Ummmm….Now What??

Technically, the answer is no for ‘Traditional’ PLR. Major no no, in fact. However, Zero Content books are usually more about the template design than the verbiage itself. The main work in creating these books, especially planners and workbooks, is in the design, creation and formatting of the interior pages. The verbiage is generally very limited, and very easy to completely change with a simple “Search & Replace”. “The Day Ahead” becomes “What’s On The Agenda Today” in 10 seconds, and there is no duplicate content issue to deal with.

Amazon will not allow duplicate covers – however, if you look through their website, you will see MANY covers that are very, very similar. Same design with different background colors, different ‘banner’ template behind the title text etc. I have yet to see any guidelines as to exactly what constitutes a duplicate cover, so I don’t know if you could use the same cover with a different title if the interior is totally different, ie: use the same cover for both a notebook of plain lined pages and then on a full planner. If anyone knows – drop us an email at [email protected].

This is a VERY good question, because Amazon does NOT allow PDFs to be sold on Amazon. However, it IS okay to offer the printed version of your Zero Content book with a link to the downloadable version as well! And from a marketing standpoint – this gives you an option to send your customer directly to your website, too 😉

An alternative suggestion (and one we have been successful with) is to create a mini-guide or course on how to use the planner or workbook (ie with a specific diet or workout plan, or setting up a blog – the list is endless) and the Interactive product then becomes the downloadable companion product to the main product. In this way, you are differentiating yourself from the competition by offering a major bonus to the core product by offering a printable or interactive PDF to allow the buyer to maximize their purchase experience.

Get creative – there are a number of ways around this one!

Your own website is a great place to start, but Facebook, Pinterest and Etsy are all great places to sell PDFs and printables of any kind! I am actually putting together a list of some of the lesser known places to sell printables and hope to have it done next week. It will be free for all newsletter subscribers 😉

In the meantime – here’s some good articles we found about selling Printables, Planners and other Zero Content products:

HOW TO MAKE AND SELL DIGITAL PRINTABLES ON ETSY

How I Made Over $30,000 Selling Printables on Etsy

16 great places to sell your design work online
(Not all of these will accept Zero Content products but many will!)

This really depends on where you are planning on selling the finished product. If you are selling it on your own website, you can probably get away with minimal changes, but if you want to sell on Etsy or Amazon, you will need to change the original template enough that it is no longer recognizable as the original PLR.

Fortunately, with our Zero Content products this is really much easier than with the typical PLR book! You don’t need to re-write 20,000 words because a simple ‘Search & Replace’ to change the table headers or page title to your own verbiage is all you need to create an original Planner or Journal that is specific to your audience. ‘The Day Ahead’ becomes ‘My Workout Goals’, or ‘My To Do List’ becomes ‘My Exercise Routine’.

In 60 seconds or less…you have a whole new Planner 😉

If you need to just edit the text, you can use a variety of free and very low cost software, such as PDFEscape, but if you want to make any serious edits or changes, or you want to create your own original document, I would strongly recommend that you look into Adobe Acrobat PDF PRO DC. This software used to be prohibitively expensive, but you can now get a 14 day trial and then the monthly fee is as low as $15 depending on the plan you choose.

The problem with pretty much all of the other PDF software is that there is very little automation capability. For example, the Stay On Track Workbook Journal was designed to be used for a full year, and be used as one document, so the user could reference back without having to open another file. So, we started with a 432 page word doc that we were able to convert to an interactive fillable doc in just a few minutes. This was more than 9,000 fields to create! Now, Acrobat PRO is NOT perfect – you almost always have to make manual edits and corrections as some areas will not be ‘seen’ as fields and you have to enter them manually – and in the case of this project, there were 2 checkboxes and 2 fields that we had to go back and create manually across all 432 pages….and yes, it took a couple of days to do…but compare that with the same process via PDFEscape….

PDFEscape is a great piece of software for 2 or 3 page docs, such as checklists – but every field has to be set up and entered MANUALLY!! Now, that’s not so bad if you have 20 fields – but 9,000+?? Ain’t happening, my friend!

There are definitely times when you have to weigh cost versus output – and seriously, Adobe Acrobat PRO has to win hands down if you have any serious Zero Content projects in your future.

Or you can just leave the grunt work to us, and we will continue to churn them out for you!