#239: Write More Blog Posts in Less Time
Is it possible to write more blog posts in less time? Wait until you listen to this episode!
I have blogging coaches, Michele Brosius and Gina Lincicum, from Connect & Learn, on the show to talk about a PLR (private label rights) content.
This is content you purchase the rights to, and use it to help you write blog posts faster.
I knew so little about PLR until this episode, so it was great to get all my questions answered by Gina and Michele.
In this episode, we discuss:
- What PLR is exactly
- Best practices for using it to write posts
- How to make PLR content your own
- How to target specific keywords with PLR content
If you are looking for rapid blog traffic growth, this episode is for you. Enjoy!
Table of Contents
Show Notes:
- MiloTreeCart
- MiloTree Pop-Up App
- Connect & Learn Community
- Connect Learn Community PLR Shop
- Catch My Party
- Become a Blogger Genius Facebook Group
- All Blogger Genius Podcast Episodes
- Leave a Podcast Review on iTunes
- MiloTree on TikTok
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Intro 0:04
Welcome to the Blogger Genius Podcast brought to you by MiloTree. Here’s your host, Jillian Leslie.
Jillian Leslie 0:11
Hello, my friends. Welcome back to the Blogger Genius Podcast. I’m your host, Jillian Leslie. I am a serial entrepreneur, and I love helping other bloggers, creators, entrepreneurs grow their businesses.
I want to give you a quick update on MiloTreeCart, which is the payment tool David, my husband and I have created to help you sell directly to your audiences. You can sell memberships, coaching, workshops, and very excited to announce digital downloads that should be live in about a week.
So, if you are thinking of dipping your toe in selling products to your audience, digital downloads are a great place to start. These include things like guides and eBooks and templates and printables digital art really anything you can download; you can sell using MiloTreeCart.
For today’s episode, I have my friends, Gina and Michele on the show. And together, they help bloggers grow their businesses with their company called Connect & Learn Community. They also have a Facebook group. They are bloggers themselves old school bloggers.
And we are going to be talking about something that I knew very little about. It’s called PLR for Private Label Rights. And these are rough drafts of blog posts you can buy, get the rights for, and post them on your blog. This was all new to me. I thought it was pretty fascinating.
If you are trying to grow your blog, get more traffic, create blog posts quickly, you will be incredibly interested in this episode. So without further delay, here is my interview with Gina and Michele.
Write More Blog Posts in Less Time
Gina and Michele, welcome to the Blogger Genius Podcast. One by one just share who you are so they understand the differences in your voices and your individual entrepreneurial journeys?
Gina 2:23
Sure. So, I accidentally fell into blogging in 2008 like a lot of bloggers did back then I was a busy mom with three kids under three and I was a big coupon person and saving money. And it turned into very quickly a send out an email to friends and family. And then it just started growing and growing.
And I decided, let me turn this into a blog where they can come to me. And because it was right before the recession, got lucky with my timing and my frugal and couponing blog went national. And I was on national news and things like that. And so, I was earning income right away, way back then.
So I did take it seriously as a business from the very beginning. And then now it’s what 14 years later. And now I have multiple sites, I still have my original site. But it’s more like from real lifestyle. Obviously, the couponing thing has worked out by now.
And I’m doing different kinds of web publishing. I’ve done, gosh, all kinds of things over this interesting career. And I’m excited to be part of this partnership with Michelle.
Jillian Leslie 3:32
Cool. Alright Michelle, what is your journey?
Michele 3:36
And I also started in 2008. So that’s another thing that we have in common. And my blogging journey started out as personal stories to connect with family, none of my family lives by me. And we had someone in my family who was sick and it was just a way to keep up with that.
And I was always a couponer from way back. My mom taught me when in the 80s how to do that. And so, I started following all these coupon sites online like trying to save more money and somebody added me to a secret coupon blogger group and they started talking about how they were making money.
And I was like, “Wait, what? You guys are making money doing this.” And I was a stay at home mom with three kids under 12 and I was like, ah, make money. So got on the coupon train also did that for the three or four years it was lots of money.
Created another blog that was a lifestyle blog. rebranded that to a Healthy Living blog. And now I still have my original money saving blog, My Healthy Living blog and affiliate marketing blog and a recipe blog.
Jillian Leslie 4:56
Oh my gosh, I love what you guys are sharing which is that as you guys evolved, as the world evolved, as online evolved, you could be pivoting and changing and mixing it up and you guys have multiple blogs. So there’s something about that flexibility.
