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First thing’s first – I don’t want this blog post to make it sound like I’m some kind of site-creation guru. As far as Internet marketers go, I am pretty far behind the curve in terms of site creation. I have 25 sites and another 5 or so that I created and sold (or retired) over the last four or five years. All of my current sites are successful in the sense that they generally make more money than I spend to put them online, but keep in mind that I am still in the habit of doing a lot of my own writing, coding, uploading, etc.

Okay, so that out of the way, I want to share with you something pretty cool that I worked on with a friend a little while back. It’s come up recently as I’ve gotten quite a few questions from people here on the site about the first steps of taking PLR and creating a site with it. This is basically exactly what I would do if I were to buy a 10 pack of PLR and create a site right now. It takes about an hour from start to finish (depending on the depth of the content and customization). Here we go:

1. Buy Your PLR – Let’s assume you just decided to become an Internet marketer, heard about PLR and picked up a pack from a well trusted provider to get started with. In my case, the site we started was about rebuilding relationships and I snagged a decent sized pack of PLR that came with two eBooks, 20 articles and a chunk of autoresponders. I think it cost $27 and I split it with my partner.

2. Keyword Research – Keyword research is important in some niches. In others, not as much. Scratch that. It’s always important. It’s just that, in some niches, you can get away with a few shortcuts. Relationship rebuilding is in the middle so I did some light keyword research, following the advice I had gotten from a friend a while ago to look for 10-20 target keywords with between 500 and 5,000 searches each. Aim for 10,000-20,000 total searches among all of your keywords with low-medium competition.

3. Choose a Domain Name – Using the list of keywords, find one that is grammatically correct and available from your domain registrar and lock it up. I’m not very picky about extensions. The sites I build are based around solid content and longevity, plus Google won’t reward you just for having an exact match domain name anymore.

4. WordPress! – Setup domain name, set nameservers to my server (during checkout to avoid downtime), install WordPress with Fantastico and install one of my favorite themes. I like Continuum from WooThemes, as well as Thesis and the Genesis Framework. They’re all premium, but they look nice, work well and don’t require many tweaks.

5. Get a Banner – For now, just place text at the top, but in the mean time, go on Fiverr and check out this gig. The turnaround time is often pretty long, so you may want to shop around, but if not in a hurry, this provider does great work.

6. Content Tweaks – For now, just get one or two pages of content on the site. Go through the content and make some very basic tweaks, injecting your keywords, moving bulleted lists around, removing paragraphs and customizing the first and last paragraph. It should take 5-10 minutes per article and you only need 2-3 to get started. There are some videos on the training tools section that cover this process.

7. More Content Tweaks – You can do this yourself if you’re on a budget, or you can go to iWriter.com. I alternate between the two depending on timeline and budget, but most of the time, you’ll get content back from iWriter in less than a day. They’re fast. So, load up the rest of your content, get it rewritten and it should cost between $40 and $100 depending on the quality of writer you hire. Do it yourself and you’re looking at 3-5 hours. Not a big deal, but if you’re in a hurry, not ideal either.

8. Traffic – You need traffic. Gone are the days of just loading up on Xrumer back links and waiting for traffic to role in. I personally only use content-based SEO methods these days. I know other methods work, but I’m paranoid. Anyways, take 5-10 of your PLR articles and put them into article directories (after being rewritten) with links back to your site. Make sure the content is good and your anchor text is natural. No direct keyword matches if you can help it. Also, look for a mix of follow and no-follow directories. Other quick tips for indexing including a single swipe of SocialAdr (20-40 credits only) and posting to 3-5 forums. This will get you indexed fast.

9. Build and Maintain – Next, build your traffic with regular guest posts on niche blogs and continue adding new content to the site. The goal is to keep building slowly – 3-4 posts per month should cover you.

10. Monetize – You can monetize from day one if you want (I often do) or build a content-only site and then monetize once it averages a certain number of visitors per month. I like to start with monetization because then I know where I stand with algorithms, ads included. An opt-in list with freebie and offers is good; banner ads are okay and text ads are surprisingly good here. Other options include reviews and if you can get enough traffic, selling space on the site for media buys.

The Time Commitment

This is ridiculously oversimplified, but if you discount the time spent waiting for your banner, rewritten content and traffic to come in, it takes between 45 minutes and 2 hours to build a site using the above list. The cost is between $50 and $100 (though it can be more if you want original content or if you pay for someone to handle some of these tasks) and the payoff can be as little as a week or two and as long as 6 months. The site that I first used this strategy with took 3 months to recup investment of $200 but now makes $120 per month on average, all with a $27 PLR pack and some basic rewriting. Not amazing, but solid.

What will work for your marketing efforts best? It really depends on what you want your sites to do. I like to provide content and build up ranking in Google naturally. It takes longer but when I get there I tend not to go anywhere. None of my sites have been dinged by Panda, Penguin or anything else Google threw at me. This site actually increased its traffic by about 30% after the most recent update by Google.

Keep an eye out for creative ways to use PLR and if you have questions on anything, hit me up on the contact form here on the site.