Gary Halbert - Direct Marketing Secrets Seminar

I have about six talks that I give that I can give almost in a coma um you were about to hear probably the Mis the most dis organized disgruntled public speech I've ever given and I'll tell you why I've been in self-publishing since 1968 and some people say that if you get one good idea from a seminar it's been worth your money so far I have 112 and I think Ted Nicholas deserves a hell of a hand for that secondly uh it does make uh put a dime in my pocket whether or not you buy

his products um and perhaps you shouldn't perhaps you should spend the next 25 years learning this stuff the hard way because my motto is you got to be tough if you're going to be stupid so if you're tough enough don't buy this stuff you'll learn it yourself you know $250,000 in a quarter Century later um I've listened to the audience's questions and I feel that they have been all intelligent questions but I also feel they were nearly all off the mark you people have asked about printing you've asked about fulfillment 800 numbers Merchant accounts those

aren't stupid questions but let me let me try and emblazon something in your mind in self-publishing and in direct marketing if 100 equal success 99.9 of that success is getting the sale and that's what all of your questions should be about where do I get my books printed there are 10,000 people who can print your books how do I get an 800 number there are 10,000 services or or whatever many for that how do I get my orders fulfilled people in the phone book have solved those problems never worry about problems that have already been

solved by multitudes of people now these I'm not berating you for asking these questions I'm just saying you're asking these questions out of sequence because in the large the larger scene those the answers to those questions are of very little consequence if you don't know the answer to the one big question and that is how can I sell my product on a cost effective basis that's what I'm going to talk about I'm going to talk about how you sell your products not how you fulfill them not how you get them printed not how you get

an 800 number or anything I've been in self-publishing since 1968 I have made so many millions of dollars that I have become a legend in my own mind none of you should feel jealous about that because I have the same capacity for keeping my money as a pig has for solving geometry problems I've got a big earning capacity because I have to because I'm so stupid about money but because of self-publishing and even though I'm an idiot about keeping money I still managed to manage right now to live in Key West Florida in a beautiful

home with a double-sized yard a swimming pool a jacuzzi and a waterfall I drive a Cadillac bought a Rolls-Royce for my girlfriend I have three boats one is the original Sea Hunt uh one is a riber wit which some people consider the finest fishing boat in the world and almost all of that came from money that has been sent to me in the mail or telephone to me with credit cards when I fly over the United States I look down on the country with happiness secure in the knowledge that one out of every three homes

I am I have flown over has sent me or one of my clients that I got a commission on a check that's the only part about flying that I actually like uh um if selling is the number one thing you have to concern yourself with then the number one question you have to begin with the Bedrock is what is it that I am going to sell and Ted has offered you some really excellent suggestions on what to sell and I am going to give you some almost foolproof suggestions on what to sell um what what

you want to sell ideally is a superior version of a book or other information product that is already selling well with Superior advertising it costs too much to be a Pioneer when the road has already been paved now how do you find products books let's let's I'm just going to refer to books but when I say books think videos and all the other things but let's just keep how do you find books that are selling well through Direct responds it's very simple you get letters in your mailbox if you're on enough mailing list about them

over and over or you see them repeated in magazines over and over and over and over um one of the things a lot of people think of me as a creative genius and although I would be the last to deny that the truth is most of my success more of it comes from cowardice than it does from creativity and I'm afraid to try and sell diet pills to weightlifters I'm afraid to try and sell gain weight formulas to fat people I want to sell things that are already selling now I not only publish my own

material I also have an elite handful of clients that I work with in such a manner that if they let me choose the product I guarantee that they will get a winner and I charge an awfully lot of money and if I don't produce a winner for them on the first time I have to do it on the second time and so forth so I try and make damn sure I do it on the first time I'm not going to read all of this letter because much of it's confidential but I have a number of

clients that I've worked with on this basis and I spent hundreds of hours picking the product that I would sell for them I'd like to share with you my choices that I outlined to them in a letter I wrote Saturday November 28th there's 10 products I'm not going to tell you about two of them they are confidential uh but I am going to tell you about eight of them and they are all books one the approxim imate title of this one will be what to do about arthritis pain I Envision it selling for between $10

and $19 and there is a huge proven market for such information two approximate title how to pick up girls instantly anywhere in the world this is another proven monster product of which similar ones have been selling well for years there is no end to this Market three approximate title how to negotiate and win no matter who you're up against and I went on to say you know every time I get on an airplane and leap through the inflight magazine of whatever Airline I'm on I see a multi-page ad for the carass negotiating seminar it cost

