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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.