PLR ebook providers are a source of useful, relevant, important information! Find out more about this undervalued resource below.
PLR stands for Private Label Rights. This means that someone else has created an article on a topic, which includes the research and the writing. If the article fits in with the requirements of what you would like to write about, then it is potentially useful to you. The authors of such articles give, or sell, you permission to use their content in your publication, and then sell copies of it under your own name as if you had written it.
What Are PLR Ebooks?
Many PLR Ebook providers sell bundles of targeted PLR articles in the form of ebooks. Such ebooks may contain ten to twelve PLR articles on closely related, niche subjects.
Why Should You Buy PLR Ebooks?
Two of the reasons why writers and publishers buy PLR ebooks are that they are a fast and cheap way of obtaining content for a publication. For example, if you see a great skin care product that you would like to promote, you can either spend days researching and writing a dozen articles on the subject, or you can spend $20 on pre-written material and start selling immediately.
The Pros & Cons Of PLR Ebook Providers
There are various pros and cons of using PLR ebook providers. However, they are basically the same as when buying any product. Quality is of prime importance. In the case of PLR, this means material that a professional has diligently researched, professionally written and not oversold. In other words, you don’t want to be able to find your article on dozens of competitors’ websites around the Internet. This is called fresh content.
Where To Go For More Information About PLR Ebooks
So, if you’re looking for more information about PLR ebooks, then you should check out our collection of 125 niche PLR ebooks on this blog. Furthermore, ours are unique for several important reasons. A professional novelist has written them, and many of the ebooks exist in several languages. This means that you can sell to other countries with confidence using the exact same sales campaigns. This is what professionals do. Just look at ads for the same products in Britain, Spain, France, Germany, the USA, etc… They are all basically the same!
Now, you can do that too!
Conclusion on PLR Ebook Providers
There are plenty of places online where you can buy niche PLR ebooks. However, most of them have been poorly written, overspun, and oversold. No other PLR ebook provider except Megan Publishing Services offers niche PLR ebooks written by a professional novelist and translated by professional native translators. This means that you can run the same sales campaigns simultaneously in several countries.
PLR blog content for Writers Photo by Pixabay on Pexels.com
PLR blog content is useful for reasons that will suit many people including discerning authors. This may seem strange since you would expect them to write their own material. The fact is that they do, but a great deal of work goes into writing a good article or post, and sometimes even authors just don’t have the time to produce writing of high quality. This is where good PLR blog content can be useful. A good PLR author will have done the necessary research for the piece.
Find a reputable PLR provider
There are reputable companies out there offering PLR articles. However, most of the firms you will find are just reselling other people’s work that has been spun and respun so many times that it doesn’t make sense any longer. Yet others are selling plagiarized content. If you find one that offers high-quality PLR content, then you should make a note of it.
Choose a PLR topic or keyword phrase
Once you have chosen a topic or keyword phrase to help you find the article you need, you need to decide what kind of article you want. Do you want an ezine article, how-to article, social media post, blog content, or something else?
Find PLR blog content based on that topic
There are several ways to find content. One option is to search The Internet. Another option is to use a paid service. Obviously, one method is cheaper and the other more time-consuming.
Add images, videos, links, etc.
Once you have found an article that you think would work well for your business, you need to ‘make it your own ‘. You can do this by adjusting the style of the piece to match your own. You can also add some additional elements to make it more appealing to your readers. This includes adding images, videos, links to other articles, and even testimonials.
Publish your PLR content!
Once you have produced a good article from your PLR blog content, you should publish it as soon as possible. It will help you build authority and credibility with readers and the search engines. Repeating this process regularly will help you build up your own collection of high-quality PLR blog content.
Welsh Writer Gives Top 5 Tips for Aspiring Writers
Keep writing!
Welsh writer, Owen Jones, is from Barry, South Wales. He has loved language and languages all his life. This love manifested itself in learning nine languages and a constant stream of writing. However, for a very long time, he didn’t even consider writing books. They were for reading. He enjoyed writing during his formal education, and after that wrote letters to his friends and family. At twenty-eight years of age, he bought a computer, and began translating professionally. Ten years later, he became an office manager meaning more writing. The proliferation of the Internet was a boon for Owen. He started building websites and creating content for them.
Websites
By 2011, he had 145 websites and was writing 1,000,000 words a year as content for them. One day, he decided to write a book instead of all the content, and, so his first novel, Daddy’s Hobby was published in 2012. By 2018, he had written fifty-odd novels of varying length, and 125 manuals. Four years later, he had organised the translation and narration of many of those books, so that in 2022, he had one thousand books registered in his name at the British Library. Here are the top five tips of this prolific Welsh writer.
Tip One:
Keep writing! Even if you only write a few paragraphs a day, keep writing to train your mind to get into the zone! The most useful advice I ever got was from a footnote in a desk diary. It said:
“If you want to be a writer, write for ten minutes every day”
You will probably not see the full sense of this advice unless you really think about it. For example, I cannot write for ten minutes every day. Why? Because when I start writing, hours fly by! I can get into the zone just by picking up a pen, or opening a new document on my computer!
