time doing that. You can get some very well written content as well. Many brilliant writers use it as a way to get their reputation going.

I will sometimes match-up PLR with products to create some quick and dirty niche sites. Most of the PLR I purchase needs to be rewritten, but it's still a time saver versus going out and doing research. It can also make for some decent video content.

What to write about can be a killer and how to write it. For someone who is not keen on doing much research and does not know what to write on, PLR is it.

Also you may be promoting a niche you know nothing about i.e acne. PLR takes care of that

The time-consuming part of writing is all the research. That PLR author did a couple hours of research I don't want to do, and is happy to sell the articles that came out of that research on Tradebit for $1.50 or whatever.

Even if I get horrible crap PLR, I still get the research. The problem is usually language skills:

"Sir Lord Charles Howard Effingham was with command to the British fleet in the 1588 when Francis the Drake having of the control and make the fireship in the armada like pirates so they run."

That would take some time to look up from scratch, and is certainly not ready for prime time as it stands. But it's pretty easy to fix with a rewrite:

"Lord Charles Howard of Effingham was in command of the British fleet in 1588, but turned control over to Francis Drake - who used fireships, a common tactic of pirates, to rout the Spanish Armada."

It's the grammar that's the problem, not the facts. But when I sit down to write, the facts are what I don't have.

Love all the healthy discussion going on here!

To me having good quality PLR article content to start off with is a huge advantage. First of all, it just takes so much of the mental effort out of getting started.

Because there are already some good existing ideas and points on the page (assuming that you have a good provider of course), it's easy just to build on one idea and run with it, finish that train of thought and then have the next idea ready to go. Compare that with starting off with a blank slate - you get stuck, you have to work to get into the flow, you get distracted as you research certain facts or ideas, etc.

Secondly, I don't see the process as "rewriting" the PLR, well not as some people may conceptualize "rewriting" anyway. I'm not changing the PLR for the sake of making it unique to the search engines so much as putting myself into it.

What do I think about the ideas and the points that I'm starting with?

I can agree, disagree, expand, illustrate, debate... and most importantly let my personality and value shine out of it.

If you still have any doubt about the value of PLR, think about why that we tend to write so much more efficiently and effectively on forum threads like these? It is that there's already someone else's thoughts populating the discussion - it's a conversation and all of us know how to converse! The same principle is true for PLR, that it's a lot more effective and efficient when you can draw from existing thoughts instead of having to organize new ones.

This is why to me, in a nutshell, rewriting PLR is so much more powerful than starting from scratch.

My thoughts on this are, if you chose not to rewrite a PLR product, then there might just be 100s of others who may have used it as is, I'm guilty of this myself, I have bought numerous PLR products, but when you think about it, you are rewriting it, so you may as well get the information from someones website( not suggesting copying it or using it here), but do exactly the same, rewrite it.

I often get articles on a given subject off ezinearticles, and use them as PLR, by rewriting them completely, it just gives you a template, something to work with

I love using PLR, the hard part of writing articles is deciding what angle to take on a topic and the research. I rewrite the complete article every time and it may go in a completely different direction from the PLR article. But the research and the angle is there waiting for you, so for me it takes a lot of the thinking out of the task. If i don't have to think about it I get more done just about every time.

Like many have said, I find that PLR products give me a base to work off.

For example, when I try and launch a site pretty fast, I'll see if I can find a PLR product, then modify it for my needs. The content and structure is already there, so I simply have to is add in my own style, maybe some extra content I feel it needs and any links needed. Sorted. It save me time.

I like to use PLR as starters for ebooks. I also like to use the plr to create videos. I'll just make a powerpoint presentation from the plr article and then narrate it. I can relate to that blank screen thing.

This is a very good discussion for me because I found a PLR product that I want to promote. Parts I want to rewrite and parts I do not. I even thought about changing the graphics but the ones that came with it are of such high quality I figured why do so - of course I re read the can dos and cannot dos and found that was part of the cannot's.

Like many of these discussions I am finding that the real answer is "depends" there is no one solution to the question and no one solution that works all the time for every situation.