Have you ever come across someone on social media who told you about “digital dropshipping” or claimed they earn hundreds of thousands of dollars each month from the digital products they’ve created? Well, most of the time they are lying through their teeth.
They could be earning a fair amount, sure. But the majority of these influencers only earn that amount by tricking people into believing that their digital products made them rich. Then they “coach” people for a hefty fee. But they didn’t earn money from digital products in the first place, so it’s a case of the blind leading the blind.
The sellers will still tell you that they earn hundreds of thousands of dollars, sometimes millions from one digital product that they spent five minutes to create – or some equally unbelievable story – and people eat it up and lose their time and their money for it.
PLR as an income source
It is true that if you do it right, selling digital products can turn into a decent side hustle. If you are passionate enough, it can even be turned into a full-time income. But it is also true that most people who sell PLR/MRR barely know what the acronyms stand for or what is actually included in their bundles.
PLR – Private label rights
MRR – Master Resell Rights
PLR (Private Label Rights) and MRR (Master Resell Rights) are licensing options that allow individuals to purchase digital products and use them for various purposes. With PLR, individuals can modify, rebrand, and sell the products as their own, while MRR grants the right to resell the products to others. By using PLR and MRR products, people can earn money by creating unique content, setting up online stores, offering digital products as bonuses, create YouTube channels or podcasts, or building membership sites to sell these products to a wider audience. Each seller defines their PLR/MRR rights differently however, so it is essential that you acquire a document from the seller that clearly states what you can and cannot do.
Nine out of ten PLR/MRR/template sellers have no clue what they’re selling. They hope they make the sale before anyone figures out that they’re clueless, and then they hide behind the fact that there is a no refund-policy on digital products. Many sell them dirt-cheap, and that should be a good indicator that the value is low. But I have found just as many people who use fancy product photos for those exact same products and sell them for a lot of money. And still, they have no idea what they’re actually selling.
Beware of Etsy’s Digital Bundle sellers
I once purchased a bundle from a person on Etsy who was a recommended Star Seller. They went all out to get me to connect with them afterwards, only to try and sell me some course. Spread all kinds of nonsense about how they learned so much from it, earned so much from it and it would only cost me 5oo dollars to buy it and then I could sell it to others.
I kept quiet and carefully looked through the products they’d sold me. I’d paid a fair amount for them and I wanted to make sure the quality reflected the price. Spoiler alert, it did not. The graphic design was a mess. The content was just thrown into a pile on every other page. The grammar and spelling was absent. The educational information inside was mostly useless. I found tags and links from a handful of different people within the content. So I confronted the seller.
They were incredibly nonchalant and almost proud of the fact that they’d at most skimmed through the products once and knew perfectly well that they were selling garbage. And even after this, they STILL tried to sell me the course they’d mentioned and offered to teach me – for a hefty sum – how to sell nonsense and scam people too.
On their social media, they used the common line “I am a mother of x kids who earns “insert impossible amount” online while I sleep.” I get why they used the mother-card, but I still think it’s wrong. When someone hears that the seller/influencer is a mother, many people honestly believe that that means they must be authentic, reliable and a good person. But it really doesn’t. It simply means that they are a seller who will use any method to sell. Even their own kids.
That’s how they get you
On Etsy especially there are many who sell the bundles that hold millions of PLR/MRR products, but that too is often a scam. The amount may be correct, but even if it is, it isn’t possible for them to have gone through all of the products in the bundle, and chances are, they haven’t seen any of the products for themselves. They likely purchased zipped folders from someone else and simply resold them. But the original creator of the bundles knew what they were doing.
Those bundles usually contain one of these three types of products:
1 – E-books/courses/articles that have been downloaded from free PLR sites, bundled and then sold. Smart, but kind of unethical.
2 – E-books/courses/articles generated by AI. The “books” usually contain a few thousand words that have been poorly written and spread out on 10-30 pages, depending on how large they made the font. Had the written text been placed in a regular document, it would likely have been 3-5 pages long.
3 – Written works by famous authors that have been downloaded illegally as e-books only to be bundled and sold as PLR/MRR. But the copyright those books are protected by is still very real. It is illegal to buy/sell/download them. Even so, there are hundreds, if not thousands of people who sell bundles like that on Etsy. Some go as far as to strip the individual works of their copyright pages, but most keep the books as they are, copyright and all, and somehow have the audacity to claim they own them and are able to sell the rights to you, the buyer.
My experience
I have ended up buying from a few sellers like that in the past. Most of the sellers have no contact information and since the products are digital, there’s no refund available.