Tip Two:
Don’t worry about grammar or punctuation in your first draft. In fact, I can’t write like this, but I know that it does help many writers. The idea is that worrying about grammar slows the flow of creativity. I, personally, find that there are seconds to minutes when I have to pause to order my thoughts, and during these moments, I correct the typos that my word-processor highlights. I don’t worry about dates and fact though. If I refer to a factual event, I mark it with three question marks. It is easy to search for ??? during editing.
Tip Three:
I found it difficult to commit myself to a point of view at first. I was frightened of opening myself up to ridicule. Make no mistake, when you write, whatever you write, you are telling people something about yourself, even if you don’t want to, or mean to. Your politics, your beliefs, your opinions and your thoughts will become apparent to an astute reader. Often, I am the last to know or see a deeper meaning in my writing. I often learn a lot from an insightful reviewer.
This is scary, or it is to me… less so now that ten years ago, but it is still worrying – a little.
I think that the best way around this is to use social media. Express yourself on Facebook, Twitter or whatever you like, and write articles for your blog (start one). People will criticise you, mock you, question you, and some might even agree with you or even praise you. You will learn to ride with the punches and enjoy the non-criticism.
Tip Four:
You will probably be your own editor, proofreader, researcher publisher and promoter. That’s a lot of hats, but it means that whatever gets to market is your responsibility. It’s all yours… you have no-one to blame. If you spell February throughout your book as ‘Febuary’, someone will pick it up and mock you for the mistake. As common as it is, you are not allowed to make it. I was once asked to proofread a book by an acquaintance. It was humorous and well written, but the basic premise was the Celts versus the English. The problem was that he thought that the Welsh were basically English, not Celtic.
When I enlightened him, he scrapped the book, wasting nine months of work. And why? Because he hadn’t done ten minutes of research.
You will need to get facts right, and spelling and grammar are facts, whether you like it or not. The way to get around this is to read a lot and pay attention to what you read. Become a master craftsperson, don’t settle for remaining an apprentice. After all, books cost roughly the same whether the writer is famous or not, so would you expect a reader to want a well-written, professional-looking book, or your effort that is shot full of holes? Would you employ a carpenter who used second-hand, bent nails and a hammer from The Cheap Shop?
Tip Five:
Be yourself, I am a Welsh writer, and write about what you are passionate about. Yes, there are authors, mostly historical writers, who will choose someone from history, research that person and then write a biography, but that is what they like doing. However, most novelists write fiction. I do, but there is always some truth in my novels, and I usually wrap in some factual events.
Don’t worry about what other people think. They will either love you or hate you. Either way, they won’t affect your life. So just do what makes you happy, as long as what you write can’t be ridiculed for inaccuracy. I don’t mean political or religious bias, you’re allowed that, but many facts are indisputable, so don’t make mistakes with them.
If you don’t already know what your style, genre or voice are, hopefully, you will discover them. It is quite important. Especially if you want to attract an agent and a publisher. Most writers struggle with this, but reading, writing and ‘publishing’ your work will help you discover them. Reading widely, especially, helps you develop your own style and voice as a writer. You should read fiction, non-fiction, poetry, and plays. You should also read magazines, newspapers, blogs, and websites. This gives you an idea of what other people are doing with language.
Welsh Writer
I write because I love words. I love to follow an idea. They’re my lifeblood. I like to learn, so research is a pleasure for me. I write for myself, and for others. I write to share my thoughts and feelings. I write to entertain, and to educate. I write to inspire, and to motivate. I write to contemplate, and to understand. I write to connect, and to communicate. I write to create, and to discover. I write to live, and to learn. I write to laugh, and to cry. I write, because many people don’t listen.
In order to rank higher on Google, you must optimize your content. In this article, you will learn how to rewrite PLR content to create unique engaging articles.
First things first, what is PLR? PLR stands for Private Label Rights. It is content that another person has written, which you have the right to reuse. You may have been gifted the right, as in the case of free PLR, or you may have bought it. It is not permissible to copy an article just because you like it. This is intellectual property theft at worst and plagiarism at best and search engines will penalise your website or blog for using it. They will also penalise you for just pasting PLR onto your site whether you have the right to or not. This is multiple use content and is deemed to add little to no value to the user’s experience, because it is available elsewhere. So where do you go from here?
Choosing The Right Content
Obviously, one, if not the only, solution is to rewrite the PLR content in your own words. Rewriting PLR articles is an easy way to improve your rankings in search engines. It will also give you more flexibility when creating new content for your site. You would be forgiven for wondering what the point of acquiring PLR is, if you have to rewrite it yourself anyway. It is important to realise that free PLR on a popular subject has probably been rewritten, at least to some extent, hundreds, or perhaps, thousands of times. How many variations is it possible to derive from one 500-word article? OK, an almost infinite number is probably the correct answer, but a powerful analyst like Google would see through your content. So, my advice is never to use free PLR unless it is on an obscure topic. Always buy from a reputable source, because then you know that the writer has researched the topic, and not sold too many copies. I also recommend that you buy a bundle of targeted or niche articles on one topic. It offers more choice, more ideas and more opportunity.