For us we started with Catch My Party, our path looks really random. We built a pop-up app for ourselves, it worked really well, we rolled it out as MiloTree, we sell it to other bloggers. From that we created this our MiloTtree Cart product to help bloggers sell digital products.
So our journey, you look at it and go, Well, that’s crazy, too. So I notice how we are continuing to pivot and change and grow as we’re growing.
Gina 5:44
And that’s kind of how we ended up talking to you about PLR today, because we were doing in person events, we were doing small retreats or blog.
Meeting at a Blogging Retreat
Jillian Leslie 5:56
Before we get there, I want to know how did you guys hook up and what do you guys teach? And what is your mission?
Michele 6:07
So as Gina started to mention, in 2017, I decided to host my first in-person event on a whim, I had gone to a huge blogger conference. And people were just talking about how exhausted they were working 20 hours a day, not seeing their kids.
And I was like, “This is ridiculous. This has to stop. People are going to kill themselves to make $1.” And I was very upset about that. So on a whim, I was like, “Let’s have a meeting in the Poconos. People can come we can talk we can share what we’re doing.”
So I did that in 2017. I had eight people show up. Not one of them that I knew. Nobody came down as far as Texas, to the Poconos. Develop that relationship. Next year did it again, had eight new people come. I think I had maybe one copy. And that was when I met Gina for the first time.
Gina 7:10
And then I think we knew who each other was just from being in that online space all those years.
Michele 7:16
And then, at the second retreat that she came to, we decided that we were going to form this partnership. And it was just a partnership with the retreats in mind. And then it morphed into so many other things because of the world shutting down.
We held our last in-person retreat, the same weekend that COVID hit, we had to change our flights and come home early from Florida, to make sure we got home.
And so, we created the Connect and Learn blogging community to support women in their journey to earn money doing things that make them happy, not doing things where they have to work themselves to death.
Jillian Leslie 8:02
I love that. And we met because you guys reached out to me, about MiloTreeCart and starting to sell workshops and things and then we connected. Now as I joke, like we’re best friends, so it doesn’t matter.
This is the coolest thing you guys told me about it. I knew this was a thing, but I didn’t really know it was a thing. And it is called PLR and it is a way to buy content and use it to create blog posts and write blog posts quicker. So, that’s all I know.
And so, I want you to explain to me what this is and why this could be a game changer for bloggers.
What is PLR?
Gina 8:59
So we keep finding people who have never heard of this, which is funny to us, because both of us knew about it way, way back when. But PLR stands for Private Label Rights, which just means that each person who’s creating it and selling it can decide what their rights are.
And in our case, it means that it’s sold to an unlimited number of bloggers. And we call it shortcut content. Because it’s not just for blog posts, you can copy the same text, to do your email newsletters to do challenges to make guides and eBooks, there’s so many things you can do.
The idea is that it’s already written for you, and then you’re going to take it and adapt it for your own use.
Jillian Leslie 9:44
Give me an example. Let’s use the example of the barbecue. So you guys have pieces of content, written stuff, potentially recipes and photos. And I purchased this from you for not a lot of money, how much is one of your PLR Products?
Gina 10:09
Four to seven.
Jillian Leslie 10:10
Literally $4 to $7?
Gina 10:13
Correct.
Jillian Leslie 10:13
And I get like a zip file, what do I get when I purchase this from you? I get a zip file.
Gina 10:20
If it’s just text articles, you get the text article and you can do that in Google Docs, or Microsoft Word or whatever you’re using. And then you get a page that has our rights on it, we’re saying these are the things you’re allowed to do with it. These are the things you’re not allowed to do with it.
So each time you purchase PLR from anyone, you should make sure you read that first page, lots of people skip that part. Just like reading a little contract. We’re telling you what you can and can’t do with it.
Basically, we’ve wrote these articles, but you’re not going to post this on your website and put us as the authors. Once you’ve purchased it, you own it. And it’s your content to do with what you will.
So for example, let’s do some grilling, we have some grilling articles that are things like 10 tips for the novice griller. So that could be perfect for someone who has a food blog, and they have a lot of articles where you’re grilling meat, and they want to speak to the beginner grillers out there.
Or maybe you are a real estate agent and you run a blog as part of your website to draw traffic to you through SEO, you could have these articles that are about home related backyard related things.
You could also use it as any kind of blogger, you could take several of these grilling articles and put it together into like an eBook. And you could sell it. Once you’ve purchased it from us, it’s yours to do with what you will.
