Hello everybody and welcome back to Affilorama.com. I have with me Marc Lindsay and Daniel Turner from PLRPro.com.

Marc’s Background

Mark Ling: For the people out there who do not know who you are, would you mind starting first, Marc, on how you happen to be an internet marketing guru so to speak? How did you start to become profitable online and that sort of thing?

Marc Lindsay: I am very far from being a guru but my main actual background is that I’m a member of the Royal Shore Navy at the moment – I’m trying to move away from that. I’ve been there for 6 years and I started online recently (within a span of one year). And approximately 6 months ago I partnered with Daniel over here to do our main launch of PLRPro. Previous to that I’ve mainly been into search engine optimizations (SEO), doing Adsense and niche style sites.

Mark Ling: When you say one year ago, did you start doing niche style sites only a year ago?

Marc Lindsay: Yes.

Daniel’s Background

Mark Ling: Awesome. How about you Daniel?

Daniel Turner: Well, my background is mainly in offline business. I’m an internet baby, really. I’ve only been in it for about 12 months in total. But I’ve had 11 other businesses online – I’ve never held a job so to speak. So when I went online I’ve always looked at it from a perspective of an offline business and see the opportunities that weren’t there. And like Mark was saying, we met up 6 months ago. I was doing quite well in pay-per-click (PPC) marketing, and I set up a PPC consultancy business for offline businesses that had online websites. Marc and I met through that when we were looking for some SEO services. We sort of got together and went from consultancy relationship to a business partner relationship. We started putting together some AdSense and affiliate sites and put up a bunch of those in a very short period of time and then PLRPro was born.

Mark Ling: Your AdSense sites and stuff like that are going pretty well before you launched PLRPro obviously. Just to give people out there some background about your business knowledge – you actually had some pretty solid business knowledge, so that probably helped you accelerate a bit faster than your regular Joe Blog (that doesn’t mean that people can’t start from scratch). Can you just tell us a little bit about the kind of businesses you are running, what you are doing?

Daniel Turner: When I was 17 or 18 years old, I went into business with my mom at the time and I took over the operations and management side of that. I’ve built that from a single shop operation up to 4 clothing operation shops. I built that into a franchise model, and then split it up and sold that. And then I went on into buying and selling businesses. I made a lot of mistakes – but I learned and improved, and then I came online. But it’s nothing different to the average person. The biggest thing I think that separates Marc and I (with the amount of success that we’ve had in such a short period of time) is the fact that we do whatever it takes to make it happen. Like, if we have to work for 18-hour days, we go for it.

Hard Work

Mark Ling: I’ve heard especially with you (Marc) having 2 roles like you’re full time in the navy and then full-time in doing private label rights stuff. That’s a lot of hours.

Marc Lindsay: It’s been a very interesting working situation. Sometimes that’s just where it all comes down, you do what you need to do to get where you need to be. I remember during the early stages (before I met Daniel) when I was just doing SEO and my own niche sites, I put up with an 8-hour day – I wake up at 5 in the morning and get home at 4pm. And then spend whatever time I have there until 12midnight or 1am sometimes if I need to.

Mark Ling: That’s what it takes. A lot of people (when they’re getting started), they want something where they can spend 20 minutes a day on. And it’s not realistic, honestly, as much as it would be nice to be able to just put a little bit of time each day to do something. I’m sure that people out there have heard of weight loss systems where you only need to do 10 minutes a day. Well, surprise, surprise, they often turn out to be the ones that don’t work. Yet the ones that actually require you to put some time and effort in and make it a part of your life – these are the ones that work.

Daniel Turner: If you’re doing 2-3 hours a day, that’s cool if that’s what you’ve got and you’re putting your maximum effort in. But you just got to be aware that it will take you just a little bit longer to get to your end result. If you put in 8 hours in your day job (which most people have) and put in another 8 hours on top of that, you’re going to get results a lot faster than the person doing just a third of that.

