The Guinness Book of World Records listed Joe Girard as
"World's Greatest Retail Salesman" for 12 consecutive years. He holds singular distinction of having sold an average of six cars a day over his career. Recently, Joe Girard told me: "Joe, I can sell in person to individuals in a personal way - in fact, I can sell more cars per day than anyone else. Yet, I can't do what you do -- you sell millions of products to masses of people through sheer power of print."
Salesmanship in Print
When you look at it from Joe Girard's perspective, it's hard to deny awesome power of writing good sales copy - which I call "salesmanship in print" -- a power that anyone can take advantage of. You don't need good looks, a charming personality or even great intelligence. In fact, you don't even have to pass English.
This is why it baffles me when people desperately rack their brains trying to find ways to make money -- when greatest opportunity is staring them right in face. What's even more mystifying is that those very same people, when presented with ingenious approaches to writing copy that sells, take skill for granted and don't use it to make personal fortunes for themselves.
Flunking English
Not many people know this, but I almost flunked English back in high school. In addition, I don't know many big words, unlike rest of my advertising and marketing colleagues -- and my writing style is quite unsophisticated to boot. Yet, by learning to incorporate into my sales copy all things about how human mind reacts to certain words and phrases that I've learned over years, I have made millions of dollars for myself.
The most important lesson you must remember is this: If you learn nothing else but proper use of psychological principles in writing sales copy, you will always make more money than you'll ever need.
The Million-Dollar Grapefruit Farmer
If you're one of those people who believes that you're not a good enough writer -- and that you couldn't possibly learn to write ad copy that sells -- I want to tell you story of a man who attended one of my seminars. This man was a grapefruit farmer who had never written sales copy prior to attending my copywriting seminar. In fact, he expressed his doubts that he would get anything at all from copywriting lessons he learned. Yet, by end of seminar, he was able to write direct mail copy to sell grapefruit by mail which, over a period of ten years, has earned him millions of dollars.
Success Leaves Clues
For many years I specialized in "space-age" products, and my claim to fame was in building and selling "the better mousetrap" -- from state-of-the art smoke detectors to chess computers to new-fangled calculators -- and more recently -- to BluBlocker® sunglasses.
But you don't need a space-age product to make a million dollars. In fact, that is downfall of most people who enter marketing field. They find a product, fall in love with it, and try to get market to buy it. With an unproven product, you could lose a lot of money in process.