hundreds of dollars to attend this seminar and I believe $37 to purchase the tapes of same I'm sick of seeing this ad it has been repeated so often for so many times that whomever running it must be worth a fortune now imagine someone having read the carass ad then a few pages later seen another ad for a negotiating book which gives the carass and other techniques and much much more and selling for only $39 to $69 seems like a natural to me four approximate title 57 proven ways to lower your golf score combine a killer

ad with a low price tag $19 to $99 and I think the golfers of America will gobbled it up by the thousands five approximate title 27 secret ways to melt off body fat hour by hour what can I say there's just no end to the market for diet information six appr proximate title latest facts on here on how to cure prostate problems if you're anywhere near my age you almost certainly know prostate problems are a major concern to the majority of men after they reach 50 books offering this type of invo have been selling like

hot cakes for years and there's no end in sight seven approximate title how to flatten your stomach in the fastest way humanly possible the flatten your stomach appeal has been pulling well for over a decade but I can't help but wonder how much more profitable would be with one of my ads pulling in the sales eight approximate title how to get what the US government owes you this was my first successful mail order book idea and like the Social Security ad in book it has been copied profitably by many others and I say they're like

hyenas yapping at my heels and different variations personally I think it's time for me to get back into this game and create a super book which will be sold with a super ad this area is all the more enticing now since there are so many cars boats homes Etc that have been seized by the DEA and Customs agents when which can be purchased Dirt Cheap by a person who has the right info why did I pick those projects I don't think there's any mystery or any of you have any doubts about why I picked those

projects they are proven appeals they are NeverEnding concerns of people get up in the morning and read USA Today how to give your golfer an extra 50 yards for Christmas for only 9.95 golfers are like heroin addicts they will spend any amount of money for any Gizmo they think will take two or three Strokes off their game are there any golf in the audience with is that not true that's absolutely true reading USA Today I picked up an ad does a man's prostate have to grow into a problem when he grows up would you raise

your hand if you're male over 50 would you agree that there's never going to be an end for the market for prostate relief huh what now it is crucial for you to know what appeals work the most important thing Ted said in this seminar if you never get anything else out of it is that you don't sell people what they need you sell them what they want you can swim up River if you want to and trying to sell something that's trying to be logical about selling is one of the most difficult swims that you

are ever going to make I'm going to suggest another couple ways for you to get ideas for products one Ted mentioned you should get the srds consumer magazine book and you should because when you read of a special interest magazine and find out its circulation you know that there is enough people and they have captured the names and addresses of those people to be viable like model railroading you wouldn't believe the Publications you know how many model railroaders there are but you should also get the SRD srds list book and you should read the descriptions

of those lists just it should be your nighttime reading what they do is they list nearly every mailing list available in America they tell you who owns the list how to contact them they tell you how many names are on the list what the average unit of sale was and what the appeal was and what they bought and you will see list all the way from a couple hundred thousand or a couple hundred names to 78 million names now if you're going to put your time and energy into writing a book and writing is the

single most difficult work in the world does it not make sense to write a book that's going to sell a ton of copies as opposed to writing a book that's only going to be read by your mother-in-law because she'd be too embarrassed us to not to and so if you read the srds list book for example and you find that last year 475,000 people purchased by mail a book on how to lose weight and only 1,250 purchased another book on how to gain weight what are you going to write your book about how to gain

weight got to be tough if you're going to be stupid so you should of all things you should become is you should become a student of of markets become a student of markets now having said that I am now going to talk about what I call selling formulas and what I have learned is the best way to work with these selling formulas what you really have to do is you have to get your selling presentation down on paper that is the first step to every great marketing campaign and then you have to translate that or

permute it or reform or adjust it into what I call Delivery Systems I look at my sales message as a nuclear weapon and the delivery system as the vehicle that gets it to the consumer and we're going to talk about some Delivery Systems and ways to make that I have found through trial and error to make those Delivery Systems more effective no matter what form of direct response marketing you get into you must understand the basic principles of superb Direct Mail because if you mark it through magazine ads the most profitable point in your whole

business process is the day you get the order from the ad and send that guy a first class letter saying thank you reselling him on he made a wise decision and giving him the opportunity to buy something else that's direct mail if you sell by television it's the same thing You' got to understand direct mail I could talk up to you about direct mail for the rest of this seminar but I'm going to do a very condensed version of How I Learned some very hard one lessons um the first thing I ever published well the