Find Out Which Keywords You Should Be Targeting.
If you’re looking to write original content for your website, then you need to find out what keywords you should be targeting. This means finding out what people are searching for online and writing content based on those searches. You can use tools such as SEMrush to help you with this process. It will show you what keywords people are using when they search for certain topics. Once you know what words people are typing into Google, you can start creating unique content that stands out from the crowd. Find your ideal content by using your chosen keywords or key phrases. So, enter something like “PLR on yellow teeth” into a search engine, if that is your chosen topic. Purchase your bundle, and select an article to rewrite.
Write Unique Articles That Stand Out From The Crowd.
Read, re-read, and re-read that article until you understand it thoroughly, then I would start by bracketing off the existing headline and writing your own. You can change the title at the end, if you like. Something might come to you. Putting the title, and all subtitles, in brackets will remind you that they are not yours. You will need to create headlines that grab attention. If you write headlines that grab attention, then you’ll naturally attract more readers. This means that you’re going to get more views, shares, likes, comments, and subscribers.
Rewriting Tips
Many re-writers (and translators) create a blank paragraph above the one they are working on. The trend these days, is to keep the paragraphs and sentences short. Other tips include not using the same words in the same place as in the original and definitely replacing word pairs or phrases. It is difficult to edit technical or medical terms, but some alterations are usually possible and there are often British and American spellings (but stick to one or the other in each article). It is useful to use the technical term only once and then replace it with terms in common usage like ‘lumbago: backache, back pain, lower back pain’. Good source PLR makes a big difference, so buy quality PLR. It spawns ideas, cuts down on research and provides tramlines to guide you in the creation of exclusive content containing engaging information. Another point, is that good PLR in English is fantastic for those whose other tongue is not English. PLR gets a bad press because lazy people misuse it. However, in the right hands, it can be used successfully to publish a flood of high quality, targeted niche article content for your online publication fairly quickly, which will help you gain traffic and kudos, enabling you to become more successful in affiliate marketing.
I have spent most of this month doing what I should have been doing last year – adding references to book translations to my website.
I have admitted my error in not looking after this blog before, so I won’t go into it again now.
However, translators have every right to expect an entry on our blog Megan Publishing Services, and that is what I am doing now.
Book translations
It has surprised me how many languages Owen Jones’s books have been translated into. The current count is thirty-five (plus English), although not every book has been translated into each of those languages.
The book that holds the record is THE MISCONCEPTION, the first volume of the Psychic Megan Series. It’s the lovely tale of Megan, a psychic teenager, who is looking for answers to questions about her nascent psychic powers. It is available in 35 languages at the time of writing. We are only missing Sinhala to get all of them).
Foreign Translations
The second one is A NIGHT IN ANNWN with 14 translations. It is also about a man’s supernatural experience during an NDE (Near-death Experience).
There is a stunning number of applications to translate our books at the moment. We often receive up to ten a week from all over the world. It is not at all unusual to publish three of more books in a single day, and for a run like that to last a week. This is why Owen Jones has over 1,000 books registered to him. In fact, there are more than eight hundred in the British Library records, and we are adding more every month.
However, do you think that it is coincidental that the two fore-runner book translations are about Spiritual matters?
I don’t think so.
How about you?
Best wishes,
Chalita.
PS: I am now buying new book covers at the rate of two-three per month, so look out for lots of changes 🙂
PPS: I have changed the covers for both of the novels mentioned above. Check them out on this site!
Update March 2023: Publishing continues to expand. I now have 25% more than when Chalita write this article barely nine months ago. I am finding that audiobooks continue to outpace ebooks, and some months we sell three times as many paperbacks as ebooks. Ebooks are looking like third choice now for sure.
My blog stats for last month were quite unusual, but then so, perhaps, was my own personal activity on it I will explain.
For the first time ever, that is in more than twenty years, my blog received more visitors from the UK than from the USA! For the first three weeks, up to three times more. By the fourth week, that had evened out to about 50k from each country and by the month’s end, America was just in front.
Years ago, China was always in the top five, but nowadays, it rarely ranks in the top ten. Third and fourth are Germany and The Czech Republic, which is normal, although the Czech Republic is so small compared with the other top three that it is surprising really.
Fifth and sixth are the rivals Ukraine and Russia, but again, the difference in populations is enormous. Far behind come France, Canada, Spain and Australia.
My blog is hosted in the USA, and where it is hosted has a big effect on the number of visitors and where they come from. Britain is about a fifth the size of the USA, so how could it get more visitors in three weeks? In fact, the total number of visitors was up by 10%. My content is universal, not aimed at any country.
Odd Blog Stats
Another strange fact is that AwStats reports my blog having received 135k pageviews, but Google says that there were only about 500.
Can anyone answer that one for me, please?
So, what have I been doing that could have influenced the blog statistics so much?
Well, I spent most of the month updating book pages with new covers and more relevant meta descriptions. That’s all. I suppose I changed about thirty pages, but I can’t for the life of me see why changing 30/1700 pages would have that affect on my blog stats. Can you?