Mark Ling: To those people who want to make a lot of money, I personally recommend about 4 hours a day. I’m not saying that you can’t on an hour a day, which would probably be the bare minimum if you want to have a supplementary income. But if you want to start making some serious cash, you have to put the hours in – that’s part and parcel with the territory, and then you can cut back later.

Marc Lindsay: A lot of people on our end know that I’m going part-time with the navy shortly to help drive our business forward. And even when I’m doing it full-time, we can put in 40 hours worth of work in the weekend alone, which is like a full-time week work for some people. But as you say, that’s what needs to be done if you really want to propel your business.

Mark Ling: It’s so worth it in the long run though – you can cut down and give more time to your family and stuff like that.

Daniel Turner: It’s a short-term pain for a long term pay-off. You can come back to that one hour a day or two hours a day when it’s already going.

Private Label Rights (PLR)

Mark Ling: Alright, people out there in the audience are wondering, what is PLR? What is the definition?

Daniel Turner: Private label right is effectively taking a product (be it content, e-book, software, vitamins, or manufacturing goods) and putting your own name, your own spin, and your own brand on it. I mean PLR hasn’t just been around in the online days, it’s been around for vitamins – there are companies online that just manufactures stuff, and then you can sell it as your own brand. PLR stuff in terms of content is really the same. From our perspective, you give them 440 articles a month for 67 bucks or something (whatever it is) where if you have to do those 440 articles on your own, it will cost you $ 4,000 ($10 an article or $15 an article).

Mark Ling: That’s on a cheap end.

Daniel Turner: Yes, exactly. I know some places that charge up for $22-$25 dollars an article. It’s actually putting your name into something that’s good. PLR is giving content that is usable in your own sites and virtually anywhere you see fit. Obviously there are some limitations on it depending on who you go through. It depends upon what you like to do with it. You can take them, slap it in your site and away you go because you have paid for it.

Marc Lindsay: Essentially, what you have the ability to do is to grab those articles and put your name on it as if you have written those articles. Obviously, you try to rewrite them a little bit as you go along. You just don’t want to put those private label articles up but you can pass them off as your own. They are wholly and solely yours – obviously there are certain aspects that we do modify in terms of service, but you have written the articles as far as everybody is concerned.

Mark Ling: Usually what I’ve come across (it’s not a bad one – it looks fair to me) is that you’re not allowed to resell private label rights to the articles.

Daniel Turner: Yes, you can’t un-sell your rights. That’s where it gets into resale rights and we haven’t gone yet to that arena so we don’t know the terminologies behind it. But yes, there’s a big difference between selling the PLR articles that you get and using them for yourself.

Marc Lindsay: As already stated, you can use them for Adsense on your articles and build an entire Adsense website. But there are many different variations in which you can use your PLR articles to gain monetary benefit and also traffic benefit. Some of those maybe in your newsletters – instead of just putting PLR on your site, you may have an introduction of your newsletter. So you might spend 5 minutes writing a small topic about your newsletter and you would then take a snippet from your articles and place that in the newsletter with maybe a "Read more. . . "

So when you send your newsletter out, they’re getting a nice introduction (it has only taken you 5 minutes to write) and some high-quality information with the "Read more ..." back to the website. They can then click on that and go back to the website. It’s not only promoting back-end visitors to your website, but you can also have Adsense on that page (which can also promote more monetary value for you in that term of sense). And if you compile multiple articles, you can give it away on a small 7-day report. Everybody knows how well it works to give some sort of bonus away for a subscription. You may have a small pop-up on your website or a 7-day report on whatever your article seems to be on. You know, you can increase your subscriber rate quite substantially.

Mark Ling: For newbies out there, you probably don’t understand how important e-mail marketing is. From what I see, it doubles the money you make. Example: Somebody is doing an average of $3 a day or $20 a week from only one site for their Adsense. But he could easily be making $40 a week just by simply having a newsletter sign-up box and a recurring sequence because people that get the newsletter might click the "Read more. . . " button, go back to the site, click on an Adsense ad, or sometimes you want to send out a promotion to your list if you happen to be running a private label article site that happens to be on a topic such as "gardening. " You might happen to find an e-book on "tomato gardening " that you want to promote to your list and say "Hey I’ve found a great book worth reading" and then next thing you know is that you’ve made a heap of money that you wouldn’t have made if you didn’t build your list.