first thing I ever tried to publish was called something called the modern Homemakers budget decorating guide and I when I discovered the world of mail order and direct response I was so in enthralled by it I read every book bought every course traveled to the Library of Congress I would drive a hundred miles to buy a $10 manual I went to the library in Manhattan when I lived in Ohio and could hardly afford to get there and I studied everything and I learned everything these advertising experts had to teach me about magazine advertising and direct

mail and I started working in direct mail and I followed all those rules and I just lost all my money I went down the tubes many of you already know this but there's there was a point in time I actually was spending the utility money to buy postage to mail letters and we would be sitting in a dark house with no running water waiting for order orders that never materialized and my wife who is not my wife anymore uh was a very stubborn pigheaded woman who thought that living in a dark house without running water

was a sucky way to live and said if you're going to continue doing this you better damn well figure out how to do it so I went down to my basement and I put myself in a mindset that I call ICE brain and I said what would you do if you had to write a letter to somebody and ask them to send you money and if they didn't the government would behead you then I thought well I'd learn some of these tricks I use while selling sarer Peters door too I wouldn't do all this other

stuff and very briefly the way Direct Mail is supposed to work according to advertising agencies is like this you hire an expensive copywriter to write your letter you hire an expensive graphic artist to dial it up with expensive color U artwork then you have a very expensive brochure made then you have an envelope with teaser copy written on the outside then you have a letter shop assemble all this and because bulk rate postage is cheaper than first class you you have that postage printed on it gets delivered to the post office postal employees being very

ambitious and vigorous about the job and happy to get your mail they sort that mail as fast as they can they send it through the postal system all the other people in the post office system are really happy to be dealing with your bulk rate advertising mail and the and the end the end Courier hurries and delivers it to the prospect who's standing there with her whale boox just waiting to buy another copy of your of a book like yours and she takes it rips open the envelope writes a check and sends it to you

and you get rich it works slightly different than that the way it really works is like this if you do your mail like that on the average letter shops in America only deliver to the Loading Office of the post office 90% of the mail that they charge you for I'm not saying all of them are dishonest I'm saying I'm making a generalization there are some very good ones very honest people so you've paid for 100,000 letters and only 90% of them have gotten delivered to the post office that's where they weigh them and they give

the letter shop owner a receipt that says that he delivered 100,000 how do you get a posted employee to do that drugs money and sex it's real simple okay so now he gives you a receipt and you've mailed you that says you've mailed 100,000 letters but you've only mailed 10,000 when you mail bulk rate if someone has moved and left a forwarding address your letter doesn't get forwarded on any given mailing list it's almost always going to be 7% dirty so that now you're down 177% of your letters because because they didn't get forwarded in

addition to that 177% of properly addressed bulk rate mail that's obviously advertising gets thrown away from the post office that's the average so now we're down 34% that means you paid a 100 for 100,000 Direct Mail sales letters and you've got 66,000 of them delivered if my math is correct now comes the really bad news news and if there I know I've said this some of you have heard this many times before I never apologize for repeating it it is the most important thing you will ever learn about selling by direct mail you should write

it down the people of America sort through their mail while standing over a waste basket of the type of mail I have just described 75% of it gets thrown away unopened that means if for if you mailed a 100 letters the way the advertising agencies and all the experts teach you to do it all the phony experts you mail 100 letters you'll get 66 of them delivered and 75% of that thrown away what's that leave us with uh 16 letters out of a thousand that actually got to the Target and got opened here's how to

avoid that it's my semi famous AP pile B pile Theory I believe the people of America separate their letters into two piles one pile I call the a pile which is everything that is or appears to be a personal letter the B pile is everything that's obviously advertising everybody always opens all of their aile mail most 3/4 of all be a pile mail is thrown away unopened how do you get your mail in the apile it's very simple suppose you like or dislike what I have to say here and you decide to write me a

letter about it when you go home what you will do is you'll go home and type the letter or if you have a secretary she'll you'll dictate it and she'll type it you'll proofread it sign it you'll put an envelope you'll write or type my name and address on the outside of the envelope you'll take a real honest to God postage stamp put it on there and you'll put it in the mail to me right you won't put any teaser copy on the outside of the envelopes personal messages don't have that did you ever get

a letter from your lawyer where on the outside on the envelope it said here's hot news about your new lawsuit do you ever get a letter from that lady you had a one night stand with in Atlanta where it said on the outside of the honey you were great last night personal letters aren't written that way personal letters PE the biggest reason that people open an envelope why what is it to find out what's inside and if you say here's how to get time life at Half Price you don't have to open the envelope to