My (step) father, Owen Jones, created this blog, Megan Publishing Services, in 2013. It was shortly after he had written the first couple of volumes of The Megan Series, and it was meant as a vehicle for that series alone. The logo is the cartoon characterisation of the Megan in the series
He already had websites for his other books such as Behind The Smile and The Eternal Plan – Revealed and a personal catch- all called Welsh Products Online.
Megan Publishing Services
However, as his book real estate grew, and it happened very quickly, he decided to use the Megan blog to represent all his books. So, he rebranded it Megan Publishing Services.
Websites and blogs appertaining to specific series are now not being renewed when they expire. The rebranding of the blog / website has not seemed to matter. Well, to no-one except Facebook, which has labelled Megan The Misconception dot com as a spammer. It’s unfathomable!
In fact, people seem to have taken the site and the series to their hearts, even though we have rebranded The Megan Series as The Psychic Megan Series. We did this because it is more evocative of what the theme of the series really is. Megan is, after all, a psychic teen.
In 2020, he handed this blog over to me so that he could concentrate on writing.
Search Terms for MPS
Another interesting fact is that the three most popular search terms used to find our blog in order of usage are:
1] megs publishing services
2] meg’s publishing services
3] megan publishing services
People looking for us used the first search term eight times more than the third one! I am proud of that in a strange sort of way. I find it touching that people think of our blog in those endearing terms and, that the search engines accept the compliment.
Amazing, or what?
MPS and #MPS
When speaking about our blog, most people refer to it as MPS, but I have so far failed to make the search engines associate the acronym with us. A search on MPS comes up with boring ‘Members of Parliament’. Likewise, searching for #MPS on Twitter reveals posts about MP’s.
Still, I won’t stop trying to get this blog associated with MPS!
Publishing Services
I’ll take this opportunity to explain briefly what Megan Publishing Services actually does. It has two aspects:
1] Readers: we are showcasing about 800 books on this site. Owen Jones has written fifty-three stories and 125 manuals. All of the stories, and some of the manuals have been translated and / or narrated making up the 800 books mentioned above. For example, the first volume of The Psychic Megan Series now exists in 34 languages.
2] Writers: except for the basic writing skills that one learns at school, Owen Jones learned and taught himself how to write books. How to get them translated, narrated and published, and most importantly, how to get them in front of readers who might want to buy them. He is willing to share that knowledge with other (would-be) authors. He is also offering the said 125 manuals as niche PLR articles for writers to use in their own online publications in several languages.
Onwards and Upwards! Megan Publishing Services and everyone who uses it! ☺️
When I started thinking of applying for Google AdSense, this blog was receiving 10,000 unique visitors per month, who visited 30,000 times and read 250,000 pages. Google AdSense’s online earnings calculator suggested that those statistics should earn me about $1,000 a month.
That is not to be sniffed at, so I applied, and was granted a license to show Google Ads for AdSense.
However, it was a steep learning curve for me, and there was Covid, and I was getting into commissioning audiobooks from Dad’s novels. The audiobooks were going really well, and so Google’s AdSense took a back seat, along with the blog in general.
Looking back on it, that was a silly, naive move, since it had taken Dad more than ten years to build up the blog, and I threw away a lot of that effort chasing money.
Anyway, this year I have been concentrating on AdSense, but I have problems. To make Adsense work, you need an active website. The more active the better!
Google Tools
I use Awestats in cPanel for my statistics, as Dad did before for the figures above. It is depressing. I now receive 5,000 uniques (unique visitors), who make 15,000 visits and read 130,000 pages. So, about half of what used to happen.
Right?
Google Adsense
So, why does Google AdSense and Google Analytics report only 300 pageviews a month? Fifty times less?
Last year, the blog earned $2.10 all year. With all my extra work this year, I have earned 30c a month!
How can that be?
If 5,000 visitors are reading 130,000 pages, how can they only be clicking two or three times a month?
I can think of only two possible reasons.
Google AdSense is not being displayed on all the visible pages
Awestats is reporting falsely.
What do you think?
I blame Google AdSense 🙂 (not really).
Update March 2023: A high percentage of the pages on this blog were not being crawled. I think that the reason for this was a blog theme we used to use which would create ‘pages’ out of Twitter posts, categories and tags. It looked great having thousands of pages, but Google was not fooled because many of them had only ten words or less on them. We are now rooting those pages out and deleting them.
A worrying sign today, we had 6% more impressions than 28 days ago, and 7% more clicks, but the pay rate for them was $0.00 That doesn’t look good, does it?
Until about New Year 2020, I took care of my author platform assiduously. Decisions were always made with reference to it, and I pampered it with fresh content every single day.
I had all the social media sites too, but my pride and joy was my blog, which I had started in 2013, a year after I published my first book, because that already had its own website.
Anyway, I attacked the problem of not having an author platform with my usual zeal, and I was writing an article a day for the blog. That level of activity was bringing me in about 10,000 unique visitors per month, who made about 30,000 visits and read about 250,000 pages.