Jillian Leslie 11:45
Here’s the thing, I feel like sirens are going off because wait a minute, I buy this from you. And I copy it and I paste it in my blog or in my newsletter, what? And so, tell me the correct way to use this content because I have a feeling that’s not it.
How to Appropriately Use PLR for Blog Posts
Michele 12:07
We never recommend that you copy and paste and publish something exactly as it is. We leave it open to adding lots of your own affiliate links and things like that. We don’t put in headers, which we suggest that you should add.
You should change the title, you should come up with a keyword that’s related to your niche. You should add your own introduction and your own conclusion to the article for sure. Those are just easy ways to change them up.
Most of the articles that we sell without photos are 750 words, you should at least add another 300 to 500 then you have a perfect, not perfect, but a good blog post. We don’t do the SEO optimization, things that should be your own personal addition to these articles.
But starting with 750 words, that means you can put a blog post article out in 15 to 20 minutes, and you’re done.
Jillian Leslie 13:03
Wow.
Gina 13:06
It’s especially important, I just want to say this is why some people who don’t use PLR get nervous about the idea of duplicate content.
Jillian Leslie 13:17
Let’s talk about that. What is duplicate content? And how do you not get dinged by Google by posting duplicate content.
How to Avoid Duplicate Content
Gina 13:24
Michele will tell you; Google is looking for duplicate content, mostly on your own site, you don’t want to be cutting and pasting the same things on your own site.
So for example, if I have 12 cookie recipes on my site, I probably could use the same, I could just make it a template and go in and change the kind of chips I use or whatever. But that’s not good for Google, it’s not good for readers.
Let’s face it, you still want to have a specific keyword phrase that you’re targeting that article for and the Googlebots are going to come read those first couple paragraphs, and they’re looking for that. But with a reader.
If I had a white chocolate chip cookie recipe, and you started reading it, and you couldn’t tell it, that’s what it was, you might back out of that article. So, first thing we’re going to tell you when you add your 3 to 500 words is it needs to be in the beginning of the article.
So, you need to make it fit for your niche. Let’s take that grilling article. Again, you could have someone who all they blog about is different kinds of grills. So, they’re going to attack that article slightly differently than me.
If I’m doing gifts to give a father who’s a new griller for Father’s Day, that’s a totally different angle. And if you’re a real estate agent, you might have a totally different angle or a different niche of readers that you’re hitting.
So we always recommend that you focus on those first two paragraphs. That’s the first thing your reader and Google will see. And so that’s the main way to avoid duplicate content.
The other thing is, and we have all this on our PLR shop too, because we’d love the suggestions. Things like lists where it’s like 10 grilling accessories that you need, why not flip them around, they don’t have to be in the same order that we gave them to you.
You could go in and add five more that you personally recommend. And now you’ve got 15. So you already have a different number than somebody else who purchased that article.
So we’d like to call it shortcut because we really do want you to add your own voice, add the niche of the readers that you’re reaching, and personalize it.
Jillian Leslie 15:26
I love that. It’s like this writing a blog post is like pushing a boulder up a hill. And that’s hard, staring at a blank page, that’s going to be a blog post that’s a thousand words we are talking hours and hours of work.
So, if I could purchase your PLR, put it in my blog, and then have something to work with. That gets me halfway up the hill.
But as I want to warn everybody, I would say even go into those paragraphs that I’m sure you wrote beautifully. And change every paragraph, change every sentence, just make it in your own words, because Google is really smart.
And they can go wait a second, this paragraph looks very similar to a paragraph on somebody else’s blog, or let’s talk about photos. If I buy a piece of content that has photos, what does that look like?
Gina 16:27
We offer photos with our recipes and DIYs. We have like some fabric projects, some arts and crafts, projects, things like that. Bloggers are out there spending a lot of money for virtual assistants and food photographers and people to do the work for them.
I know Michele and I both did this for many, many years back in the beginning, you couldn’t feed the kids dinner before you had the lighting right. And you had to take your photos and the kids are like, “Come on, we’re hungry.”
A lot of us just don’t do that anymore. And a lot of us pay other people to do those things. PLR price is so much far.
Jillian Leslie 17:01
So they are paying somebody else to be their recipe developers what you’re saying?
How PLR Saves You Time
Gina 17:05
Right. So they make the recipe, they take all the photos, provide the process steps. So, we are taking all of that off of your plate, you don’t have to go find that person. Because we’ve already done that. We are paying people to do that for us.
