Smart Internet marketers know that buying master resale rights is a shortcut to getting products on the market. But did you know that Bill Gates and the Microsoft empire were built from purchasing master resale rights?

That's right - the richest man in the world bought the rights to DOS, the operating system that began the Microsoft empire.

There are 5 important lessons Bill Gates could teach you about master resale rights.

1. Find a hungry market with a burning need and fill it.

Bill Gates read about the Altair 8800 computer in Popular Science in 1975. Realizing Altair needed a simple programming language to make the computer popular, Gates sold a version of BASIC to Altair before it was even written. Then Gates worked night and day with Paul Allen and Monte Davidoff to develop it. Microsoft was born.

In 1980, IBM created the desktop PC - but they didn't have an operating system. Gates saw a burning need waiting to be filled, and learned a new lesson:

2. You don't have to create a product to fill a need if you can buy the master resale rights instead.

IBM approached Bill Gates to create an operating system for the PC. Gates initially recommended they contact Digital Research to purchase their CP/M operating system. But those negotiations failed, and IBM came back to Bill Gates.

Gates learned that Tim Paterson of Seattle Computer Products had developed a clone of CP/M called QDOS. Microsoft bought the rights for just $56,000.

Of course you don't have to invest $56,000 to get rights worth selling. Often you can buy master resale rights for $100, $50, even $10 or $20. You can even join resale rights membership sites and get thousands of dollars worth of products for a small monthly fee. Sometimes you can even find master resale rights products for free!

Why so cheap? Sometimes the products aren't very good, but often they're great products that weren't marketed well. Not seeing the opportunity, people sell their work for almost nothing.

Smart marketers know that sometimes you can just rename a product or change the marketing and have a hit. This is where Bill Gates could teach us the third lesson:

3. Repackage or rebrand, change the marketing approach, and build your own brand.

QDOS stood for "Quick and Dirty Operating System." IBM might have bought it even with a name like that, but being a savvy marketer, Gates decided to rebrand it. He dubbed it "PC-DOS," for "PC Disk Operating System." He targeted it squarely at IBM - and they bought it, big time.

When PC clones hit the market, Gates saw another hungry market with a burning need. Microsoft quickly rebranded DOS, dubbing it "MS-DOS" for "Microsoft Disk Operating System," thus building the Microsoft brand at the same time. The rest is history.

Resale rights products are often widely available. If you do the same thing as everyone else, why should someone buy the product from you? But if you take the time to repackage or rebrand the resale rights where permitted, you will have a unique product you can market to a hungry audience with a burning need. Because the next lesson we can learn from Bill Gates is:

Page 1 of 2 :: First | Last :: Prev | 1 2 | Next