As a plr seller myself, I thought you might be interested in knowing about the kind of rights you should/shouldn't offer to your customers, especially if you are looking forward to creating and selling your own plr product.
As always, I will merely give you suggestions; ultimately it is up to you to make the final decision. :)
1. What Kind of PLR Rights Should You Offer to Your Customers?
There is nothing set in stone about plr rights: you can offer "restrictive", "unrestrictive" or "flexible" rights. YOU, being the seller, are free to decide what rights you want to assign to your customers.
At the same time, you need to be aware of current market trends. Being too inflexible and restrictive can spell doom for your plr business in the long run.
Ultimately you will want to have a rights statement which is not too restrictive, while preserving the value of your plr package.
You live and learn in the plr business, just like any other venture. You can take a look at my plr rights statement at:
http://flexiblewriter.com/plr-rights.html
Believe me, this is not the first version of the statement; this statement has gone through numerous revisions and updates.
I cannot remember it exactly, but I think that when I started out, my plr rights statement went along these lines:
[YES] Can Be Edited Completely and Put Your Name on it.
[YES] Can be used as web content
[YES] Can be used in an autoresponder e-course
[YES] Can be used in a special report (free or paid)
[YES] Can be used in an ebook (free or paid)
[YES] Can be submitted to article directories
[NO] Can be added to paid membership sites.
[NO] Can be offered through auction sites.
[NO] Can sell Resale Rights.
[NO] Can sell Master Resale Rights.
[NO] Can sell Private Label Rights.
[NO] Can be published offline
When I first started out, I didn't allow offline publishing of plr content without my permission; I did this this because I was essentially following the 'herd': that is, other plr sellers (many sellers either charge extra for offline publication of plr content or disallow it altogether).
In those days, I used to keep getting emails from prospects about whether they could use the plr content to publish their book.
I finally discussed it with my friends, many of whom happen to be plr sellers themselves. While the answers were different on the surface, I did manage to see a pattern in all of them: as long as I don't have any intention of publishing the plr content offline or charging my customers extra fees for offline publication of my content, I can safely allow it to my customers.
Since I had no such intentions, I conveniently changed '[NO] Can be published offline' to '[YES] Can be published offline'!
A few months after this, I got an email from one of my Fatlossplr.com subscribers (Fatlossplr.com used to be a membership site in those days, and I think some of my Nuttiezine subscribers were part of it). He said he was cancelling his subscription because I didn't allow plr content to be added to membership sites 'as is'.
I didn't give much heed to it as I was not going to devalue my plr content in the quest of satisfying one odd customer. But I figured I could add one more right to my plr statement:
[YES] Can be added to non-PLR membership sites (for your members' personal use ONLY)
It is much better than saying '[NO] Can be added to paid membership sites' or '[NO] Can be added to free membership sites', or both! The clarity and transparency of your plr rights statement is one of the most important factors in determining the number of sales you make!
Later I also noticed that my plr rights statement was silent on matters like: whether the buyer could giveaway or sell any product created from my plr content. While most people would assume that this is allowed, I thought I could add this as well.
[YES] Can be given away
[YES] Can be sold
Of course, this only applies to any derivative product you create from my plr content, NOT the raw plr source code! :)
In fact, I still keep updating it. Just today I changed '[NO] Can be offered through auction sites' to '[YES] Can be offered through auction sites'!
By implication, it means you can sell any 'derivative product' you create from my plr content on auction sites; you just cannot resell the private label rights to your customers!
If any of my plr customers are reading this, please note that what you see on the page http://flexiblewriter.com/plr-rights.html takes precedence over everything else and is effective immediately! So if you see anything contrary in your PDF Readme file, just disregard it and follow the above page!
Since it is not possible for me to update the Readme files of all of my plr products every time a little change occurs, I have created a separate webpage for this! I might as well simply link to this page from within the Readme file from next time! ;)
So you see, I lived and learned through trial and error, and now you have the whole plr statement before your eyes. Of course I don't think I could make it any more flexible, what do you think?
http://flexiblewriter.com/plr-rights.html
Enough of rambling; I just wanted to tell you that you won't be able to make a 'perfect' plr rights statement right at the first instance, so don't freak out on it.
Get feedback from your customers and fellow plr sellers, and use your discretion before you take the final decision. Remember that you are free to decide what rights you want to offer to your plr customers.