find out what's inside because you may not know all the specifics but in a general way you know what's in that envelope a subscription pitch for Time Life magazine so never use teaser copy never use bulk rate now I'm going to tell you something that might surprise even Ted because it surprised a lot of big marketers you can use bulk rate in a way that will be more cost effective than first class mail and you shouldn't do it anyway I'll explain why if you use a buff colored envelope and a bulk rate stamp and directed

impression addressing the main thing you will do with that is fool the postal system into thinking it's first class mail and that they have to deliver it and sometimes not not too often but sometimes using bulk rate in that fashion will be more cost effective than using first class mail but here's the rub remember when I said on the app average 177% of bulk rate male gets thrown away that's the average sometimes they throw it all away Mark Stoddard had a tested appeal he tested it every way from Sunday it was a big money maker

he dropped 600,000 pieces of mail and didn't get a single check he went to Chicago to find out why it was easy all 600,000 letters were in the dumpster behind the main Chicago post office write this down please bulk rate is the dumpster rate make your letters personal now when you use Direct Mail sometimes it is very helpful to have an order coupon and a brochure with pictures describing what you're doing and I found out from a pornographer how to do that and still maintain the personal look this is a true story I had a

girlfriend that owned uh one of these private mailbox services and one of her customers it was a pornographer and he sent out letters just as I described a pile mail but he had a white sealed envelope in there and he said contents he said warning you know do not open this envelope if you are offended by explicit pictures of naked women doing absolutely insane debouch things you know you know and I got to thinking about that you know that's a hell of a good idea for much more palatable marketing things so I still use brochures

sometimes I still use order coupons and so forth but what I do is I put them in a plain white sealed envelope and say please read this please open this envelope after you've read my letter do you see the difference selling is like seduction and but it's not r and seduction works best if there's a little foreplay if if you go on a date and buy dinner and have a little wine or something Etc and before you pop the big question I see I this is a cleaned up version of how I usually present this

um because I promised Ted that I would do that um so I'm trying I'm going to try and make the point in a sanitized way but what what I'm saying here is that it isn't just the question which in that case is will you go to bed with me and in your case it's will you buy my book it's just not the question and it's just not how you ask it it's when you ask it it's when you ask it and the dummies in direct mailand ask the question on the envelope before there's been any

warmup any foreplay any wine any any meals any nothing you know I can't get many women to go to bed with me under any circumstances but if I asked them when I first saw them I think I'd be beaten bloody that's what these guys are they're financially beaten bloody they ask the question out of sequin that's a very heighten version of direct mail make your direct mail look personal from one human being to another use first class postage direct impression addressing and if you have to use brochures and orders and Order coupons which are sometimes

legitimate put them in a sealed envelope inside the direct mail piece when I followed all the rules those people had taught me as I said I failed so badly my utilities we turned off when I followed the concepts that I just presented to you I sat down and wrote a one-page letter contained 361 words I used to brag that it was the most widely mailed letter in history that there was 140 million of them mailed that was before the guy who bought the company was at a recent seminar of mine who revealed there have now

been 500 million of them mailed but when I was there it took 40 women to make our bank deposit we took in 20,000 checks a day you know that was back when making 100 Grand a day was a big deal I can't believe I blew I can't believe I sold the company and blew the money um anyway but I've been using that the those techniques ever since and they work and do I ask you do they not just make Common Sense listen I want to see everybody raise their hand who automatically always throws away their

personal mail now I'd like to see everybody raise their hand who routinely throws advertising mail around raise your look around everybody does it don't ever let anybody talk you out of this that's one delivery system and how to strategize it let's talk about another delivery system another delivery system is print advertising and you are getting some of the best advice I've ever heard from Ted Nicholas about print advertising and what I'm going to say is very similar to what he's saying and maybe it'll just reinforce it or maybe it'll give you a slightly New Perspective

here here is the best thing that could possibly happen to those of you who have a book you want to sell this is the dream scenario a reporter here's about your book this reporter works for the New York Times book review and he gets a copy of it and he reads it and he falls in love with it so much so that he wants to meet the author or authoress would would that be correct and he comes flies out to meet you and not only does he fall in love with your book he falls in

love with you and your wife and your children and your dog and your cat and everything and he goes back and he writes a full page Rave review about your book and as a public service in the last column of that review he tells people the price of the book and how and how and to order it now I have a surprise for you that is unlikely to happen but you can make it happen you be that reporter and you write a rave review about your book that looks like an article that's very important there's

