That is what I do because my company doesn't keep Perl modules in a place that Perl knows anything about.

If you provide the PREFIX variable to the perl Makefile.PL command you can install a module anywhere you want using the standard process. e.g

perl Makefile.PL PREFIX=/my/custom/INC/dir/

make

make test

make install
[download]

This hasn't always worked exactly as planned but it has worked for me for many years. I never install modules into the OS perl distribution and always install modules in my home directory when I'm on a system where I can't install another perl distribution or don't have root priveleges.

Refer to the perlmodinstall man/perldoc page http://perldoc.perl.org/perlmodinstall.html

CPAN and CPANPLUS can be configured to use this PREFIX by default so that you can install modules in your special place as easily as into the distribution. Just refer to their documentation.