Many have seen these as a timesaver, and correctly so, but behind the hype and hysteria there are some serious flaws and drawbacks to using Private Label or "PL" articles on a regular basis. If you plan on doing business online with PL articles as your main source of content, it's best you go into this with you eyes open. So, In order for PL articles to work for you, there are a few things you'll need to consider and do.



The first thing to scrutinize is the source. Does the site you've subscribed to have limits on its membership? It will make a huge difference if you're dealing with a site of thousands of members versus one where the owners have limited participants to a few hundred. Obviously, you want less competition and limiting your efforts to low-membership sites is advisable.

The second is quality. Who's writing this material? Does the PL site have a full-time staff of writers with English degrees? Or are they taking submissions from just anyone off the street and running a spell check? A great way to tell is to check for usage errors. The English language is full of words and phrases that sound alike to the ear, but have radically different uses. For instance, do you see the possessive pronoun "your" used in place of the contraction "you're" as in "Your gonna love it!" ("gonna" is another red flag)? How about an overly-generous use of apostrophes where a simple plural is required ("Million's of people use our course!)? Neither of these errors are caught by spell-checkers and they can be a sure sign that your original writer is not a professional writer - or even a skilled English speaker for that matter.

Finally, be sure that your article isn't all over the web already. Type a few phrases of the PL article you plan to use into the Google search box and see what happens. You'll likely be surprised, albeit not pleasantly. The obvious solution to this glut of repeated activity is to change the article in some way. Of course, the more work you perform on it, the greater the likelihood that you're defeating the purpose of purchasing a PL article, but then, that's the balancing act you signed up for when you took this route. If nothing else, at least change the title!

Private Label articles can be a great help in generating content for your website, newsletter, or e-zine. Just be sure you take the above points into consideration before you consider paying someone for access to them.