another note you should take ads that have an editorial look an article type look get 500% more readership than ads that a that look obviously like ads so write your own Rave review I have mixed results from using coupons and not using coupons in the ad um usually I don't usually I have standard verbiage saying will this book help you it's easy to find out with no risk whatsoever here's how to order all you have to do is write your name and address and and the words world's best diet book and send it with your

payment of $39 plus $3 poaches and handling to and it fits right in there with those OP the ordering instructions are crucial parts of your advertising and you should study great ordering instructions so one delivery system is what I'll just call straight Direct Mail uh another delivery system is what I'll call straight space advertising another delivery system and I would say to those of you in this room who are working on a limited budget this is the delivery system that has the highest percentage chance of success of all marketing models known at least known to

Halbert and that that model is running small space display ads that generate leads now notice I didn't say classified ads there's been a lot of people lost a lot of money in classified ads lately because they got suckered into running thousands of dollars of them because they're so cheap but what the people understand is that the offers that work in classified ads relate to subjects that people normally read classified ads for you don't read classified ads every day you read classified ads when you want to buy or rent an apartment or sell a house or

get a job or buy a car and if you have an offer related to those things it'll work in a classified generally your offers won't fall in that category so you want your lead generating ads to be display ads not classified display ads um I have a client who has a book that sells for $1,250 and there is nothing to increase its perceived value there's no video cassettes with it there are no audio cassettes with it and so forth he hired me to sell it for him and it's selling like hot cakes you know how

I did it in it said the there's a leadin headline that says wouldn't you like to make your money bulletproof and then the main Le headline says free report reveals how to H how to pay zero taxes and totally eliminate lawsuits to get your copy call such and such a number now the reason you want to run those kind of ads is because the most expensive thing in all advertising is waste circulation and if you run an ad in a newspaper and let's say that the ad is for piano lessons the fact of the matter

is that only a small percentage of the people in that paper are interested in taking piano lessons all the rest of it waste circulation and you have to pay for it and paying a full page for a publication that has 99% waste circulation is too much so you need this hot little lead generating ad that sucks it out when the lead generating comes in you immediately send them by first class mail a multi-page hard-hitting letter selling The Living Daylights out of your product which brings up a comment no one one's asked me that question I

don't give a I don't even give people a chance to ask me well nobody will read all that stuff here's what the statistics show two page letters outpull onepage letters four pages outpull two eight outp outpull four 16 outpull eight 32 outpull 16 I don't know where it ends but I know that it doesn't end at 56 Pages now let me what I try and do is teach people how to think about things cuz no one can teach you every little ramification but if you can teach people how to think about things things then the

ramifications become easy and I want you all to imagine this I want you to imagine that God being the Merry Prankster that he is got bored one day and took your spouse away from you and you could never be with your spouse again and God said since I'm God and I can do whatever the heck I want to do I've decided to have a little fun with you now I know that you need a woman if you're a man or or a man if you're a woman I know you need another spouse so I've selected

a hundred of them from which you have to choose one of them to spend the rest of your life with and just because I'm God I'm going to make it a little harder you're not going to get to meet them you're not going to get to talk to them you're not even going to get to see a picture of them I'm going to have each 100 of them write you a letter and from those 100 letters you got to pick the man or woman you're going to spend the rest of your life with what would

you want that man or woman to tell you about themselves everything everything there is I mean would you say would you like hi my name is bunny I like astrology and walks on the beach sure hope you pick me that ain't going to make it that's standard advertising agency Stu know this the people who are non prospects aren't going to read three paragraphs or your ad the people who are genuine prospects for your product want to know every single damn thing there is about it as long as it's still relevant do not worry about long

copy as long as it's still relevant you don't throw it in just to just to make it longer it's got to be relevant um another thing that you might be interested in in product in determining what to Market um there's a company called American Business list and what they do is they computerize on a daily basis every ad that appears in all the Yellow Pages of all the 5,000 telephone books in America and that database is broken down by the size of the company the type of the company yearly sales the manager's names the telephone

number and the number of employees Etc now all of you know I think I publish a newsletter several of you in this room get the newsletter and I've been so busy marketing other people's products I really haven't had time to promote my newsletter but I got to thinking you know I just started my newsletter 1986 I made one mailing to it that brought in $1.75 million maybe I ought to get more subscribers so now I've decided to do that I have a book it's called many of you have the book it's called how to make