Marc Lindsay: That’s exactly right, and by building a list, you’ve got an instant community of subscribers who are genuinely interested in what you’re providing them. Otherwise, they wouldn’t have signed up. So by giving them what they want, you are promoting traffic back into your website and also a tighter, more friendly community as well. You can build a really responsive community that way.

Daniel Turner: When you get these PLR content, you’ve got the articles themselves, you can condense them into snippets (like Marc was saying when you put it into your e-mail and they come back to your site, they click again so you get more stick-ability), you can put it into a free report (there’s no reason why you can’t take those 10-15 articles, put them into chapter headings as titles, then that’s a 15-pager report that you can give away as a bonus for people signing up and then get them to come back to your site). If you want to do a little bit of extra work, usually a good PR site will have the articles at a decent enough content (30-40 articles around that niche) and you can take them and add a little bit more content to them – maybe do a little bit of research and all of a sudden you’ve got over 40 pages of content – if you add maybe an extra 50% then that’s a 60-page e-book that you can possibly sell if you wanted to. But then, you also got other things like putting it into audio – there are a bunch of other extra things.

Mark Ling: Yes, that’s a big thing. That increases the readability if you’ve got an audio play button at the top of your article; imagine the drawing factor as opposed to your regular article that just sits there.

Daniel Turner: And it only takes you about 3-4 minutes to read that article out with some software. You just add that in and the people can either listen to it or read it. And when someone’s got that visual and audio factor, it means that they will be staring at your site longer, which means that you get more sticking factor (which means that you in turn make more money).

Mark Ling: About a month ago, I was over in the U.K. and I met with Michel and Sylvie Fortin. Sylvie was telling me that she signs up to a lot of private label rights sites and her main use of them is not so that she’s got a bunch of articles she can check-up (so to speak). It’s research. It saves you from having to go to the bookstores, learn stuff, and then write an article – it’s all done for you. But she doesn’t put it up as is; she rewords it and then put it up. Do you think that that’s one of the best uses of private label rights?

Daniel Turner: I will give you guys a resource where you can upload your original article and dynamically change it and see how much it changes within both. So you rewrite sections of it and it will tell you how much it changed (a percentage of the change). What most people are having problems with is called writer’s block – when they try to write something, they can’t think of what to write. So when they’ve got this visual representation of how easy it is to see it being changed on a fly, they can very easily come up with a new rewritten article that’s changed by 30-40% and away they go.

Mark Ling: Yeah I’ve heard from Jason Potash from the Article Blueprint (don’t quote me on this) – the chances that Google will notice whether something is a duplicate content if the article has changed by 25-30% is almost nothing – like it’s a different article by then.

Marc Lindsay: That’s an industry standard. Obviously, Google change the algorithms quite regularly but as far as we’ve seen in quite a lot of our members (and even Jason Potash have) – around 25-30% of a rewritten article (content wise) will not be picked up as duplicate content.

Mark Ling: That’s good to know. Running your private label rights company, obviously you give a lot of support and a lot of people would come across some common problems. What would you say are the most common things that people do wrongly with private label rights? The reason that I’m asking you this is so that the newbies out there who would want to get into private label rights stuff don’t get these same mistakes when they get into it. What sort of things do people do wrongly?

Marc Lindsay: I think that the biggest thing that they do wrong is that you need to invest time (we’ve talked about this before), you can’t do it in one hour a day but you need to have the time (first of all) to put your website up. And that would bring the 2nd point which is: you need to have your own website of some description. You need to be taking action on these articles – you just can’t expect to put it up on a free web post and get as much benefit. You technically could, but it is not advisable.

Mark Ling: This enables you to have a website, right? I mean, you don’t need to have a website before you have the articles. You can use them to create a website, right?

