As someone who has purchased a few hundred thousand pieces of PLR content over the course of five years, I know firsthand how easy it is to get overwhelmed by your content. Especially, if you have become addicted to purchasing PLR content to repurpose into digital products but don’t have a clear plan on how to get it all repackaged and listed.
First off, know that you are not alone!
Purchasing bundles of PLR content with the intent to repackage and list it for sale on platforms like Etsy and Amazon seems like a fast and easy way to add additional revenue to your service-based business. Plus, digital products like planners, journals, affirmation cards and google sheets are all the rage right now in the world of coaching and freelancing.
So if you have been struggling to scale your service-based business in this economy, leveraging PLR into a suite of digital products in the form of a store or membership is a no-brainer.
However, purchasing quality PLR content, sorting through it, and prioritizing it to be repackaged and sold is debilitating for many entrepreneurs and small businesses. As a result, that library of content either sits in the cloud collecting dust or gets rushed through the listing process without repackaging (Major NO NO).
If you can relate, this post is for you because we are going to create a system for sorting through your PLR library before I share an inspiring way to get it packaged and sold. If you’re tired of waiting for ‘someday’ to launch your digital product business, use this post as your springboard for momentum.
Step One: Start By Mapping Your Buyer’s Customer Journey
Most coaches would tell you that you need to choose a niche. I’m making you go deeper so this doesn’t turn into another colossal waste of your resources. Instead, I want you to imagine your target buyer as the heroine of their journey and I want you to think about the transformation that you want to facilitate for them with your products and services.
This about just trying to sell a bunch of digital “stuff” for quick cash. It’s about making a difference as scale and creating a legacy while having the financial and time freedom to cherry pick out projects, right?
That said, you need to be selective about which products you list and how they are repackaged and by taking the time to map their heroine journey into phases, stages, and steps. Once you have everything that they will experience out on paper or the screen in front of you, it will become obvious which products need to get listed in which order to best serve your customer base. It will also make it easy to see how to bundle products and services together to optimize lifetime customer value.
Step Two: Archive The PLR Products You Won’t Need
Staying organized is a critical component in your success as a digital product seller and that means eliminating clutter. Now that your customer journey map has illuminated your path to profit, you can see which products are not relevant in an urgent and important way. Remember, not every problem is a profitable problem to solve.
Step Three: Review Your PLR Content For Quality With A Rubric
Now that you have organized all of your content according to your target buyer’s customer journey and eliminated the irrelevant topics you need to review the content you still have for quality.
Remember, the point of selling digital products is to acquire paying customers that can later be moved up our funnels into larger ticket offers. Therefore, these digital products you’re selling in your membership or your store will reflect you, your brand, and the level of quality that you stand for in your craftsmanship.
This is your first impression.
I’m not saying you need the content to be perfect but you should strive for excellence.
My favorite way to ensure that the content meets my quality standards before it goes out as a digital product designer is to use a Rubric. In fact, I find using a rubric a very useful way to train my apprentice and assistant in the process of developing and designing digital products from scratch. It also helps me to feel more confident in listing and selling the products so I strongly encourage using a tool like a rubric or a system that works for you.
You can also use a rubric to help you with the PLR buying process because as you now know, not all PLR is created equally and most of it isn’t valuable without a lot of help from a designer like myself.
Step Four: Create A Product Development Schedule To Fill The Gaps In Your PLR Library
Odds are you have now identified a handful of areas where you still need content or products developed to meet your buyer’s needs at every step of their journey. Now is the time to close those gaps, Sister.
Your immediate content schedule now revolves around filling those gaps, starting with the end of the journey and working backwards. Why? Because as you plug those gaps, you will be empowered to better serve your high-ticket paying customers as you develop the remaining content. In fact, I suggest you gift existing customers with new products and allow their feedback to guide the remaining content.
This will also allow you to attract more high-ticket customers to pay your bills while you focus on developing out this digital product suite the right way. If you’re going to do this you want it to pay off and keep paying compounding dividends for a while. That means doing it right the first time.
Step Five: Use A Simple Digital Asset Management System
One of the biggest mistakes virgining digital product sellers make is they fail to implement a consistent digital file management system. As a result, they actually don’t know what products or content they have or where it is.
That’s like having a warehouse of inventory that you can’t find – yikes!
Oh, and if you care at all about optimizing production time for your digital products then using a digital asset management system (or a consistent filing system) is a must. The most important part of this system is that you follow and maintain it so keep it as simple as possible and use as many sub folders as possible.
Step Six: Research, Rebrand & Repackage One Product At A Time
Now that you have a prioritized list of the digital products you will be listing, you have to research, rebrand and repackage the content to attract the right buyers. You never, ever, EVER want to list Master Resell Rights content or PLR content and products exactly as you purchased them as it will hurt your SEO and probably never sell anyway.
Unless you fully intend to invest the resources to repackage your PLR products and content before listing, you might as well not even bother with trying to sell it at all. It’s a terrible business move that will severely cost you – for nothing. Therefore, if you aren’t able to repackage the content, I suggest you work with a digital product designer like myself that can guarantee it is done right.
But this process really starts with performing some research to see how you need to position the PLR product.
Let’s say I have a client that wants to sell a PLR client management dashboard built on google sheets that is lovely but very generic and the listing photos are practically viral so everyone has seen them. Let’s say the client’s target buyer is female yoga instructors in their 20’s struggling to develop a business that pays more than $40 a class. I can go on platforms like Pinterest, Google, and Insight Factory (ETSY SEO research tool) to see what colors, cover designs, and topic angles are trending right now.
That research will inform:
- The product name
- The product branding and overall aesthetic design
- The product angle and positioning
- The product price
- The product listing image layouts
All of these are very helpful in taking an overdone topic with a tired design and transforming it into something elevated and evergreen.
Step Seven: Incorporate Feedback Into Future Products
As you list, promote, and sell your products, collecting honest feedback should be a top priority. Again, I suggest gifting new products to established and loyal customers to add equity to that relationship while collecting their feedback. That will get you started until the organic customers begin showing up and adding their own feedback.
When feedback is disappointing, take your emotions out of it and use it as an opportunity to optimize. Sometimes that means recognizing your messaging or pricing might be attracting problem buyers. Other times, it will mean that you are truly dropping the ball but you still have the opportunity to make it right and crush it the next time around.