maximum money and minimum time and mostly it's a collection of back issues of my newsletter with some additional material well I've come up with a new plan to Market it which I'm working with several of my clients on and I'm going to share the concept with you in the hopes that it will spark an idea how you could do something similar let me tell you something I hate plagiarism I think I have had more people steal my writing than any other person in direct response what you should do when you see someone else's work is

you should be inspired by it to go above it you shouldn't Xerox it anyway let me tell you this book that I have how to make maximum money and minimum time again we're talking about selling formulas here's one I'm about to try I'm going to take the attorneys in the United States there's 415,000 attorneys and I'm going to send them all a letter and it's going to have a big headline across the top and it says free book by top ad expert reveals how any attorney can double the profits of his law practice and then

I'm going to customize the letter from an attorney's point of view so that he can visualize how the concepts in that book can build his practice in fact we're also going to customize the book for attorneys and then what am I going to do next my next you know I'm going to say free book by top act ad expert reveals how any dentist can double the profits of his practice in less than 60 days and then we're going to go to chiropractors we're going to go to small business owners Etc you can make a major

material magnificent difference in the profitability of your marketing efforts by repositioning your product and your advertising appeal I'm going to recommend a book that you all get should get I had to travel to the Library of Congress and have someone photocopy the book book for me it was written something like 60 years ago it Remains the best book on publishing the most informative book on publishing ever written it's called the first 100 million and it's written by a guy named e Julius hadelman now you can either get it I don't know if I have a

subscriber who has a lot of out ofate marketing books and his name is what is his name Carl galletti and if you want his number you can call my office one of my secretaries will give it to you and ask him if he has it if he doesn't have it it is worth your while to pay somebody in the Washington DC area $200 or $300 to get them to xox a copy of that book for you and I'll tell you why e Julius hatman used to sell something called the little blue books and he would

run full page ads and the books sold for a nickel but you had to buy 20 of them you had to pay a bucks worth and he would categorize them like foreign languages ethnic jokes they were all and most of them were how-to books self-help etc etc etc now the unique thing about the way he was selling it is is that people bought what they really wanted to buy now you women don't know this but when Playboy first came out guys like us didn't have the stones just to go say hey give me a copy

of that and pay for it that isn't the way you bought Playboy back then you bought National Geographic and you bought time and you bought life and then you bought Playboy and you stuck it in the middle there and then you took him up to the clerk and it would be you know and that's how you'd buy Playboy magazine when it first came out well guess what hadelman after he had sold 100 million books kept statistics on every one of those books he sold and he is able to rank the appeal of books in absolutely

strict numerical order and that ranking is almost 100% valid yet today cuz human nature never changes guess what the number one appeal for books is in America you got it back then it was what every girl should know and what every boy should know you know they couldn't use the kind of titles we can now but sex was the number one appeal and hatman found out as Ted Nicholas has told you by changing the title of the book book without changing a word of the concepts you could increase the sales 500 1,000% some good titles

be the best if you're stuck for a title you can never do better than how to some other gens are secrets of the art of an amazing way to now at last and so forth but he has those and those titles make great headlines and that book should be in everybody's library because it it gives you an exact statistical representation is of what is inside Americans Minds in rank order and the information is as valid today as it was before let me see some of my notes what I wanted to say here formulas I sell

a newsletter if you are thinking about going into the newsletter business you should know that is the most difficult form of information you can sell the people who buy newsletters are the most intelligent and dedicated and real players in the world the reason the other people don't buy it is they don't understand that success is a process and not an event and they want the miracle answer right now and that's not what you get with a newsletter they don't want it parceled out month after month they want one $10 book that tells you where to

find the magic Genie and what spot on his belly to rub to make the money rain out of the sky so newsletters I will tell you this if you think about publishing a newsletter people ask me how long does it take you to write your newsletter it takes me 24 hours a day 365 days a year it's never out of my mind my newsletter is Me It's My Life The News letters that succeed are the ones that are called personality letters and that doesn't mean that you just put personality in it it means that the

writer takes a stance if your newsletter doesn't offend anybody you won't get a high percentage of renewals I don't write my letter to deliberately defend people but I take very strong stances and I say I write my newsletter the way I would talk to you after you and I had gone out and had a three a few drinks together and we said hey let's cut through all the crap Gary tell me blah blah blah and some people appreciate that and a small percentage of uptight people dhds who never made an honest buck in their life