Every month…
My Author Platform
I was proud of it as I am a one-man band.
I could sell advertising space. In fact, people regularly approached me with offers without my having to advertise.
Then came the fateful date of January 2020.
I had a brainwave, put it into practice, and within months, I had increased my earnings ten-fold. It was going so well that I took on a couple of virtual assistants to help me. I hadn’t written a book at that time for several years, because I needed to make money, and my existing books just weren’t making it.
However, now that the money was flowing, I could return to writing.
Three months later, Facebook had banned my blog for spamming, and Audible had de-listed my most popular twenty-odd audiobooks for ‘fraudulent activity’.
How or why has never been explained to me despite scores of emails to Audible.
So, with my writing life in tatters, I returned to my blog.
I had not kept up my previous level of activity, and so, as I ignored my blog, unbeknownst to me, it had sunk to the level where it no longer showed up in search results… At least, not in the first ten pages, whereas it had been on Google page one.
OK, I have books now, but otherwise, to all intents and purposes, I am having to start again with my author platform.
Keep On Top of Things!
Let it be a lesson to you.
No matter how much things seem to change in your favour, do not ignore what you already have… the very things that gave you the leg up in the first place, because if you take your eye off the ball, well-meaning employees can screw things up for you, and you can even do it for yourself 🙁
When you are steaming full ahead chasing the money, be sure that you are not destroying the foundations of your business with the wake like I did.
I am hoping that our new garden fish pond will be an area of cool relaxation, tranquillity and delight for us, which will be great for writing. I could do with that as I have not written much over the last few years due a lack of stability in my life and a disappointing drop in sales, which could be the result of a culture shift brought on by Covid 19.
There has long been a movement away from reading and towards films or TV. Coincidentally or not, at the same time as the Covid 19 lockdowns, audiobook sales increased massively and from nowhere. For example, I was selling seven or eight audiobooks for each ebook. Ebook sales had fallen off a cliff! Another very unexpected change is that paperback sales have boomed. In fact, in January 2021, for the first time ever, I sold seven times more paperbacks and twelve times more audiobooks than ebooks! Admittedly, I am working off low figures, but it seems to be the trend
Those are statistics that I still find very difficult to believe.
Our Garden Fish Pond
Nevertheless, overall sales are down on previous years, and so writing new material seems next to pointless.
However, I want to keep writing, and so I am hoping that our new garden pond will be, not so much a source of the inspiration, but a quiet place to work that every writer needs. Inspiration can, and does often, come from the oddest chance occurrences… something someone says or does, whether it be live, on the screen of in print, but a writer still needs quiet moments to allow the brain to process those items and somehow come up with a story of sufficient length for the purpose required.
Garden Fish Pond
The picture shows the new garden fish pond that my wife, the builders and I have created. We have stocked it with a few Koi to see how it goes.
PS: We are currently available for international garden fish pond projects.
Availability: the drop of a hat
Vaccination status: double dosed and boosted
Daddy’s Hobby – The Story of Lek, A Bar Girl In Pattaya
I opened a Facebook account shortly after it launched, and after a couple of name changes, I settled for OwenJonesWriter. Pretty succinct, but it described me and my activities very well.
Social Media
I had various spurts of activity, and inactivity, on my Facebook account, but I gradually built up a following of about 3,000 friends, acquaintances and complete unknowns, as one does.
As you probably already know, I am a writer, and writers want to sell books, so I incorporated Facebook into my sales strategy along with Twitter, many social media accounts and my blog.
By using devices such as smarturl.it I was able to see where most of the click-throughs to my books came from. It is impossible to track actual sales in this way, but most of the clicks on my sales links on Amazon came from my blog and Twitter
There was absolutely no doubt about that. Facebook was delivering at most about 5% of those two combined.
Facebook Idiocy
Then, one morning, I turned on my computer to discover that my Facebook account had been blocked or banned or shut down, whatever you want to call it, for ‘spamming’. I have never ever spammed anyone, so I sought clarification, but they would reveal nothing other than (paraphrased) ‘…they had to keep the Facebook community safe, because I had been accused of spamming by several of their members’.
So, it seems to me, that if you want to shut your opposition down, you just have to get a few friends to complain to Facebook about spam.
This is obviously open to abuse, and is madness… it is Facebook Idiocy in the extreme!
The previous one was seven years old and the designers had stopped keeping it up to date several years ago. Therefore, as WordPress developed, certain key features had ceased to work.
The result was that it was becoming tedious to update.
I, and my colleagues and friends chose the new blog theme that you see before you at this moment. The designers have produced it especially for authors and publishers just like me 🙂
We set our new blog theme up quite quickly, although that is not to say that this new theme is without its problems, not the least of which is the slow response from the support desk and the lack of a clear, easily referenceable manual.
Blog Support
In these days of Covid-19, support must be difficult, since call centres are all closed, or should be, I imagine. Either that or they are running at one-third to a quarter capacity. Anyway, the support team does answer eventually, but it can take days, which seems like years, if you are anxious to get a new blog theme up and running!