Marc Lindsay: Yes, when I say "have their own website," meaning to be in a position to be able to purchase a domain and have a hosting account with that, and actually set a website up using this content. Regarding your question – the biggest thing that people will be doing wrong is not actually rewriting their content somewhat, I mean there’s nothing wrong with putting that content directly up in your website, but if you want to get the maximum gains out of Adsense and affiliate programs, then you are going to need to rewrite your article somewhat. It takes a little bit longer but it’s for a long-term strategy which is ultimately what we really want.

Mark Ling: It’s a heck of a lot less time than if you start them from scratch.

Daniel Turner: I can speak pretty confidently on this – when we started out, we put out almost a hundred sites every 3 months, and that’s content that I was writing in the very beginning. So I was writing content for 10 hours a day. It took me (on average) about 40 minutes on a good article, but more likely about San hour an article.

Mark Ling: You must have learned a lot of stuff.

Daniel Turner: When you’re doing the writing, you select the niches, do the research, and then do the writing. My point is: when someone gets a PLR article, they can rewrite it in 5-10 minutes and make it so that it’s virtually unique as opposed to writing an article from scratch – which will take 40 minutes to an hour.

Mark Ling: I think an average person would take longer than that to write an article. It would take me longer – I’ve seen how fast you type.

Daniel Turner: It gets frustrating for some people and that’s where the writer’s block comes up – if you’re writing articles from scratch and you’re writing about the same topic, it gets pretty hard coming up with new stuff to write.

Mark Ling: That’s one big thing that a lot of people have trouble with – writing their newsletters. They know that e-mail marketing works, but writing a newsletter can be really difficult. Now if you can go ahead and create an auto-responder series, just spend 5 minutes an article and do 20 articles (20 x 5 minutes), then you’ve got 20 weeks of newsletters for your follow- ups.

Marc Lindsay: Not only very difficult, but also for a lot of people I know (in the earlier stage) it’s very daunting as well to actually send out a newsletter. Also, a lot of people are nervous about sending an e-mail out to a subscriber list – take note that when they have subscribed to your information, they do want to hear from you – it shouldn’t be daunting to send it out. And if you’ve already got the content pre-written, you don’t really need to worry so much about what you’re writing.

Mark Ling: Do you see it as a great way of supplementing and kick starting a website? As in, they have 3 different niches and they’re not sure where to get into. They’re quite prepared to write unique content but they don’t necessarily want to write it from the start because it’s a lot of work writing your first 40 articles, but if they get the visitors, that makes them money, then they’re prepared to write all unique content from then on.

Daniel Turner: Or even reinvest in their own articles so that they’re outsourcing it and they don’t do it themselves. One of the things on the points that people make mistakes with, is I think people think that PLR content is different from normal content. And in reality, it’s just content. If you’re going to be building a website, the main hub of that entire website is the content that it’s built upon. So once you’ve got the content, you are 80% there. If you already have a template, and you’ve got a design (there are places where you can get them for free all over the web), you just put your content in, and away you go. Think of it not as a new age, crazy weird thing that has just come out – it’s been around for a long time. Treat it as normal – like you have written the articles yourself.

PLRPro

Mark Ling: Ok, can you just tell our audiences out here – just give us some more information about your product PLRPro. I know you told me beforehand that you don’t really want to plug your own product here. You just want to tell people about what PLR is, if they chose PLRPro, then that’s great. I appreciate that, but if people will choose your product, they would want to know what’s in it. Can you just explain what’s in your product?

Daniel Turner: I’m just going to give a rundown:

$67 a month (we’re right now going through a price rise but it’s not 100% known when it’s going to be). It’s 440 articles a month – you get all the keyword research (KR) done on those 440 articles plus supplement keywords so we give them a list of the article keywords and based on the KR and the numbers, they can then take other keywords and then put them into the articles and make them apply so that they’re targeting another keyword.

Mark Ling: I think you better explain that because some people won’t understand what you’ve just said there.

Daniel Turner: Alright, there’s effectively a supply and demand within the internet. How much demand there is on a keyword vs. how many pages there are with content (that mentions that keyword).

