You spot an offer online: one disc holding thousands of ready-made products for next to nothing. It looks like a shortcut to a full product line.

Hold on. That bargain may turn out to be the most costly licensed product you ever buy.

Licensing is a fine way to build a business. Yet the market is full of junk, stale files, and sellers who had no right to sell what they sold. One bad buy can eat weeks of your time, not only your money.

In this post you will see nine hidden red flags to check before you buy any licensed product. Each one takes a minute to spot. You will also get a five-minute check to run on every license you look at.

I have been in this business since 2001, and licensing has been part of it from early on. These are the traps I want you to skip.

In This Article...

Why A Bad License Costs More Than It Saves

The price tag is the smallest part of the cost.

Think about what a weak license takes from you. It takes hours of reading, editing, and setting up. Then your readers find the product flat, out of date, or sold by half the internet.

A weak licensed product also puts your name on someone else’s mistakes. Your readers trust you, not the seller.

A checklist beats a hunch. When a deal looks exciting, your judgment leans toward yes, and a list on paper keeps you steady.

The fix is a short list of checks. Run them before you pay, and a bad deal never gets through. If you enjoy ideas like this one, you will find more in other posts I have shared recently.

Two kinds of license matter here. Reprint or resell rights let you sell the product as it stands.

Private label rights let you change it. Keep that split in mind, because some flags matter more for one kind than the other.

Flags One And Two: The Bargain Bundle And The Crowded Market

Flag one: the giant bundle. Auction sites sell thousands of products on a single disc, often for pennies each. These bundles tend to be master rights products.

At that price, the products have already lost their value. The market is likely full of them too. Add them to your own offers as bonuses and you drag down the value of everything else you sell.

Flag two: too many licenses. A seller who hands out too many licenses wrecks the value of the product for every buyer. The fewer licenses out there, the more yours is worth.

Here is a rule of thumb. With 200 licenses on offer, you face little competition, and many holders never sell a single copy.

With 500, the picture is still fine. Once the number climbs into four figures, take care.

Picture 1,000 licenses. Say 300 of those holders are serious sellers, and many of them have affiliates too. Thousands of people end up promoting the same offer you are.

The remedy is to stand apart. Private label rights let you make the product your own. Reprint rights leave you with one lever, which is reaching corners of the market the crowd ignores, such as offline buyers.

Which Flags Matter For Which License

Not every flag ends a deal. The kind of license you hold decides how much each one weighs.

With reprint or resell rights, you cannot change a word. So poor quality, old content, a loud original author, a clashing voice, and opposite beliefs each end the deal on the spot.

With private label rights, you can edit. The question there becomes how much repair the product needs, and flag five is your measuring stick.

With master rights, you can sell copies to buyers and sell licenses to other marketers. That gives you two streams from one product, but flag two hits hardest here.

Keep this map beside you as you read the next flags.

Flags Three To Five: Junk, Stale, And Too Much Repair

Flag three: poor quality. Some licensed content reads as if its writer did not speak the language well. Some of it is thin, padded, or plain wrong.

Skip it. Plenty of better products exist.

Flag four: outdated content. Look for old dates, old tactics, and old offers still on the page. A product that was fresh years ago can send your readers to tools that no longer exist.

With private label rights, a few small fixes are fine. With reprint rights, you cannot change a word, so stale content is a no.

Flag five: massive rewrites. Light tweaks are expected. A full overhaul is not.

If you must rewrite most of a product to use it, you are doing the job of writing it from scratch. So what is the point of the license?

A license should save you time. When it stops doing that, move on to the next one.

Flags Six To Eight: The Product Does Not Sound Like You

Flag six: the original author is everywhere. Some products began life as the creator’s own offer. They tell the creator’s life story and lean on personal examples.

Private label rights let you put your name on a product. You cannot do that with a story that belongs to someone else.

There is one exception. If the creator is a well-known name in your market and you hold reprint rights, that brand can lift your offers.

Flag seven: the voice is far from yours. Say the content is full of swearing, and you never swear.

Say it leans on religious examples, and that is not you. Your readers will feel the jolt.

Flag eight: it teaches the opposite of what you believe. A few small differences in opinion are fine. You can tweak those.

But picture this. You teach readers to pull in traffic from search engines. Then you license a product that says search engine optimization is not worth doing.

Your readers get two voices pulling in opposite directions, and that is confusing.

A licensed product should read like a chapter of your own work, not a stranger’s.

A licensed product should read like a chapter of your own work, not a stranger’s.

Flag Nine: The Seller Behind The Product

The last flag has nothing to do with the words on the page. The content may be good. The seller may still have taken it from someone else.

In that case, the seller has no right to hand out licenses. You may land in legal hot water if you use the product.

Look up who made it, and see how long they have sold it. Read what other buyers say.

If you cannot find clear answers, walk away.

If a license leaves you unsure, ask a lawyer to read it before you sign.

A Five-Minute Check Before You Buy

Here are the five checks I would run on any license, in this order:

Check one: read the license. Make sure it says what you may and may not do, and that both sides sign and date it.

Check two: count the licenses. Ask the seller how many they issue.

Check three: skim the first and last pages. Hunt for old dates and the original author’s name.

Check four: read one page aloud. Ask yourself if it sounds like you.

Check five: look up the seller. Find proof of who made it and what buyers say.

Run them in order, and stop at the first red flag. One is enough to say no. The next offer is only a click away.

Now see how it plays out. Say you run a list for home brewers, and a seller offers a beginner brewing guide with private label rights.

You open the file. The intro tells the author’s story of brewing in his garage. The examples carry dates from over a decade ago.

A chapter calls brewing kits a waste of money, which is the opposite of what you teach. That is three flags in ten minutes. You close the file and save yourself a week of repair.

Now compare that with a guide that passes all five checks. It has no old dates, a few hundred licenses, and a voice you can match with light edits. That one earns a place in your range.

Where This Naturally Leads

If you want to go further, the next step from here is the full training behind this checklist. Product Licensing Formula at ProductLicensingFormula.com walks you through the seven L.I.C.E.N.S.E. steps, from locating a market to finding high-quality licensed products and customizing a product until it is yours.

Its section on what to avoid when buying a license goes deeper than I can here. The cheat sheet puts all seven steps on one page.

If you would rather skip the hunting, go.LicensingVault.com is a done-for-you license package. The Instant Set Up Wizard software walks you through setting up each product, step by step.

Closing Thoughts

Pick one license you have been eyeing and run the five checks today. A few minutes now can save you weeks of repair later.

Your next product deserves a solid start, and you deserve one you are proud to put your name on. I am cheering for you, and I would love to hear what the checks turned up. Hit reply and tell me.

Nick James

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9 Hidden Red Flags That Make A Licensed Product Costly