do not like that kind of uh action but if you're going to write a newsletter be if you're going to publish a newsletter number one make sure you are a stone flat out total expert in your field don't try and fake a newsletter number two put your personality into it and but this is about how to sell it and if you're selling a newsletter there's one way to sell a newsletter that works very well and that is you give away something valuable that that person can keep if they give you a trial subscription to your

newsletter and if they decide to cancel they still get a refund and get to keep the premium and that premium should be related to the newsletter and contain the immediate magic Genie answer that they're looking for so it satisfies both situations that's one selling formula give away a premium with a trial purchase of your product a premium that you can keep even if you decide to return the pre the premium for a refund that's a selling formula um I'm going to tell you one I am experimenting many now that's fascinating um I have found I

don't really understand it um exactly but I have found that few people are indifferent to what I have to say and that I what I write my personality a lot of people don't like it but few are indifferent to it and I have found out that my Flagship book the maximum money book is like a giant meat cleaver dividing a sea of humanity and it takes all these ugly dull boring losers who are image conscious and it puts them over here and it puts all the players who want the straight scoop over here and so

it occurred to me the more people I can get to read my book the more people I will get to subscribe to my newsletter now I want to tell you a very interesting story with a very important marketing ramification probably the best media buyer I know the most knowledgeable guy for Entre for on opportunity type magazines like success and entrepreneur and income opportunities is a guy named Jay Flanigan and he told me that blind ads most of the ads in those magazines are blind ads they offer a mystery Secret you know I was broke I

was eating the bark off Trees sleeping in my car and then all of a sudden it came to me and my whole life changed and now I've got tons of women 55 rolls-royces and 127 homes and you can have it too if you'll just buy my secret for 10 bucks now my ad describes exactly what you'll get it's very specific but those blind ads outpull my specific ad by 3: one but there's a major difference when a person buys from one of those blind ads and he gets the book as a general rule that's the

end of the business relationship when a person buys my book which was very specifically described and finds out that it lives up to every promise I made and more it becomes the beginning of the relationship and a very high percentage of those readers go on to be subscribers lifetime subscribers clients video and tape buyers seminar attendees Etc if there's anything you want to have etched in your mind about the marketing equation it's what Ted said said you should think of yourself as building a relationship not making a sale your first sale is the most unprofitable

one you will ever make but if you satisfy your customers and deliver more than they ever thought they would get they will that is so rare in America that that they will buy from you over and over and over and I thought it might interest you to know something I'm experimenting with because it may be a formula that possibly would you could use if you have any high-priced products to sell I ran recently an ad one column wide 13 inch high describing my maximum money book in um the uh it's a financial newspaper called uh

Investors Business Daily and I offered the book for $10 I then ran another ad about a week or two weeks later it was the same ad except I offered the book free giving the book away free got me three 3.2 times more orders than asking $10 for the book the ads cost about 713 bucks a piece which means I have a little less than $1,500 in advertising in those books now here's what I did as they came in this is a formula as soon as we got the order for the book whether it was a

$10 order or the guy the man got it free the first thing they get is a personalized letter with a dollar bill attached to the top of it that says thank you for ordering my book oh I I just say I have a standard opening did you notice there's a dollar bill attached to this top of this letter there are two reasons actually there are three reasons one I I have something very important to say to you and I want to make sure this letter would get your attention two since what I'm writing about concerns

money I thought using the dollar an ie catcher was especially appropriate here's what it's all about recently you ordered my book how to make maximum money and minimum time I am writing this letter to let you know that the book has been sent to you will be sent to you tomorrow by first class mail the point of this letter is not to sell you on anything because you've already bought the book the point of this letter is to sell you on just reading it because unlike other books it doesn't contain a lot of hot air

it it lives up to all the promises and I retell him what he's going to find out about when he reads that book and at the end I say you know you can as far as the dollar is concerned you can do whatever you want with you can buy yourself a beer give it to charity but let me tell you what I hope you do with it I hope you frame it and I hope a year or two from now somewhere down the line someone ask you about that frame Dollar on your wall and you

say well that's the first dollar I ever had because of my relationship with Gary Halbert and since then I've gotten over million more and I tell them it's happened many times and it and it has so imagine that you order a book would that my write this down astonish your customers astonish them astonish them astonish them with the quality of your service and your dedication and your products astonish them the Japanese do it and we are indifferent Dave Barry went to a hotel in Japan the faucet leaked the whole place panicked they sent a whole