Mark Ling: So if you were to search for "photos of drycleaners" as a search term, there might be 50 sites that may come up, but if you search for "dog training," you might find 9 million websites that might come up.

Daniel Turner: The last time I checked on MSN, there’s 22 million for the term "dog training. " So that’s where the competition comes into play. So when we give the keyword research, you can select the ones that are the best keywords if you want to.

Marc Lindsay: Just to explain a little bit more on that, the keyword research is for those who want to pick and choose what keywords to use (that are going to benefit them the most). So maybe the more searches per month with a lesser competition is going to give you a much better chance at getting a high position in the search engines and driving more traffic for that.

Mark Ling: Also, when I say that they supply is probably 50 for "dry cleaner photos," the demand might be zero, but if you find something where the supply might be 500 websites and the demand might be 500-1,000 people a month searching for that, then you’ve got a winner. And you’ve done that research for people on every topic?

Daniel Turner: It depends on the topic – some niches only go to 60 keywords while some got to 500 or 600. So we’ve got the keywords and we also find affiliate programs that are relevant. And it’s also based on our experience because we are in a lot of niches ourselves, so we give recommendations based on those. So we’ve done the research for them. We also have very few listed bonuses on our sales page, but when they actually log in, they will find out that there’s a ton more.

Marc Lindsay: Yes, we’ve got extra but it’s not stuff that we can mention outside of membership.

Daniel Turner: If people take advantage of it, there are things in there on efficiency, PPC, SEO, and how to create hugely greater traffic.

Mark Ling: One other thing that I liked (when I have a browse through) is your forum – it’s so " happening" in there. People are posting back and forth, and you guys are actively there everyday. A lot of people try to set up web forums in their member’s area but they’re not on it themselves, they just leave it. So this is different?

Marc Lindsay: We actively promote the forum whenever we can to our members because it’s a great place. Not only for our members to be in touch with us and ask any questions, but also, when one member may have an experience in one section, and another one is maybe lacking, they may want to share their knowledge. It just makes a really good environment for some of the newer people to learn, and also for some of the older people (I mean older by experience) to pick up new tricks from younger players. We also put in there resources we use and recommend, whether that be free, paid or discounts that we managed to obtain.

Mark Ling: One thing that I’m really interested in and I think people out here are probably interested to know as well – how do you actually decide which topics to use?

Daniel Turner: In the beginning, we essentially just go off our experience. We started with the most profitable niches for us. Then it came to a point (we have over 800 members now) where we need to find 44 niches a month on a consistent basis. So what we do now is: we opened it up to our members and we say "You tell us what you want. "

And so our members come to us each month and say "Well I want a thing on plants, scrapbooking, dog training, golf, and whatever. " So we’ll get a list of usually between 50-90 niches that they’ll give us. We will then go through those niches, cut them to about 30 based on our criteria and we check each niche to see how much the competition is, or how much the searches are. I mean, if there’s a niche that only has 3,000 searches a month, it may not be a bad niche, but that’s probably not good enough.

Marc Lindsay: There are probably no Google ads or something like that, because we actually check to make sure that (if people do want to use them for Google Adsense) that there are going to be ads there for them to display on their website.

Mark Ling: So they’re profitable niches.

Daniel Turner: Exactly. Some people get hooked up on: you’ve got to have $20 a click in Adsense. That’s not necessarily true – if you have 100,000 searches a month on $0.10 a click, you’re still going to be making a fair whack of cash on that.

Mark Ling: Yes, I’ve got a lot of Adsense sites but one of them in particular is one of my hairstyle sites. People are only paying $0.05 a click for that, but you can make hundreds a week from it when there’s a lot of people searching.

Daniel Turner: We’ve got one niche that does 1,200-1,500 bucks based on an online game. There’s like 4-5 advertisers, and it is $.05-$.10 a click.

Marc Lindsay: Not even. I think it’s between $.02 and $.04 a click, and just because it’s a very, very popular site. We’ve just recently made it a community site. It does extremely well in Adsense because there’s a lot of traffic to it.

Mark Ling: Alright. Thanks very much for coming to this interview here.