And then we are selling it at the PLR low price of $7 instead of whatever it would cost you to pay somebody else to do that. And to be honest, as a busy mom, the idea of just purchasing it.
And now I still need to write a whole blog post around it because the recipe or DIY will come with your instructions, or your recipe, the list of ingredients, the list of supplies and all the steps.
And then we have process photos, we have ingredient photos and all the finished photos, plenty that you can choose from that you can use for your pins and everything else. And again, you get enough of everything that not everyone who publishes that recipe, say is going to use all the same photos.
But again, it’s just like using Stock Photos. You don’t necessarily want to throw them up exactly the way that you get them. You can make a collage; you can flip photos very easily.
There are so many free photo editing sites out there where you can zoom in on other things, there’s so many things you can do to make the pictures your own, give them your own branding and that kind of thing.
Jillian Leslie 18:21
And change the file name, change the file name of the photo.
Gina 18:24
Yes. Again, you should be doing that anyway, because this whole recipe, we might put up a recipe called, Breakfast Casserole. But that doesn’t mean that everyone who buys it is going to call it breakfast casserole, even if it is a breakfast casserole.
Someone might be focusing on the fact that it’s vegetarian, somebody else might have a low carb blog, and they’re going to focus on that part of it. So, it depends on what your niche is and what keywords you’re going to use for your own website.
Michele and I have a sort of opposite food blogs in that, mine I don’t really care if it’s all full fat ingredients, and this and that, and hers tends to be lighter.
So, you can easily go through that list of ingredients. And you don’t know if that’s not low-fat cream cheese or low-fat sour cream, why not list them that way, that’s totally fine.
The other way that we personally love using the food photos is we’ve been blogging for 14 years, we have some very old posts that still get traffic that are worth updating. And some of these are pictures before I knew how to do anything. Before there was Pinterest or anything. The pictures were terrible.
So, to be able to go into an older post and bring it into this century and have these beautiful, professional photos is huge. You’ve already done that work that many years ago. And again, you’re more than halfway there at that point.
And especially with the food and the crafts, you’re only getting the directions and the photos so you’re not getting a blog post in this situation. In that case, you’re writing against the entire blog post traffic like you would if you purchased it from anyone who’s doing that work for you. Or even if you do it yourself.
Jillian Leslie 20:07
Why didn’t you write the posts for these?
Gina 20:20
Isn’t it the same reason we don’t do the SEO on there? You’re asking people to use that term, that keyword if you give it to them, we’re trying to not do that, we’re trying to make things like we have a basic brownie recipe or a basic chocolate chip cookie.
How many chocolate chip cookie recipes are out there in the world? It’s okay, that there’s multiples out there, we always say what about when you go to the grocery store and go to the bread aisle, there’s not one, they’re all the same. They have different packaging on them.
And then yes, some have different ingredients, and they are aimed at different audiences, it’s kind of the same thing.
If we wrote the articles for you, you would be much more likely to just use it the way it is. And I think for the food in particular, first of all, it costs a lot more. Second of all, it’s so important that it needs to fit your voice your site, it has to fit for your readers.
If you have a healthy eating blog, you’re going to write a different article than someone that’s like, this is the most indulgent Mother’s Day breakfast casserole you’re ever going to eat go for all the calories or something like that. That kind of thing.
Why PLR is Like Scaffolding
Jillian Leslie 21:33
Got it. I like that because it does force you to write in your own voice. And I agree with you that if you said this is a Mother’s Day brownie, it’s hard for me to then kind of restructure it, whereas you’re just giving me the bare bones.
You’re giving me the scaffolding. And I get to build out the entire story and the post around it. So, I think that’s terrific.
First of all, how did you get into selling PLR? And if I’m looking now to purchase this, how do I go find this kind of content?
Michele 22:09
So we got into selling it because Gina said, we’ve known about this for years. PLR has been around forever, really, but most of it was old. Most of it doesn’t come with images. You can buy a recipe with no images, which to me is like odd, I at least want the images to go.
But we saw a need for quality PLR for lifestyle bloggers, a lot of the older PLR is business related. There were a few recipes. Like I said most of them had no photos. So, we thought we need to do this for lifestyle bloggers, give them another shortcut.
Because in part of our mission of helping women is to help you find easier ways to do it. So you can enjoy your life, not work yourself to death.
Take the MiloTreeCart Digital Product Quiz to Find Out What Product You Should Create First
I wanted to take a short break to tell you about this quiz I just created to help you determine what type of digital product you should sell first. You answer a bunch of questions and it will tell you whether you should start with a paid workshop coaching or consulting or a digital download.
