How to Customize PLR to Fit Your Brand

Using PLR in your business is a great way to save time, money, and energy by getting prewritten content and done-for-you templates all ready to go. But, one of the biggest mistakes people make is not customizing it before they use it.

While this is optional, it is highly recommended. You want Google to see your content as unique, and to remain consistent, your content should be in your voice and tone.

But don’t worry, this is actually very easy to do! I am going to give you some options, both if you are in a hurry, and some more extensive customizations.

Why You Need to Customize Your PLR

Customizing PLR is a way to make it yours, just like you would do if you used any other template. If you purchased a website theme for your blog, you probably went through and changed the colors, fonts, images, and demo content – you need to do the same thing with your PLR.

Benefits of customizing your PLR include:

• You stay true to your brand
• Your tone and voice is consistent across all platforms
• You make it unique and original
• It helps with Google ranking
• You avoid duplicate content

Keep in mind, this doesn’t mean completely rewriting everything, otherwise PLR isn’t really benefiting you all that much. Customizing is making small changes to your content and templates just to make it stand out, to fit with your own brand, and to get content in your own voice. This can be as simple as changing the subheadings on a blog post and using your own images.

Before You Begin Customizing

There are just a few things you want to do before you begin the process of customizing your content and done-for-you templates to fit your brand and business.

Choose Content That Aligns With You – This actually begins when you are still looking for the right PLR to purchase. You want your content and templates to align with you, your vision, and your business. This is why we recommend joining multiple mailing lists and following different PLR stores to see what they offer, so you know when something is released that fits your vision or next project.

Review the Content – When you have purchased the content you want to use, take a little time reviewing everything. Read through every article or lead magnet, look through the bonuses like prompts and affirmations, open up all the templates to see what they include.

This gives you some ideas right away about how you want to use it – including what you will change, and what you will keep as-is. Take down some notes of any ideas you get about customizing it for your business.

Have a Plan For the Content – Finally, think of what exactly you plan to use this content for. This determines what you customize and how you go about editing everything, since preparing a lead magnet to use as a freebie is going to be a different process than if you were using that same content to turn into a blog post.

3 Steps For When You Are in a Hurry

If you want to get the content published as quickly as possible (we get it!), here are the 3 things we recommend doing to customize your content:

1. Rewrite the Title

The first thing you should do for all your PLR content is to rewrite the title. It doesn’t have to be completely different, but make it your own and write it in your own voice. PLR titles are often very simple and straightforward, because we know you have your own style and are most likely going to change it.

If a dozen people are using the same article as a blog post, you want yours to be unique and stand out. At the very least, write your own title.

2. Rewrite the Headings and Subheadings

This is another super fast and easy edit you can make to your content. Go through and just rewrite or rework the headings and subheadings. Again, this doesn’t have to be vastly different, but just put your own spin on it.

Example: For a blog post about self-care with a heading that reads: Benefits of Self-Care, here are a few alternatives:

Why You Should Practice Self-Care
How Self-Care Will Change Your Life
The Impact of Self-Care on Your Life

You might have your own style for subheadings on your blog, such as a specific formatting or making yours shorter or longer, so keep that in mind when writing them.

3. Write Your Own Introduction and Conclusion

The last thing we really recommend on your own content to get it in your own voice and be consistent with the rest of your content is to write your own introduction and conclusion.

The introduction is the first thing Google will see and the first thing your readers notice. It should sound like YOU immediately, so at least get the first few sentences of the introduction in your own voice.

With the conclusion, it often includes your call-to-action, so of course you want to customize that for your own needs as well.

Rephrase Key Sections in Your Own Voice

If you want to go beyond the basics with customizing, the next thing to focus on is some key sections within your content and rewriting it in your own voice. Sometimes, this is really just switching out some words that you would personally never use.

For example, if you purchased an article pack by me, and I used the word “cultivate” but that is not something you would typically say, but instead would say “foster”, that is such an easy switch.

To simplify it, here are some easy places to look at for rephrasing things:

• Bulleted and numbered lists
• The first sentences of paragraphs
• The introduction of different sections
• Specific examples (use your own)

Add Personal Details

Try to add your own personal details whenever you can! This makes it to where your audience can instantly identify this content or template with you and your business, especially if you are a blogger, coach, or influencer and your own identity is part of your brand.

This could be adding your own images instead of the stock images the PLR provider used, adding your website URL or the name of your business, or using examples from your personal life within the content.

Add Your Own Images and Graphics

Adding your own images allows you to customize PLR without having to rewrite anything. If you don’t have time to go through and rephrase the content any more than the subheadings and maybe a bullet list or two, just add some of your own personal images or graphics you like, and that will work great.

Format to Fit Your Style

Another super easy way to customize your PLR to fit your brand is simply to reformat the content to your own style. This of course includes colors and fonts when it is relevant, but that also means something like how a list is formatted.

If you always use numbered lists with a period at the end, but the PLR provided used a bulleted list with no punctuation, this will take you less than a minute to change and it instantly becomes more recognizable to your audience as your content.

Trust me, your audience is smart. They pay attention and they notice patterns. They will know if you suddenly do something different than how you used to. This is why remaining consistent is so important, and these tiny changes will add a lot more value to content you publish.

Review and Reread

Something I do with ALL my content, from what I write for PLR to my own blogs and emails, is read everything again from start to finish. This helps you pick up on a lot of nuances, phrases you want to change, or words you simply would never use. It is one of the best tools when you are reworking content to fit your business.

Customizing PLR Templates

Are you working on customizing done-for-you templates, such as planners, printables, journals, or card decks? This is actually a little easier and faster to do! All you really need to change are basic things to fit your design and brand, such as switching out the logo and images, changing them to your desired colors, and possibly changing the fonts.

There will be some printables where you just want to use different wording for each section, or possibly move some things around.