I Almost Flunked English But Went On To Make Millions of Dollars Writing Sales Copy

The Guinness Book of World Records listed Joe Girard as the "World's Greatest Retail Salesman" for 12 consecutive years. He holds the 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 the sheer power of print." Salesmanship in Print When you look at it from Joe Girard's perspective, it's hard to deny the 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 the greatest opportunity is staring them right in the face. What's even more mystifying is that those very same people, when presented with ingenious approaches to writing copy that sells, take the 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 the 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 the things about how the human mind reacts to certain words and phrases that I've learned over the years, I have made millions of dollars for myself. The most important lesson you must remember is this: If you learn nothing else but the 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 the 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 the copywriting lessons he learned. Yet, by the end of the 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