So, go get the quiz at milotreecart.com/quiz and go start building your digital product empire. And now back to the show.
Jillian Leslie 23:44
I think about all of the photoshoots I would be setting up in my kitchen and I pull out these lights from my basement. And exactly what you’re saying my daughter would be like, “Can I taste the egg?” And I’d be like, “Get your fingers out of here.”
And I would be wanting natural light and then it would be a great day. And it would take so much longer than I ever could have anticipated.
Gina 24:11
And part of it is the pivoting like Michele mentioned. Having kids a certain age I remember back in the day, I would be blogging about the places we went when they were toddlers and the crafts that we did and the food that we ate. It doesn’t mean that my audience necessarily has kids exactly the same age.
What if you run a blog for youngsters who do crafts and that’s your money maker. Just because your kids are out of the house doesn’t mean you don’t have that business anymore. It’s like owning a daycare or school or something.
PLR Saves You Time to Work On Building Your Business
So, maybe you’re not doing those things in your home anymore then who’s doing it for you? Who’s going to do those crafts and take those pictures and you still have the writing skills, that kind of thing.
Or maybe you’ve blogged so long that you are just over it, you don’t want to do that it’s not your favorite thing to do. And maybe you want to be doing other things with your time. And then so many of us have needed to do digital products for the longest time. That’s something you would tell us, right Jillian?
Jillian Leslie 25:13
Absolutely.
Gina 25:14
So, trying to find the time to have this extra task. Well, what if you purchase five of these grilling recipes, you wouldn’t even necessarily have to post them, you could throw them into a little cookbook, and it’s a grilling cookbook.
It could be an opt-in or you could sell it, that’s an instant way to use PLR. And not worry about the duplicate content thing. Michelle, I honestly don’t worry about that. Because we know we do SEO correctly, we’re always personalizing everything.
Again, think about how many chocolate chip cookie recipes there are, you can’t rewrite the directions too much, or it’s not going to make any sense to people. Let’s face it.
Lots of recipes have the same directions, and that’s okay. Most of us have used the one on the back of the package, that’s the same one that everybody is using. So, I don’t worry too much about that. I do like to add to it.
I think as we’ve been in this business so long, a 300-word article used to be enough. And it hasn’t been for a very long time. And so, it has been an adjustment for some of us to go up to 1,000 1,200 1,500 at the minimum word blog posts.
And so, we also don’t want you to add clutter, and friends that aren’t useful. So, a lot of our articles that we’re selling are our tips, are ways to do things, are things that we think you would find useful.
Maybe you’re updating an old article, and you need to add this many words, well, we’ve given you the how to clean this, that would be a perfect one to add to how to do this kind of cooking or whatever it is.
Jillian Leslie 26:55
Give me the URL so that people can start to look at this even like pause the episode. How can they go get your PLR? And then where could they find even more of it?
Where to Buy Blog PLR
Gina 27:08
So, our shop is at connectlearncommunity.com/shop.
Jillian Leslie 27:11
Connectlearncommunity.com.
Gina 27:12
Slash shop. And even if you end up at the main site, you’ll see the shop. We have, like I said crafts recipes, we have cleaning, grilling, lots of home articles, those do really well, because that can appeal to so many different types of bloggers. And even like I said, other people with businesses.
Again, it’s not just bloggers who use PLR. Because PLR has been around probably since the internet started. Think about any bank or school or any business that has a blog, because they know that there’s SEO traffic there. They’re constantly looking for content. And this is just a quick way to get content.
We have pets one too pets are huge right now. You could be a pet food website, not even a blog, you could have a business and you still have a blog on the side. Everybody does. And you need content all the time.
So, we do offer quite a few things where we want you to put your affiliate links in because we do want you to have that, that passive income. That’s really important to us. But yeah, you can search for the type of articles that you’re looking for. And the three letters PLR. And you’ll see it out there.
Jillian Leslie 28:28
So, go to Google and just say like, vegan PLR, vegan recipe PLR and you will find it?
Gina 28:36
Yes. And thankfully, there’s a new wave right now that we’re part of, sort of more modern PLR. But I remember even 10 years ago, I love the idea of just buying something for a few dollars, that would make my job easier, but nothing fit what I was doing.
It would be about credit and banking and computer office stuff, none of the topics just were more for that audience people were lifestyle bloggers.
Are people selling this on Etsy, for example?