If they had a comprehensive or even just a decent manual for the theme, I am sure that my friends and I could have sorted it out for ourselves much more quickly. However, the guide, such that it is, is on line and nothing more than a bunch of hyperlinks. After clicking on a few of them, I don’t know where I am any more.
My biggest mistake with the new blog theme was to impose it directly on top of the old one. I advise you to open a fresh instance of WordPress somewhere, and practise there until perfect. That way, you won’t lose your blog for a couple of days, like I did.
What a panic that was, I can tell you!
The new theme is huge though. My blog is quite large anyway for a one-man band, Owen Jones, the former owner, had created nearly three thousand entries. Two thousand of them were posts and pages! Still, I was stunned to find that the blog had swollen to 4.4 GB after applying the new theme!
Theme Features
To be honest, I have only set up the barest blog from the resources available in this theme. I am aware of what else it can do, but time has so far prevented me from learning how to implement more. Features, such as the direct sale of books (without paying Amazon, Apple or anyone else); the rental of blog space to advertisers such as authors, publishers or just about anyone; and so much more.
In fact, I have just decided that the next feature I want to implement is ‘the shop’. I am going to call it ‘Megan’s Market’, where I intend to sell readers’ and writers’ paraphernalia. It will also be able to handle the sale of ebooks, my own and those of others.
I hope that you will support me in these ventures, especially the direct sale of ebooks. If you are a regular visitor, you will notice me adding these extra features to our new blog theme over the coming month(s) 🙂
On the other hand, if you would like to purchase your own copy of this theme, called ‘Publisher’, or one like it but geared in a different direction, the owners are currently, as I write, offering a discount of 45%!
The Internet has been around for more than twenty-five years now, but there are still a lot of novice or would-be sales people who don’t realise that Internet marketing is basically the same as any other type of marketing, except that you have more possibilities and that it can be cheaper.
Cheaper? Cheaper to reach more people who might be interested in whatever you have to sell – your potential customers – and on an industrial scale. Traditionally, a salesperson would be advertising to the inhabitants of his or her town. Television increased the scope to nationwide, but the Internet has made that global.
If you are a one-man band, this potential can be daunting, and you will soon come to understand that you are just not able to source your goods; create and maintain your website; write sales literature for it; take orders and dispatch them; deal with inquiries, complaints and returns; plus maintain records for tax purposes, stock, etc., etc., all on your own. You will soon decide that you need help.
There are two ways to go: taking on (more) staff, or outsourcing work.
Taking on staff will free you up to learn about corporation tax, sales taxes, payroll, income tax, workers’ rights, health and safety, and other employment laws, whereas outsourcing will only mean a little more paperwork, It will actually create more time for you.
What you outsource is obviously up to you, but I am going to recommend that one of the things that you could outsource quickly and cheaply is the writing of your sales material and website content. By ‘website’ here, I am including the far more interactive and responsive blog. This is the easiest and cheapest way of getting your Internet-based business up and running quickly.
If you have gone down this route, like it or not, you are now an Internet Marketer with a mail order business. Congratulations!
There are five basic points that every Internet Marketer has to to learn about the mail order business in order to increase their profits:
that the Internet is just another (or perhaps the most superior) vehicle for direct response marketing, but it contains within itself the potential to make you rich! However, because the marketplace is so huge, and therefore has many participants in it, it evolves extremely quickly.
that there are hardly any markets where fashion or current trends do not play a rôle, and you will need to keep abreast of those fast-changing trends
that prices move quickly, some tend to rise, whereas those in older technology fall
international law changes – bans, embargoes, tariffs and trade wars are becoming more and more common
it has never been easier to reach so many people so quickly
When you have sorted these obstacles out, you may like to outsource your marketing as well as drop-shipping, but in the beginning, you will probably need to provide your own marketing material. This raises two questions: do you have the talent to write it, and, if so, do you have the time to write it?
If not, then again, you have two possible solutions: either hire someone to write bespoke articles for you, or find relevant off-the-peg articles and modify them to suit your needs.
The name given to these off-the-peg articles is PLR, which stands for Public Label Rights, and once again, there are two sorts: the first kind is usually free, but old articles that have been around for quite some time, and can be spotted on numerous sad-looking blogs; and the second, so-called fresh material, which has to be bought, although it is usually fairly cheap. Both kinds are often bundled into niche packages, and should be fine-tuned to perfectly suit your business.
The big difference is that the articles that have been used hundreds of times will need a lot of re-writing since so many variations already exist, whereas the the second can be turned around a lot more quickly.
Since these niche packages of PLR often cost less than $10 for a set of ten articles, it is hardly worth going for the free option, because your time is worth more than the cost of rewriting a free article as extensively as would be necessary to render it unique.
What sort of niche PLR packages are there? The range is unbelievable, there will not be much that a person can sell that will not be covered by a group of PLR articles somewhere. You will need to type something like: “[your product] PLR articles” (with the inverted commas) into a search engine. However, if you want to dive right in, even if it’s only to have a look at some examples of niche PLR packages, you could do worse than try Megan Publishing Services (http://meganthemisconception.com).
