If you browse through many webmaster forums or websites and read opinions on PLR articles you will likely find both advantages and disadvantages of using them.

Some suggest that PLR articles are useless as they can be used by hundreds of people, whereas others claim that they can be a great way to provide content on your website, as part of your article marketing campaign, or in your ezine.

The key to benefitting from PLR articles is to use them as a basis for an article rather than a complete article all ready to use.

It is important that members of PLR membership sites do alter the articles to some extent to make them unique. Simply using the articles "as is" will not benefit you - it will be duplicate content for your website or article directories will reject them.

However, possessing PLR articles can be hugely beneficial. The research for the topic of the PLR articles has already been done. This means that you receive articles on topics that would have otherwise taken you hours or days to research and write. Can you now see how powerful they are?

Once you've received your PLR articles (usually monthly) you can then simply choose the articles you want to use and edit or reword the article. This is easy and only takes a few minutes to complete the whole article. In a matter of minutes you now have a unique article to use which required you to do no research on the niche at all. Many PLR memberships even provide groups of articles on topics (often 10-20 topics each month), meaning that you may receive 10-30 articles on any particular niche. This allows you to create websites dedicated to the topic and to use pay per click or affiliate programs to earn revenue from them. You can also choose to build a newsletter list if you want to keep in touch with interested visitors to the site.

The advantages of PLR articles easily outweigh the disadvantages, but only when used correctly. PLR members who choose to use the articles that they receive each month and post them to their website without any changes, will more than likely only see short-term benefits. Those who put a few minutes effort into each article will benefit in the short and long-term due to the article being unique and not falling into the search engines duplicate content filter.

PLR articles are cost-effective. Memberships can vary in price depending on the number of available membership spaces and the number of articles that are made available each month, but the prices are significantly lower than hiring a ghostwriter.