I’ve seen it a little bit on Etsy, but we see it more in Facebook groups. That is the place that bloggers go, there’s a lot of buy sell groups, we happen to have one of those too where people can go in and try to find a VA that will work with them, oh, I need this many words written on this topic.
Or I need this old recipe redone and that’s where people find virtual assistants that do this kind of work. And so, that’s one of the places we sell to.
Jillian Leslie 29:36
Well, it’s so funny because for Catch My Party, I did hire somebody to create craft posts for me, but she would be doing the whole thing and going to Michaels and buying the tissue paper and then taking photos of everything and it was expensive.
Gina 29:55
Exactly. And she’ll never do that. But what if we could take some of that away what if once in a while, it’s not that I never want to cook something and take the photos of it, though it has been a while to be fair. Once you’ve done it for 12 hours, you get a little tired of it.
But yeah, if that’s what you do, that’s fine. But maybe you want to go on vacation and you want to schedule some blog posts ahead of time.
That’s one of the things we’re really pushing right now is, what can you get published ahead on your content calendar right now, so that you can take some family time off in July and August and not be on the computer? That’s a great way to use it.
How Often Should You Blog?
Jillian Leslie 30:32
This is so funny. I get this question all the time. How often should I blog? And I always pose this to David, my husband, and he’s like, as often as you can without having a mental breakdown.
And people don’t like that answer. They want to hear once a month, you’re good. Once a week, and you’re good. And then I remember David way at the beginning, I wrote my first blog posts for Catch My Party. And I was like, “Woohoo, I’m done.”
And he was like, “Oh, no, no, now you write another one, and another one and another one.” And I was like, “Oh, no, this took so much time.” So, what I’m hearing you guys say is that this is an awesome way to write blog posts faster to get good solid content, because the other thing too is, you can’t just put crap out there.
That’s not going to get you traffic. It’s not just quantity. It’s weirdly quantity and quality. And what you were saying, if I buy a piece of PLR, from you, let’s say it’s a recipe. And I’m going to create this recipe post how quickly honestly, could I do it?
How Long Does it Take to Create a Blog Post with PLR?
Michele 31:49
If it was me, I’m doing that whole recipe posts in less than 45 minutes, because I already have the photos. But what I’m going to do is upload all those photos to Photoshop.
I’m going to change the lighting on them, we’re going to take out some of the backgrounds and change them to backgrounds that I use. But that’s all bulk. I can get that from Photoshop.
Jillian Leslie 32:09
Wait, you are literally going to take out the background in Photoshop and like put another image in behind.
Michele 32:15
Yes, you can change it to white whatever. If there’s a brown board, I can change it to a white board. I can do that on Canva too. So, the background tool remover, which is very easy to use I’m going to do that. I’m going to look over how the recipe is written, I’m going to add some of my own commentary to that.
If it says 3 C’s, 3 C like abbreviation for cup of pizza sauce, or whatever, I’m going to change the word to cups or I’m going to write out the word three. To change the style up a little bit. I already have a blog post template that says here’s where H2, we’re going to do this.
I’ve already had this post planned out in my head because I’m not going to buy things I don’t need. Like Gina said, we don’t want you to just buy clutter and have everything in your head whatever, so in less than 45 minutes, I can be done with the recipe post.
Jillian Leslie 33:15
And you are optimizing it for SEO, you’ve already thought through what your keywords are, you’re going to sprinkle them through.
Michele 33:22
I’m going to add affiliate links, I’m going to link to my other blog posts that are related to this blog posts, I’m going to do all the things, but I’ve had a lot of practice doing all the things. That’s why I could do it.
If I was the new blogger, obviously, it’s going to take a little bit longer, because I probably don’t have the process down. But you can do a recipe with PLR in less than an hour, for sure.
Gina 33:48
But you’re taking away many hours of the buying the supplies, making the food, taking the photos, I was never great at photo editing. So, for me that alone and to be honest, I don’t take the time that Michelle does to deal with the backgrounds.
I’ll do stuff like zoom in and flip and put it into a collage of the process steps but I don’t bother with any of that background stuff because again, I’m not going to do editing, but to take away the thing that would hold me up from publishing for so long.
And why? But I can do the writing I can do the SEO part and again, once you’ve published a zillion recipes as we have you either have a template physically on your WordPress or you just have it in your head and you know the first couple of paragraphs.
You’re going to use your main keyword phrase and you’re going to use secondary and flip it around. It’s the this and that recipe and then this recipe for this and again you’re going to link it to other similar recipes for that ingredient on your website and you’re going to put in what goes with it.