Megan Publishing Services has fresh PLR for Internet Marketing purposes organised into 125+ niche packages of about fifteen articles of roughly 500-600 words a piece, which is the recommended size for an Internet article. It also has the same PLR packages in several languages, if you want to go down that road. Any smaller and the search engines might ignore it, and too much longer and the reader might give up before the end, modern attention spans being what they are.
Once you have your finely-tuned, modified article, you should place it on your website, and promote that page to your previous customer list, your website followers and the social media. After a few days, when the search engines know that the article originated from your website, you could copy it to whichever other locations you have deemed fit. These are probably specific to the industry you have chosen to market to: games, women’s fashion, auto accessories, or whatever. You might also like to post the article to an Article Directory, which is a repository for pieces that the author is willing to share with other website owners. In effect, the other webmasters reprint your article on their site as a free guest article, but we’ll leave that topic for another day.
Get “Internet Marketing Secrets” in ebook or audiobook format from Amazon
There is good news for avid readers of Welsh writer from Barry, Owen Jones, that are also audiobook fans who prefer to use the ubiquitous service of Apple’s iTunes!
iTunes – Apple – now stocks not only the ebook novels of Owen Jones, but also the audiobook versions, AND, they are all on one page, which makes it easier to identify series and stand-alones.
Owen Jones now has more than three hundred ebooks on iTunes, a hundred and fifty of which are in languages other than English, and about seventy of them have been narrated by professionals to create audiobooks of excellent quality.
ACX – an arm of Amazon and Audible – has overseen production and Quality Control throughout, so you know that you are getting a great product.
Many Locations
Owen Jones writes in the general genre of Fiction>Psychological, often including references from Spiritualism, Buddhism, or even just ‘traditional religions’ – references such as intuition, dreams, Auras, Astral Travelling and the like. His books are also set in many locations, including Wales, naturally, Thailand, various countries in Europe, Russia and the USA. One series, Dead Centre visits seven countries in just one of the two volumes!
When asked about the new collection of his audiobooks on Apple iTunes, Owen said:
“I am very proud to have my audiobooks for sale on such a prestigious platform as Apple’s iTunes. So many hundreds of millions of people around the world use an iPhone, iPad or Mac several times a day, and now they all have direct access to my audiobooks as well as my ebooks. I don’t have one myself, but I checked some trivia just for my own information, and I was surprised to see that Apple uses 131 different URL’s to allow direct access to its products. That probably means 131 different countries! Not bad for a local Barry boy, eh?”
You can find Owen Jones’ audiobooks by following this link:
In my case, first it was Google that blew its benevolent image by dropping its company motto of ‘Do no Evil!’ and closing my affiliate account without explaining why, and now Amazon has done more or less exactly the same. In both circumstances, I literally woke up one morning to find that a factor of my income that I had put a long time into had been taken away.
Amazon sent me just one email stating that I had infringed some regulation, but that my affiliate account had been suspended. I tried to find out what I had done, but the reply was highly technical and written by lawyers. Something to do with ‘pre-loading’, whatever that is. If it is not using a link with an embedded affiliate link, then I have no idea what it is.
I asked, but Amazon has sent me to Coventry. All I know is that my practices haven’t changed since I joined Amazon more than twenty years ago, so either they have changed their rules or they are very bad at catching criminals like me. From my point of view, the Amazon penalty has cost me about $2 per week, which is all I earned, on average, from the 12,000+ visitors I sent them every month.
I should have left them years ago, and I mean that, but I have other interests. The main problem is removing the Amazon affiliate links from the Smart URL links on my blog of 2,000 pages and the 4,000 Tweets that I have accumulated, so that another company can pick them up and use them in their own name. (#UPDATE: Skimlinks and Viglinks can do this)
It means that I will lose a percentage of my $2 income, but, hey, I can live with that :-).
So, why did Amazon do that to me?
I honestly really have no idea, in exactly the same way that I didn’t know what Google was taking about. I am just a hard-working, one-man band. I don’t try to game any systems. Would you for $2 a month?
I reckon that Google and Amazon just wanted to reduce the cost of paying out to millions of affiliates by picking on them. I mean, if people want to buy from those companies, and many, many do, then they don’t have to go through me, do they? Amazon, Google and the retailer will still get paid, and the customer will still be happy whether a small man lije me is in the loop trying to earn a commission or not, won’t they?
It will mean that Amazon will have to write fewer, but larger cheques, which will save on bank charges… and I think that that is what this is all about – money, and keeping it among the already-wealthy.
The rest of us can go and whistle for it.
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We went for blood tests the other week. ‘Bloods’ as those in the profession seem to call them. It’s funny that such educated people would choose such an ungrammatical word. Anyway, we couldn’t make an appointment at the hospital, so it was a question of pulling a ticket and waiting forty minutes.
The nurse took two phials of blood from each of us, which was painless and quick. I had to see the doctor the same day on a different matter, and she said that the results would be with us in a matter of days. It took eight, but, hey, that’s OK.