2. Should I offer Resell and PLR Rights to my PLR Content?
Short answer: no. If you sell resell or plr rights to your plr content, your customers will become your immediate competitors. You have nothing to say if he puts up a competing WSO just above yours: after all, YOU gave him that right!
Another reason is: when you offer resell or plr rights with your plr content, there will be 1,000 times more customers using that content. Even if this means nothing to you, it means a lot to your customers.
Just imagine: people will know that after a while, another seller is going to offer your plr product at a much cheaper rate than yours! In that case, why would they buy from you?
Dilution is of course not an issue in my book: with plr content, whether it is sold to 100 or 1,000 people, it doesn't matter to you as a customer; firstly because 70-80% of those who buy plr content never use it and leave it to rot on their hard drives, and secondly, whether 10 or 100 people use the plr content, you will rewrite the plr content anyway to get good rankings; if you don't rewrite it, then you are not a smart businessman in the first place (now, you can of course make money with unchanged plr too but that is out of the scope of this article).
So those are the reasons for not offering resell or private label rights to your plr source code.
You might be thinking that if you don't allow resell and plr rights you won't make as many sales as you would otherwise. If so, here is some food for thought: smart buyers will appreciate the fact that you are being somewhat "restrictive" with your rights so that only those who are prepared to make the best use of them will buy your plr content.
At the same time, you are also weeding out all the lazy customers who buy content only for the purpose of reselling it at a much lower price at DP forum or a $1 membership site :)
As long as you are providing value and charging the right price for your product, everything else will fall in place!
Some marketers offer unrestricted private label rights as an excuse for jacking up the prices of their plr products. If you want, you can go that route, but I won't probably buy from you (for the above reasons)!
Even if I don't believe in this idea personally, many people do subscribe to the philosophy that if a great number of restrictions exist that must mean that the plr pack has greater value; for your information, these people won't buy from you if you offer resell or private label rights with your content!
Therefore if you are not offering resell/plr rights to your private label content, you score points over your competitors who are offering 'unrestricted plr rights'!
I don't know if it is just a coincidence, but most of the time I have found that unrestricted plr products are often either complete trash or "cheap", commonplace stuff.
On the other hand, the sellers who are somewhat "restrictive" in their rights offer better content and value! Have you found something similar? I hope I am not the only one of a kind :)
Limiting the number of plr licenses is something totally different. I used to limit the number of my plr licenses to 30 or 50, but then I found that I am essentially limiting my earning potential that way.
I had discussions with a few plr stalwarts who sell 'unlimited licenses' of their plr content, and they told me that their packages sell out in spite of that!
There are actually two reasons why you don't need to worry about how many copies of a given plr product are being sold.
1. If you are a smart marketer, you know that the smart way to make money from plr content is by rewriting it. So whether 10 or 100 people are using the content should hardly matter to you!
2. If you are a lazy marketer, you won't use the plr content anyway, so no worries! ;) Btw, like I said, most of the people who buy plr content never use it, and I am one of them too!
Sadly enough, we IMers suffer from disease of accumulation and compulsive buying, and at the end of the day, plunge ourselves in neck deep debt! :D
I am not going to pay if any seller charges ridiculous prices on the pretext that he is selling content only to 20 people; this is because I know I have to change the content anyway. I regularly buy plr content from Tiffany Dow and you know that she doesn't limit the number of available copies; but since people love her content, they buy from her (I had it straight from her mouth, lol).
Ditto for Alice Seba, even though I buy only occasionally from her! Honestly I have not seen much of a difference in sales when I switched from selling 'limited copies' to 'unlimited copies'.
My sound advice is: if you are selling plr content, allow your customers to pass on only Personal Use and Basic or Master Resell Rights to their customers.
Restrict the private label rights only to YOUR customers; that way, both you and your customers benefit from the transaction. If anyone needs plr rights, they can get it only from you!
Side note: If you are dying to offer unrestricted plr rights to your content, you should ask your customers not to start reselling the product (s) before a certain date (that is, the date on which your promotion is going to end)!
If you think this article is a 'pitch', you are not entirely wrong. :) I will shortly be releasing my very own ebook on how to monetize plr products. It is going to be available as a series. I hope you will like it. It is geared toward both to plr buyers and sellers!
I don’t sell resell rights because it just dilutes the article. I don’t know how useful article packs with resell rights are. PLR ebooks may be a different story, though, since they generally aren’t posted online.