As an online course creator, you may wonder, “What is PLR?” since you’ve probably heard somewhere that it’s a fast and easy solution for content creation. Private Label Rights (PLR) content is content you can buy and then change it and add your company’s branding before making it available to your learners. Some examples of this type of digital marketing content are curriculum, articles, e-books, white papers or other reports, templates, printables, and videos.
What is PLR? Differences between Private Label Content (PLR), Resell Rights (RR), and Master Resell Rights (MRR)
Of course, to truly understand what PLR is, you should also know the difference between PLR and other types of content.
Private Label Rights (PLR) differ from Resell Rights (RR) or Master Resell Rights (MRR). With Resell Rights (RR), the only thing you can do with the content is to use it or sell it exactly as is. You cannot alter it, and you cannot sell any rights to it. With Master Resell Rights (MRR), you can use the content, sell it, or sell the rights to it (“right to sell”), but as with Resell Rights (RR), you cannot alter the content or brand it with your own company info.
The only type of content you can alter and brand with your own company info is PLR content, which is the primary advantage of investing in it.
The pros of using Private Label Rights (PLR) content
You may invest in PLR content because of the benefits of time and cost savings compared to writing all content from scratch or hiring a writer to create each piece of content. In addition, using PLR content can be a great way to add new areas of expertise to an online course or to create a lead magnet for marketing.
Time savings
As a course creator, your time is your most valuable and scarce resource; buying PLR content is a way to save time. Particularly for anyone who suffers from writer’s block, it is often easier to edit content than to start with a blank page. When used as an outline for your eventual product, PLR content gives you a starting point, and then you can improve it by personalizing it for your audience.
Cost savings
An advantage of PLR content is that purchasing it is usually less expensive than hiring a writer to create custom content because PLR content creators rely on scale to make a profit. It may be a surprise how PLR content creators can make money selling their work for such low prices (sometimes just pennies!), but since they are selling it to so many people, it can still be lucrative for them to sell PLR content.
New expertise
PLR content is useful if you want to offer your learners information in an area where you don’t already have expertise. Instead of taking the time to master a whole new subject and then create content about it, you can gain new knowledge at the same time as your learners by reviewing content created by subject experts in the new area. For example, your course may have strong content about stress management for new parents, but you want to add content about stress management for parents of toddlers, so relying on an expert on the development psychology of toddlers can be a quick way to add a whole other source of help for your audience.
Marketing
Some course creators use PLR content to create a free giveaway product, a lead magnet, as a marketing tool to create interest in their paid online course and to build their customer list for email marketing. Since the free product doesn’t directly yield a profit per sale but is a tool for increasing brand awareness, using low-cost PLR content can be a fast and smart way to get a good return on investment for the purchase.
Some ideas for a free giveaway are digital downloads, a podcast episode, or a mini-course. Some innovative content marketing ideas that are less often used are guestographics, instructographics, and storyboards. This content still needs to be personalized and high quality, because for many prospective learners, this will be their first introduction to your course creator brand.
Cons of using Private Label Rights (PLR) content
Before using PLR content, course creators will need to choose a strategy for addressing the potential cons of buying this type of content. These cons include low-quality PLR, content that is sold to too many people who might not customize it, the possible gamble of purchasing PLR content that cannot be previewed, and the potential for plagiarism or copyright infringement.
Generic content
PLR content creators intentionally design the content to be general and vague to make it attractive to a wide variety of customers, and this means you must tailor the content to your own audience of learners to make it useful. Because some course creators don’t take sufficient time to make the content their own, PLR content has the reputation of being unhelpful and of inferior quality.
Your comfort level with customizing different content will determine which types of PLR content are the best for you. Some course creators are skilled at editing written content, but others have less expertise or fewer software tools to edit audio or video, so that’s an important consideration in deciding what type of PLR content to buy.
Poor sales and customer service policies
Some PLR content sellers will only sell PLR content in a bundle where you can’t see what you are purchasing before you pay for it, and some of these sellers have return and refund policies that aren’t friendly to the purchaser. Unless the price is so low that you can afford to take the risk even if the content turns out to be unusable for your online course, this type of PLR content offering is probably not the best option.
SEO concerns
Because PLR content creators sell the same content to many buyers, Google can flag it as duplicate content. While SEO experts say duplicate content may no longer ruin your website’s search engine optimization (SEO) as content marketers once thought it did, Google still advises avoiding duplicate content. This is another reason you must customize PLR content for your learners instead of offering it “off the shelf” without modification.
Free Online Courses for Digital Marketing
- Fundamentals of Digital Marketing
Offered by Google
There’s no better way to learn digital marketing than through the company that started it all. Google’s free online digital marketing course ranks right at the top of our list with good reason; it covers all aspects of digital marketing for beginners as well as intermediate users and it comes with free certification. Industry-recognized certification through Google is an ideal way to get your profile noticed and add to your skill set.
This 40-hour free online course in digital marketing features 26 modules and can be completed at your own pace wherever and whenever you want. Each module consists of several lessons that include text, video, and quizzes to test your knowledge. If you don’t want to progress through the entire course you can pick and choose which lessons to add to your individualized learning plan. However, we highly recommend starting from the beginning and progressing step-by-step so you can receive certification.