We received our results today, and I was really surprised by how much information they seemed to have gleaned from that small amount of blood. Luckily, there was nothing serious wrong with us, but my wife was warned of a slight iron deficiency, and I of one of Vitamin D.
Dietary Deficiencies
So, a brief check on the Internet revealed that I should eat more oranges, cereals, oily fish, beef liver and egg yolks, and my wife should eat more green vegetables, red meat, liver, nuts, lentils, beans and brown rice.
I should also spend more time in the sun.
Now, that is all well and good, but my wife has been telling me for months that our diet has been deficient in precisely these areas since we left Spain twelve months ago, AND she has been telling me to get out from behind my desk and get some fresh air – every day, in fact 🙁 !
All the things that we are missing were commonplace to us until we moved back to the UK. Spain and Thailand are synonymous with sun, more vegetables and less stodge like potatoes, pastry and flour-rich gravy.
Different Diets
Thai women know about diet and dietary deficiencies. They have a different way of looking at food. To them, food is medicine and not just a gut-filler or something ‘to keep you going’. I’m British and still love my bread, chocolate, chips, and pies etc, but my wife would choose raw vegetables and fruit over those every time.
She is ashamed of herself that she has let this happen to us, although I don’t think that it’s only her responsibility. She does though.
She’s taking over care of our diet from now on, like she has done for the last fourteen years, until we arrived here.
Do you know whether your diet provides all your body’s needs?
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My wife is Thai, for those of you who don’t know me, and, since we have moved back to the UK to live, she needs a residency card (RCUK) or residency permit. These days, these cards contain biometric data such as iris scans and finger prints.
We first submitted her application for a residency card four months ago, so, for about eighteen weeks, she has had nothing to do, because the local government will not grant her the right to work without one. This is completely illegal, I might add, and contravenes the EU Directives to which the UK is a signatory. However, they don’t care about the law unless it suits them.
The government and the politicians who run it are the biggest crooks around… anyway, we all know that already, so back to the point.
On Thursday, we received a letter from the Home Office telling my wife that she should send them her biometric data within fifteen days of the date of the day that letter was posted. Well, I don’t know what that was, but the date on the letter was the third of the month, but the day we received it was the eleventh. Eight days to get a government letter 150 miles? That doesn’t sound right, does it? She had seven days to complete the task with a weekend in that. That sounds like them trying their damnedest to obfuscate to me.
Anyway, so we caught the bus to the nearest facility – the Post Office fifteen miles away – and asked for the biometric data service.
‘Oh, it’s down today, please come back on Monday. Sorry. Next!’
I wouldn’t move!
I complained to everyone around me and made a total nuisance of myself until the manager came.
‘I’m sorry, Sir’, she said, ‘but the engineer can’t get here for four hours. You may wait over there, if you like’.
I went into overdrive.
The result was that she rebooted the machine and it took my wife’s biometric data!
I thanked them and left, not sure whether to be happy that we had gotten the job done, or whether to be really sad that our once great Royal Post Office – the role model for all the others in the world – has sunken so low.
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When we arrived in Barry, my home town, on the thirteenth of June, we were looking for a place to stay – not a hotel, but a lodging of some kind or a flat. However, we had to stay in a hotel for two days in order to have somewhere to leave our bags while we trudged around town looking for somewhere.
Wetherspoons
So, we went into the neatest pub, a Wetherspoon’s, for breakfast and asked about a room. No-one knew anywhere, but I asked a taxi driver too. He named a few pubs that I knew, but as I was walking away, he added: ‘… but don’t bother with O’Brien’s in town because it’s full of alchi’s and druggies!’
We tried all the most likely places, but without any luck, and even tried a few guesthouses, but all in vain. Then, with hours to go before becoming homeless, we were walking in town past O’Brien’s when a man who was smoking in the doorway stopped me.
O’Brien’s, King’s Square, Barry
‘Owen, isn’t it? Remember me?” We went inside and renewed our friendship of fifteen years previously and I told him my woes. ‘You can stay with us’, he offered.
Eleven weeks later, we are still there, and we have been back to O’Brien’s quite often, because it is one of the best pubs in Barry.
I want to say on the record, that we have never found a more friendly pub in the UK. Furthermore, the people who frequent the establishment are among the nicest I have ever met. People can see our predicament, they are not stupid or blind, and there isn’t a visit there goes by when we are not asked how we’re doing. Locals frequently offer us a drink or some helpful advice on housing, the NHS or the local authority.
Landlord of O’Brien’s
Martin, the landlord, has also always been very welcoming and friendly, just like his staff and customers. It is a crying shame that this true community pub is going to have to close soon. I don’t know the ins and outs of why this is about to happen. However, the dying town centre and its completely unjustified reputation cannot be helping.
One of the best pubs in Barry!
If anyone is listening/reading who has a few bob to invest, come and take a look at the place. It is one of the best pubs in Barry. It would be a travesty for the local community if O’Brien’s has to close.
Please, step in and save the our community pub, some investing Angel!
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All the best,
Owen
Podcast: O’Brien’s – The Community Pub in the Centre of Barry