Use the same H2 basically for every type of recipe. What do I need to make this recipe and I always like to throw in what tools do you need so that I can throw some affiliate links in there. And my readers tend to buy the serving ware that I use, which I find really interesting.
So for example, if I had like deviled eggs post, I’m going to put some examples of those platters with the little indentations for the deviled eggs, because that’s what people are looking for if they’re serving deviled eggs at a party.
Or if you’re using a hand mixer, you’re going to show different kinds of hand mixers, that kind of thing. So, the one thing that I like too because we’re coming at it from our experience is we’ve made all of our articles connect so that you’re not buying orphan posts that are going to sit out there.
So, if you want to do, like we mentioned, the grilling there are five to seven grilling articles that all go together. If you’re not a site that has novice grillers maybe that one doesn’t make sense. But the other articles will, and then you have things to connect to.
Honestly, this is how I got started with feel our way back when was, oh, there’s all this health and wellness PLR and it’s free, I’ll grab it, but it had nothing to do with my blog. So, it sat there because I just had nothing to do with anything. I couldn’t find what I actually needed.
How PLR Can Help You With Roundup Posts
So that’s one of the reasons Michele and I are doing this because we’re talking to people who do what we do, and we’re finding out what would help them what would save time. You probably know this too, one of the easiest ways to get traffic is to throw a round up, like 25 patriotic recipes for 4th of July.
However, how are you going to make that different than everybody else’s, that is exactly the same thing. So, one of the reasons we made these listicle posts of Instant Pot accessories, for example. Those are really great fillers.
And I don’t mean fillers in a bad way, fillers, because you want to have a real meaty article that’s better for your SEO than everybody else who has the same article.
Even if you took something like that post, and you chopped it up and use it across different Instant Pot recipes, you’re adding hundreds of words at a time. You’re bulking up in a good way, these articles, which is great for SEO, and honestly, you’re helping the reader.
We’re not giving you any blog content that isn’t going to be helpful to your reader. That’s the other thing. That’s where we’re coming from.
Jillian Leslie 37:21
What I would say to anybody who is listening, think about where you are in your blogging journey. Because typically at the beginning of your journey, you are setting up the lights and you are going to the grocery store, and you are buying all the ingredients and taking the ingredient shot and doing all of that.
And then as you start to think about your blog less as a blog and more as a business, your strategy should start to change. And it’s so funny, I talk to these beginning bloggers, and they’re all excited about I want to make food.
And it’s amazing how all of a sudden when money comes into the equation, and they recognize they could make money, they can make serious money doing this, their strategy starts to change.
And all of a sudden, it becomes things like, less about I’m going to make this beautiful recipe or this diet recipe or whatever it is, and it becomes much more about huh, I need to collect email addresses. I need to think about SEO.
All of a sudden, the business piece starts to become much more important. And setting up your lights and going to the grocery store to get all the ingredients becomes less important because time is fixed.
So, I think where you are in your blogging journey, notice that you want to be moving away. Yes, you love the creativity, let’s say of blogging. But when money shows up, and you realize there is money to be made, and you could make it you start thinking differently.
Michele 38:57
So, they give you like a shortcut of starting to outsource because a lot of times people panic when they hear that outsourcing word like how am I going to pay for that I’m not making any money.
But the PLR could help you get your feet wet with maybe outsourcing by buying a piece of PLR which would be like outsourcing because the photos the recipe are already done for you. Get your feet wet in the outsourcing part.
I buy PLR but I still outsource a lot of things. But I outsource so that I can spend my time on the things that make me more money.
Jillian Leslie 39:37
Like the strategy part. Like figuring out everybody what digital products to sell. As you move forward in your blogging journey, you’re going to recognize your email list is really important. There’s money to be had there.
You’re going to probably want to work with sponsors and then at a certain point, recognize that it’s hard to scale and not necessarily do and you’re going to then start to think about what digital products and services you could sell.
You’re going to also, let’s say, add some affiliates in there, but at a certain point, you’re going to go, no, where’s the money, and you’re going to kind of follow this path. What I love about talking to you guys is we this is all about the strategy behind growing a blog. It’s not just about creating beautiful blog posts.
PLR Is Helpful for Beginner Bloggers
Gina 40:30
And we’d like to use the word secret, which is something that beginning bloggers often compare themselves to very established bloggers who’ve been around for a decade, and they’re publishing every single day, and everything is beautiful and perfect.