While we won’t list each module, some of the subjects covered include:
- Building your web presence
- Planning your online business strategy
- Understanding search and how to improve your campaigns
- Getting noticed locally
- Building an online store
- Expanding internationally
- Social media marketing
- Mobile marketing
- Content marketing
- Email marketing
- Advertising and analytics
- Inbound Marketing Free Certification Course
Offered by Hubspot Academy
Hubspot Academy’s Inbound Marketing Free Certification Course is a four-hour industry-recognized program meant for digital marketers who want to focus on their inbound efforts. The comprehensive curriculum consists of 10 lessons, 34 videos, and 9 quizzes and is designed for beginners. During the free online digital marketing course, students will learn about:
- The fundamentals of inbound marketing
- Planning a long-term content strategy
- Creating blog posts
- Understanding social media promotion
- Developing a conversational growth strategy
- Understanding and creating a conversion optimization strategy
- Lead nurturing
- Aligning sales and marketing
- Applying a customer marketing approach
Upon successful completion, students will be awarded official certification from HubSpot to display on their LinkedIn profile, portfolio, resume, or CV.
- Free Diploma in E-Business
Offered by Alison
Alison was developed in 2007 by Mike Feerick and was the first massive online open course (MOOC) platform on the web. With more than six million students registered on the site, this is one of the best free online course providers you will find.
The Diploma in E-Business course helps students build marketing skills through learning Google Analytics and AdWords, search optimization, revenue metrics, analysis, campaign tracking, digital measurement, and more. Over 84,000 students have enrolled in the free online digital marketing course, which takes between six to ten hours to complete. You will need to pass the final assessment with an 80 percent or better grade. Upon completion, you will receive a Learner Achievement Verification Report, or you can opt to purchase a certificate from the site’s online shop for around $20.
- Become an Online Marketing Manager
Offered by LinkedIn Learning
This 24-hour course offered through LinkedIn Learning provides students who already understand digital marketing with the skills they need to move up the corporate ladder into management roles. In this free digital marketing online course, students will learn best practices for online marketing, using the latest tools to implement a digital marketing strategy, and how to advertise effectively on social media platforms.
The course features 11 modules covering advanced aspects of marketing including:
- Growth hacking
- Advanced branding
- SEO foundations
- Email and newsletter marketing
- Google Analytics
- Google AdWords
- Facebook and Twitter
- Sketch for UX design
You can take the course for free if you already have a LinkedIn premium membership (most marketers do) or sign up for a trial and access the classes at no charge for a month.
- Digital Marekting Strategy
Offered by The University of Edinburgh
This thorough digital marketing course is offered by one of the top universities in Scotland through Edx. By engaging in the training for four to six hours a week, the course can be completed in about 8 weeks. The syllabus is comprehensive. Students who are looking for the most inclusive free curriculum on digital marketing will find this to be one of the top choices.
Certificates for the course can be obtained at the paid level of edX, which is also part of a professional certification. However, the lessons of each module can be audited for free. Auditing the course allows you to read and view all of the content.
The program is designed to teach users a general understanding of digital marketing at the strategic level as it relates to business. Taught by two instructors from the University of Edinburgh, it’s an ideal course to add to your resume or CV.
- Digital Strategy and Action
Offered by Babson College through edX
Digital Strategy and Action is a fascinating free online course that will introduce marketers to what big businesses like Amazon, Facebook, Netflix, and Google have in common when it comes to digital strategy. In it, students will learn how the CEOs of these giants pivoted from a simple idea to billions in revenue, and how they keep growing.
The course features inspiring in-depth case studies, including stories about Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos and Netflix CEO Reed Hastings as well as tons of tips, tricks, and advice.
If you’re an entrepreneur or marketer who dares to dream bigger, the course will provide insight into how the world’s biggest leaders in marketing have stayed at the top.
Students can opt for the paid version, which gives them an instructor-signed shareable certificate with the Babson University logo, but this is not a requirement. It can also be taken in its entirety in the audit version for free.
- Digital Media and Marketing Strategies
Offered by the University of Illinois through Coursera
The Digital Media and Marketing Strategies course offered by the University of Illinois is course five in a seven-part specialization in Digital Marketing. Like all Coursera programs, it can be completed in audit mode at no cost or in the paid version. Students who opt for the paid version will receive a completion certificate.
The free 15-hour course in digital marketing will teach you:
- How to optimize your digital assets
- The basics of online and video marketing
- The basics of email and social media marketing
- Digital Marketing Strategy
Offered by Learn@Forbes
The finance and investing publication has launched its own series of certified online courses, and this one—Digital Marketing Strategy—can be accessed free for 14 days with a trial to Learn by Forbes. The three-hour course is self-paced and covers all of the basic elements of developing a digital marketing strategy, including:
- How to create a digital marketing strategy to meet organizational goals
- Understanding the customer journey and how it applies to digital marketing
- Exploring the use of a digital SWOT in assessing marketing efforts
- Explaining how lessons learned are integrated into digital marketing
- Describing the key ethical and legal issues in digital marketing
This list is just a small sampling of what you will learn in this short, content-rich course. Learning will come easy as you progress through the class which uses case studies, flashcards, and interactive games to help you retain as much information as possible. Upon completion, you will be eligible for a certificate that you can display on your website, CV, resume, or LinkedIn Profile.
