My rating: 5 out of 5

I first heard of InfoGoRound last summer and was immediately intrigued with the idea. I’d heard of private label rights articles, and it made sense to me to use them instead of articles written by other people. For one thing, I don’t like sending people away from my site if I can help it.But the biggest thing for me—some of those free articles are terrible! Bad grammar, bad formatting, misspelling, ugh. Haven’t these people heard of using a spellchecker? Also, if you think about it, most of those outgoing links lead directly to competitors. Good for them, not good for you.

So private label articles make sense, and it’s the direction I want to go. Anyway, I was coming to that conclusion when I stumbled across InfoGoRound. What made their offering different from other PLR sites was their “Cash For Content” program, where you could potentially get a rebate for the $24.95 monthly fee.

I hate monthly fees, and will avoid them whenever possible, so this immediately caught my eye. I signed up for their mailing list and received some free sample articles. That was a nice touch—it gave me an idea of what’s behind the gate. They did a good job of staying in touch and making offers.

When I finally decided to get serious about building niche portals, I thought about IGR and took a closer look at their program. I decided to sign up and check it out, reasoning that if I didn’t like it, I could unsub. I hadn’t really thought about grabbing a bunch of content then unsubbing, but in case anyone thinks about doing that, be prepared to pay $67 if you want to continue using any content after you leave.

The way the Cash for Content program works is this: you write an article and other members rate it on a scale from 1 to 5, 5 being best. If you get a good rating (4 I think), then you get a rebate on that month’s article. So you still pay, but somewhere down the line you get a rebate. If you don’t submit an article, well you paid a small price for a lot of great articles that you can now load up into an autoresponder or post on your website.

Of course I put off writing my first article until the very last minute, and considering the amount of time it takes me to write an article, I probably would have been better off just paying the fee. But I wanted to try it at least once, so one day before my first month’s billing period was up, I fired up Microsoft Word and banged out an article on—what else?— local business and the Internet. That’s where I started, it’s a subject I know well and I find it easy to write about it. So I wrote, spell checked, set it aside, then decided it was up to my standards and logged in to submit it.

That’s when we had our first tiff—I couldn’t cut and paste the article into the editor! I couldn’t figure it out, so I went to read the directions (something I never do unless forced) and that’s when I found out that you’re supposed to type the article into the little box manually. I guess that’s their way of making sure it’s an original article, not published anywhere before, written just for IGR? Dunno. Makes no sense to me—if you’re determined to plagiarize or use pre-written content, you can very easily just type it into the box while reading it from a piece of paper.

By now I had spent much too long messing around with this article and was in no mood to TYPE it into the box. Time is money and by my calculations, I had lost quite a bit while trying to recoup my $25 fee. So I fired off an email to the IGR guy, complaining about having to type my article into the little bix, then pasted the article into my email. I knew it was a damn good article, and apparently he felt the same because he placed it into my publishing area for me, but told me to be sure and use the online editor next time. Fair enough. Next time I know to actually write the darn thing online—you can save articles in draft mode and get them just right before publishing them.

So I published it and the article has been rated a 4. If you get 2 or 3 articles with good ratings, apparently you get “special” privileges that will allow you to cut and paste. We’ll see. The membership fee is so cheap that I think my time is better spent on other things, so I’m not sure I’ll write another one.

If you want to see the article I wrote, check out my GeoLocal Blog —even though it has my name on it, you may see it anywhere online with someone else’s name on it. That’s okay, because there’s a lot of content that will be posted across many of my websites that won’t have any author’s name on it—and that’s the beauty of private label content.

Another pleasant surprise were the niche article packs—25 or 50 articles on a subject such as gardening, dating, or gambling. There was even an ebook on dating, which could be used as a giveaway to get the email address. There are about 5 or 6 of these article packs in the member area, along with the searchable article database. I was pleasantly surprised by the interface, the quality control and all the extras. InfoGoRound has thought of everything. I think I’ll stick around.

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