You have to remember I want to say all, there’s really no way to get to that level without a team, without outsourcing, without help. There’s no one single person who is running that kind of empire and doing it all by themselves. I just don’t think that it’s possible.
And before you even get to that level of getting that burnt out, that’s where we come in, we just want to keep you from getting there, we would love to see you publish more often. That’s what we’re working on in our membership group right now, we want you to publish more often this summer, but be working less.
And so, one of the ways we’re doing that is challenging you to get posts scheduled ahead through the summer, so you can leave the computer at home to go off and do whatever it is you want to do. Is it kids? Is it no kids? Is it go to the beach? Is it hanging out with a friend?
Get off the computer for a week or two, whatever it is you need to do to recharge as a business owner and everything else, that’s how you’re going to do that is by working ahead. And that’s why we want to give you the shortcuts.
We do like to call it a secret because so many bloggers even established bloggers don’t recognize that that’s really how people get things done.
Jillian Leslie 41:56
I love that. Gina and Michele. Again, so you guys teach bloggers how to turn their blogs, I would say into businesses.
And so, if people want to learn from you buy your PLR join your membership join your upcoming workshop where should they go?
Michele 42:24
So, I would say first they have to go to our blog, all of our contact information is on there the services that we offer. So, it’s connectlearncommunity.com, we just changed the name online.
So, connectlearncommunity.
Connectlearncommunity.com. And you’ll find the links on there. And we can send them to you, I don’t know if you put them in the show notes.
Jillian Leslie 42:47
I do.
Michele 42:49
We have a dedicated PLR Facebook group, because there are lots of other people starting these lifestyles. And there’s people that we recommend that we have bought PLR from them, or we’ve worked with them, so we have a special Facebook group where we share about that.
Using MiloTreeCart for Workshops, Membership and One-On-One Coaching
Jillian Leslie 43:08
And you guys have been using MiloTreeCart for your workshop, for your membership, or kind of one-on- one coaching.
Michele 43:20
One-on-one coaching.
Gina 43:21
Our last workshop was basically what we talked about today, but visually, so for people who want to learn actually how to do this, I actually put up like a checklist of the things that we recommend that you change a piece of PLR.
And I pulled up my own WordPress and took a piece of PLR and actually did it in real time. So you can ask questions while it’s happening. And you can see how we literally only take a piece of PLR and turn it into a quality blog post so that you can copy it.
Some people prefer to learn visually. So not only do you get the handouts from us, but you get a copy of the workshop. So you can watch it again if you need to. I know for me; I learn better having the two windows open and I can pause the recording and go over here and do it myself.
So, we will be offering that again this summer. And of course, we will be doing that through MiloTree.
Jillian Leslie 44:09
I love that. My friends I have to say this is so eye opening. If you are starting to treat your blog as a business, learn from these two women because I think that’s really your mission is to help women turn blogging into money.
Michele 44:30
Yes, definitely. It’s definitely our mission to help women make money doing the things that make them happy.
Jillian Leslie 44:39
I love that. Well, I have to say Gina and Michele, thank you so much for coming on the show.
Michele 44:44
Thank you. We appreciated you very much.
Jillian Leslie 44:47
Wow. I hope you guys like this episode. It’s so funny that I didn’t really understand what PLR was until I talked to Gina and Michele, and it is definitely a way to accelerate your content production save you time.
But please think of it as a rough draft, there is a lot of work that needs to go into it so that it can really feel personal.
Since PLR is so new to me, if you’re using it to grow your blog, I’d love to know what you think of it. Just reach out to me and tell me. And my final request if you liked this podcast, please share it with your blogging friends.
Also, if you would go to iTunes or wherever you listen to your podcasts and leave a review, I would so greatly appreciate it. It’s the best way for people to find the show and then I can attract wonderful guests. So, thank you in advance for doing that. And I will see you here again next week.
Other Blogger Genius Podcast episodes to listen to:
- Secret Ways to Monetize Your Blog with Corinne Schmitt & Christina Hitchcock
- Best Ways to Build Your SEO Traffic in 2022 with Casey Markee
- 9 Productivity Hacks to Save You Time with Dara Sklar
Imagine a world where growing your social media followers and email list was easy…
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Let it pop up in front of your visitors and ask them to follow you on Instagram, TikTok, Pinterest, YouTube, Facebook, join your list, check out the exit intent but really get your community growing. And we’d love to help you with MiloTree. And I will see you here again next week.
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