Master Resale Rights: 5 Lessons Bill Gates Could Teach You
Copyright 2006 Mike Adams
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:
4. Just because someone else didn't become a billionaire with
the master resale rights for a product doesn't mean you can't.
Use your brain and figure out how to do things better.
Success in any business is often as dependent on intelligence,
motivation, and marketing as it is on the product itself.
Others created the BASIC programming language, but Bill Gates
repackaged it and sold it to Altair. Digital Research had a
perfect operating system for the PC, but they missed out. Tim
Paterson created the DOS operating system that would run every
PC in the world. But he sold it to Microsoft for $56,000. Bill
Gates is now worth an estimated $51 billion. Forbes magazine
says he is the richest man in the world.
Realizing he had a hungry market with a burning need, Gates saw
opportunities that others missed, took products that were
relative failures, and built a multi-billion dollar empire.
Not everyone is Bill Gates, but don't you think we all have
opportunities that we either take or miss? And don't you think
we sometimes settle for less than we could have?
That brings us to the final lesson that Bill Gates could teach
you about master resale rights:
5. Don't sell your life for almost nothing.
Bill Gates took opportunities that others had and did something
with them. Do you think Bill Gates would ever sell the master
resale rights to all of the Microsoft products for $10?
Of course not! Yet you will often see people selling master
resale rights to great products for less than you'd spend for
dinner! They don't realize they are selling their life for
almost nothing.
You can't go far on the Internet without someone promising you
that you can make a million dollars by selling their product. Do
you realize how many $10 products you would have to sell every
day to make a million dollars a year? 274! Each and every day,
365 days a year. Wouldn't it be easier to sell 27.4 copies of a
product every day for $100 each? Or a $30 monthly membership to
a site 8 times a day?
You're not going to see Microsoft selling the next version of
Windows for $10 each, and you shouldn't sell yourself short
either.
Don't drop your price. Build your marketing skills instead. Find
a hungry market with a burning need. Fill it by creating your
own repackaged, rebranded product from other people's master
resale rights products. Use your brain and figure out how to do
it better. Don't sell your life for nothing. Charge a higher
price and make it worth it to people. Fulfill their need and
you'll have no shortage of business.