If you buy on Etsy, you may think that you’re safe. But you’re not. Buyers aren’t protected if they purchased digital content. The sellers on Etsy can technically be contacted, but I’ve found that many knowingly ignore contact attempts. The reviews on their products are often misleading. Many customers give a 5 star review for simply receiving the download.
Many of the sellers I’ve gotten a hold of have been incredibly rude and acted upset that I would dare bother them after the sale. Even though I reached out to tell them I either never received the order or received links that led nowhere. Several of them had generated the product descriptions and copied the product pages from someone else, and didn’t actually speak English. But what they all had in common was that they didn’t care about what their customers thought or whether or not they were selling anything of value.
Don’t fall for it
There was one seller that stood out though. In a bad way. At first, they surprised me. They seemed like a decent enough person and responded very quickly. But it did not take long for them to show their true colours.
I informed them that the bundle they sold me was full of illegally acquired books that they had no right to possess, resell, let alone sell the rights to. They acted innocent and claimed they didn’t know about any of that because they had purchased the bundle from someone else. That seller had told them that it was okay to sell the products, so they started selling it as a bundle without checking it. The seller apologised profusely, gave me a refund and promised to remove the products from their store. Then they made some brief small talk before they stopped answering and disappeared.
I checked their store several times after that and the products never got taken down. They’re still selling them to this day. They made sure I couldn’t give them a negative review and essentially paid for the problem – me – to go away. They knew they were scamming people, selling illegal products that were in breach of the copyright, but it didn’t matter to them. They knew most people would be like them. Most buyers wouldn’t check the products or at least not well enough to realise what they’d gotten themselves into. So they kept selling them.
PLR Templates for digital products
On Etsy, there are also those who sell bundles of templates. Some sell templates for Microsoft-programs, or templates for pages used in Shopify sites etc, but most of them sell Canva templates.
The sellers often tell you that they also added some special bonus templates to your order. This is done to try to secure a good rating from the buyer. A way to razzle dazzle them.
The bonus templates are almost always useless. Each time I’ve received “bonuses”, I have had to bin them right away. The templates that I did pay for were almost as useless. They are often sold in huge bundles, but you’re lucky if you can get a handful of decent products out of the purchase, and that is after editing them, merging the content and completely transforming them. And this requires time, care and at least some level of skill. So most people won’t bother. They just change the covers, tag them with their own shop name and sell them again.
These templates or editable products have often been generated by AI or by someone who didn’t speak English or know anything about creating such products. The language is often so bad that you can barely tell what kind of template it was intended to be. Many are simply full of random words that make no sense at all, so you usually have to delete and rewrite most of the text inside. As well as change the fonts, the sizes, the space between rows and characters, placement etc.
On top of that, the elements within the templates are often misaligned, in the wrong size or even piled on top of each other. So, fixing the design, removing the text and adding your own is like trying to unravel an incredibly knotted ball of yarn – stressful and very time-consuming. In most cases it would have been easier to watch a YouTube video for guidance and start from scratch.
They’re the same
The worst thing about the sellers who sell templates and bundles of ready-to-sell products and PLR/MRR-products – at least on Etsy – is that most of them are selling the same products only with different covers. The content is the same and when you download them, you can see that they have been copied and shared by dozens of other sellers. Neither of whom bothered to check the content. It is so common that it has become almost accepted that the templates you buy will be of an incredibly poor quality, but if you are lucky, you may be able to use them to create one or two okay products.
My business is different
When all is said and done, I know and I believe that you can earn an income online ethically. You can create and sell high quality products that your customers can trust in and rely on. You can create valuable content, earn money from it and do all of this without hurting people.
Everything I do in my business comes from a place of kindness, a deep longing for freedom and a desire to help people decycle their lives and heal. I have always wanted to break free from the ordinary and help others do the same. That is why I create educational content online and that is why I started my online store. I wanted to provide my readers and customers with everything they needed to transform their lives and start living authentically. I have written hundreds of articles about all matters of personal freedom. I have now also written a book and I have two more being published. But to truly help people earn an income online, I knew I had to do more.
I have dedicated time and effort to put together a few different bundles that will help people start creating income streams online. Whether you want to create a passive income source, start an online business, earn money as a writer or an artist or become a freelancer, I’ve got you covered. But most importantly, I have created bundles of PLR/MRR products and templates that I have personally checked and confirmed can easily be transformed into valuable content that can be monetised.
By carefully selecting and assembling these resources, I aim to make it as easy as possible for individuals to tap into the many possibilities of online business, enabling them to create, market, and sell their own content. I also offer various guides to how to use digital programs, how to market online, and more.
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