crew up there 15 minutes I'll bet you in the hotels of America you're just a pain in the neck if your faucet leaks they don't want to know you astonish your customers it'll pay off so much imagine you don't know me many of you do but if you had to know me and you you honored that book and the first thing you got was a letter with a dollar bill attached to it urging you to read it because you made a wise decision that Aston you should see the letters I get just from that step

two is I send them the book first class Priority Mail step three is I send them a letter by federal express and this short letter it's a cover letter and it says I want to thank you once again for recently ordering my book how to make maximum money and minimum time say listen I understand human nature and I know that a lot of people who buy my book are just voyers and WN to be and uh are you know just would be entrepreneurs and never will use any information no matter how valid is on the

other hand many other of the people who read my book are real hustling ambitious intelligent go-getters that realize the value of good information and if you fall into this latter category you're going to find the contents of this sealed of what's in the sealed envelope extremely valuable and when you open it up you find out my pitch which I worked a month on me and John Carlton on how to become a lifetime subscriber which costs almost $33,000 that's a formula now you may be interested in knowing the preliminary numbers on that formula at this point

it's paying out 10 to1 think of it though think of what I'm doing first of all I'm making damn sure I'm selling the best book on the subject in the world secondly I'm sending them a dollar bill thank you letter and suggesting they frame it because maybe a million more may come thirdly I'm sending the book to them first class priority mail and fourthly I'm sending them a federal Express sales letter by the way my company's the biggest user of Federal Express in monre County we're even bigger than the military and the thing is have

you ever dealt with a direct marketer that gives you that kind of attention formulas now let me see what else I got of here I'll take a look okay just a couple other notes things you may be interested in knowing when you mail Direct Mail the way I told you to using first class mail if at all possible deposit your mail at the post office on Saturday you want your mail ideally to arrive on Tuesday Wednesday or Thursday so deposit your mail on Saturday another thing that may interest you is that when you use Direct

Mail count the day you deposit your mail as day one and on day 12 generally you will have half the order you're you're ever you're going to get half the money you're going to get we call that double Day In First Class Direct Mail the 12th day is generally double day when you advertise in newspapers the the first two and a half days worth of orders is usually half of all you're going to get if you advertise in a national newspaper like USA Today and you offer them the option of ordering by phone and by

mail approximately this is very rough don't rely on it all the phone calls you get on the first day by 5:00 will represent approximately 10% of all the orders you're going to get let me see here um I'm going to tell you one more story and then I'm going to conclude talked about active listening active viewing and active watching you got to be conscious to make it in this world you got to be alert you have to be focused and you should think of yourself please write this down become an opportunity detective I would like

to tell you a story about an opportunity detective which was me for some reason that I can't remember I was visiting the akan Beacon Journal newspaper and I was talking to one of the executives there and he was showing me this little form that they sometimes run as a public service called request for statement of earnings and this little form you send it in and you find out how much youve paid into social security and he said but we don't run anymore and I said why not and he said because even if we bury it

on page 74 we get so many thousands of requests that ties up our staff and when they would bury it on page 74 I worked out the statistics something like 177% of their circulation were sending those forms in so it goes click into my mind so then I knew that social security was a hot subject so I wrote an ad called how to collect from Social Security at any age and it had a double coupon and it said you fill out the first coupon we'll send it to the proper government agency for you and they

will in turn send you a statement showing exactly to the penny how much you've paid in and when you fill in the second coupon and send it in with your payment we're going to send you a book that tells you how to maximize ize the return on all that money you paid in that was in the 1970s and when we ran that ad in newspapers we got 35 orders for every thousand circulation I don't know if any of you know what that means but if you're in direct marketing you did and we made a a

net net net profit selling that little book at three bucks of a million dollar that book has been ripped off many times so I decided to rip off the rip offers and I've written a new ad for one of my clients it's called how to collect from Social Security and Medicare at any age and it in it puts all the new advertising techniques that I didn't know when I wrote the original ad I'm going to conclude by asking a question of you how many of you have books already that you want to sell may I

see your hands how many of you are working on books you want to sell how many of you would be interested in selling those books by the Box Cars full without having to learn how to write copy without investing any money or without paying any printers or taking any risk whatsoever do any of you would like to do that well good because I'm looking for products to sell and if yours is viable I'll take it on get the financing write the ad and do the whole thing and give you a commission does that sound like

a pretty good deal and I'm pretty good at it um that's all I have to say except that one of the biggest mistakes people make in selling is that they forget to ask for the order they get real shy about that and I'm going to get off the stage now what I want you to do is give me all big hand come n