Okay, the first step on the road to Damascus and to making our life a whole lot easier is to use a thing called PLR (Private Label Rights) articles. What PL rights give you is effectively the right to brand the articles as if you had written them yourself. Those of you who are ahead of me will already be rubbing their hands together and thinking this is easy, just buy 5,000 PLR articles, re badge them as my own, submit to the article directories and hey presto, I am an overnight success.

Sorry, I wish it was as easy as that. I think I had better explain. The problem is that PLR articles get sold over and over again. They probably started their life as a genuinely unique article and once their shelf life was up, the article then found its way into the PLR soup.

So you will find that the article directories want only original articles. Indeed, Google and the like are also not particularly interested in filling their databases with thousands of copies of the same article (although with luck you can still get your PLR pages picked up). That is not to say that PLR articles do not have a place in our kitbag, to be honest, we would be lost without them. This is an excerpt from a typical PLR article (on Pay Per Click Advertising):

PPC ADVERTISING: HOW TO MAKE YOUR BUSINESS CLICK

PPC stands for Pay Per Click - a popular advertising technique on the Internet. Found on websites, advertising networks, and especially on search engines, PPC advertising involves sponsored links that are typically in the form of text ads. These are usually placed close to search results, where an advertiser pays a particular amount to visitors who click on these links or banners and land on the advertiser's web page.

In essence, PPC advertising is all about bidding for the top or leading position on search engine results and listings. Advertisers do this by buying or bidding on keyword phrases that are relevant to their products or services - the higher the bid, the higher the spot on the search results, the more the people will find the ad (and click on it) to go to their websites (this is why some people call it "keyword auctioning"). Advertisers would then pay the bidding price every time a visitor clicks through the website.

PPC advertising is also known under the following names/variations:

Pay per placement

Pay per performance

Pay per ranking

Pay per position

Cost per click (CPC)

PPC advertising is usually done with the following standard procedures:

1. Setting up an account and/or deposit funds.

etc. etc.

I think you get the idea and this article has been keyword optimized for PPC advertising and Pay Per Click advertising. To finish this piece off let us see what we can do with a PLR article and the positives and negatives of each action:

1. Use PLR Article in raw state, do not alter anything. Useful way to bolster content of web-site. Quick to do as no editing of article needed. Search engines may see as duplicate content. Article Directories not interested. Does not have any of your flavour, content could be poor.

2. Use PLR Article, reword a couple of lines, add a paragraph, change the title, add a resource box etc. Useful way to bolster content of web-site. Still relatively quick to do. Search engines still may see as duplicate content. Article Directories still might not be interested. Could spot you as a plagiarizer and potentially warn you off or bar you from their directory.

3. Use PLR Article as a base, totally rewrite the article. Useful way to bolster content of web-site. Quicker than writing article from scratch. Article Directories will like you. Search Engines will like you (because you have created original content) Mind numbing after a while. Still takes a lot of time to create content. Not much satisfaction in regurgitation.

4. Use PLR Article as a base, use a piece of software to automatically rewrite. Useful way to bolster content of web-site. A lot quicker than writing article from scratch. Article Directories will like you. Search Engines will like you (because you have created original content) Search engines are getting smarter and have introduced semantics into their algorithms, so if are things are should not how they be then watch out! Site could be de-listed! Article Directories still might not be interested. Could spot you as a plagiarizer and potentially warn you off or bar you from their directory.

5. Use PLR Article as a base, use a piece of software to tweak PLRA and automatically upload content to your web-site. Super useful way to bolster content of web-site. Speedy way of building a sizeable site. Search Engines may like you (because you have tweaked enough for them to see it as some original content) Watch out! Site could be de-listed! Article Directories will not be interested.

There is one other option we could use and that is (6) other peoples articles (like other people using ours, the ones we have submitted to the article directories). The only problem with these is that we have to leave the link in place to the other persons site. This will not be a problem down the track but for now we will stick with PLR articles as we want as many links coming into us as possible and not so many going out, if that makes sense.

Final option (7) is that you could write your own articles from scratch and upload them all manually (but we already know how long that takes).

For those of you who have been counting you will see that there are a total of SEVEN different strategies for article marketing. Guess what? Over time, we are going to use all seven. Quick word of warning; when you do find FREE PLR articles the likelihood is that there are many thousands of copies of that article already on the net. So best not to use FREE PLR articles without doing some sort of modification, preferably rewriting them in total, one way or the other.