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Editor:
Today we are honoured to welcome Jimmy D Brown, a pioneer, an esteemed figure in internet marketing. Celebrating 24 years of remarkable innovation and quality, Jimmy is a revered advocate of the PLR or Private Label Rights movement. Known for his high quality products like Earncome and Nicheology. As he approaches his well-deserved retirement next year, Jimmy joins us for one of his very rare interviews, sharing the wisdom he’s accumulated over nearly a quarter of a century in the business. Jimmy, welcome.
Jimmy D Brown:
Well, thanks very much for having me. Really, I’m the one who’s honoured to be a part of your podcast here, so I really appreciate the invite.
Editor:
Oh, that’s very nice of you to say, but thank you for joining us. Could we start by asking how you initially got involved in internet marketing and the creation of your products?
Jimmy D Brown:
So back in the late ’90s, I first came online to buy some sports cards for a collectible shop that I owned, and I started getting these spam emails about making money online. So I looked at the offers that were being made and became intrigued, because I had always loved writing and the thought of creating a digital information product sounded appealing to me. I liked the idea of doing the work once and then you get paid over and over again, really with very little operating costs.
So I began brainstorming ideas for what I might write about, and I stumbled upon a website called X.com, which was actually owned by Elon Musk, although no one really knew who he was back then. Well, this was an online bank and they gave new customers $25 to open up a free account with them. But the really interesting thing to me was, they would also give $25 for every customer that you referred to them who opened up a free account.
So I wrote this little ebook that I sold for $12.95, and the whole premise was to show people some ways to make money online, one of which could earn them $25 over and over again. Well, people would buy the $12.95 cent ebook from me, click through to X.com through my referral link to open their account, and then I’d earn $25 in commission.
Over and over and over again this happened. It was awesome. I thought I was set up for life. But then X.com merged with another company and changed its name to PayPal. And PayPal decided they weren’t going to do the $25 referrals anymore. So not only was I not going to be able to get those commissions, but I could also no longer sell my $12.95 cent ebook because it was no longer valid. I was basically out of business. But I saw the potential for selling information products to a global audience from the comfort of my home, and I quickly started creating new resources, and been continually doing so since August 2000, when I launched profitsvault.com.
Editor:
Well, legend has it that you are the person who invented PLR as a term or a concept. So tell me, how did that come about, and what drove you to invent the PLR licence?
Jimmy D Brown:
Toward the beginning of 2003, I started a monthly membership site called profitsvaultmonthly.com, where I created a new ebook every month, and members received master resale rights to it. This was uneditable, so they couldn’t make any changes to it, but they were licenced to sell it and keep 100% of all the income that they generated. I’m a very prolific writer, but keeping up with a new ebook every month became a little bit of a challenge for me, and late in the year, I found myself struggling to make my monthly deadline. I had hired a ghost writer to create a few niche eBooks for me in markets that I was unfamiliar with, but I never did anything with those. So one month, I decided to release them to my Profits Vault monthly members instead of a regular ebook that I wrote. And I gave these to members in a fully editable document with a licence to edit them and use them as if they had wrote the content themselves.
And these products in the rough, which is what I called them, they were a huge hit. I mean, people loved them. So the next month, I did the same thing, and again, they were incredibly well received. Well, during that time, I was down in Austin, Texas, working on another project with Ryan Deiss. At one time, we co-authored a number of products together and even formed an LLC together, and I told him that I was onto something here and we decided to open a monthly membership site with these editable niche products. We called it Nicheology.
And as we were writing the sales letter, Ryan turned to me and said, “Well, what do we call these things?” And I said, “Well, I guess we should call them private label licences.” And so we launched the first ever PLR membership site, and very quickly sold out 1,500 memberships at 29.97 per month, and PLR, as I envisioned it at least, started there and took on a life of its own after that.
Editor:
Well, over 24 years, I’m sure you’ve seen a lot of changes in the digital landscape. What are some of the pivotal moments for you in the early days?
Jimmy D Brown:
Well, one of the biggest things for me was making that first $12.95. And that’s because I realized right then and there, this thing works. It wasn’t much money, but it proved that my system worked. I knew that I just needed to scale things to make a lot of money while helping a lot of people. That’s one of the lessons that I learned early on that served me really well, and that is this, rather than trying to be good at many things, be great at a few things. I’m a big believer in mastering one thing before starting to do a second thing. Make it work, make it work better, make it work as best as it can be, and then you make something else work. It’s important to make something else work, of course, because I learned that lesson from x.com. You don’t want to count on one thing as your only thing.
The old saying is, “Don’t put all of your eggs in one basket,” and that’s true. So when you master something, it’s important to diversify after that. When you have multiple streams of income, if one of them dries up, it won’t ruin you while you find a way to replace it. Back in 2001, after the terrorist attacks on the United States, a lot of online sales really slowed in my industry because people weren’t spending money on digital goods while they were wondering what was going to happen next. But I was okay because I had a monthly membership site. While my other products weren’t selling as well, my monthly residual income was still coming in like clockwork. I was able to continue supporting my young family during some incredibly difficult times.
Editor:
Well, Jimmy, you’ve set a high standard of product quality in an industry that’s often flooded with quick solutions. How important is maintaining quality for you and why?
Jimmy D Brown:
When I was just getting started, I purchased an information product that promised something like 20 ways to make money selling on eBay, and it was literally like this, “Make money on eBay by selling video games. Make money on eBay by selling jewellery. Make money on eBay by selling books. Make money on eBay by selling electronics,” and so forth…
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