World s Greatest Copywriter Letter

One of the dumb things I used to
lo back then was waltz into our little local bank with a duffle bag full of checks
and money orders and rather unceremoniously dumo them onto
ver seen twenty or thirty thousand checks and money orders
It makes a hell of
a impression on you and I milked it for all it was wortt
I wanted attention and I got it. It came in the form of two men wearing
ski masks and armed with U.S. Army.45 handguns. It was a Friday evening during
the first week of July, 1973. what happened is that I was unloading groceries
from the trunk of my car when I was approached by the aforementioned two men who
had been hiding in the woods adjacent to my property. One of them flashed his gun
at me (God, it was big!) and told me to be quiet while the other one went on into
the house to capture and tie up my wife. A Very Bad Scene! At first, these guys were very courteous. The one outside with me asked me
to remove my glasses and told me
to put them on top of the air conditioner. way, he explained,
I'd know where they were when ali this was over. After that,
marched me inside to the master bedroom where his partner had my wife blind-
gagged, and tied up on the bed. Then, these guys did the same thing to me
they added an extra touch. The extra touch was they stuffed me inside a canvas bag. It was a memorable experience.

There I was, helpless inside a mail sack
(that's ironic isn't it?) and these two guys were ransacking my home and making
They took some gold and silver coins,
some cash, some of my wife's
jewelry (including a heirloon ring given to her by a treasured relative),
about $80,000 worth of orders for one of the books I was selling by mail. They
put all this into a Cadillac (mine) and then drove off. No good. That crime has never been solved and it set off a chain-reaction of events
that got me involved with insane psychiatrists, "nad dog" postal inspectors and
fiendish con men. I'll be writing about those experiences in my newsletter in an
article titled "The Dark Side of Success" and I an sure you will find it instructive and rather morbidly fascinating. But that's later. Right now, let's get back to the good stuff. O.K. with
you? Good. Anyway, along about this time, I decided to move to California and,
shortly thereafter,
I became aware of the possibilities inherent in investing in
U.S. postage stames and I decided to write a book about that subject. if the book was the same as the headline of the mail order ad I used to sell it. To wit:
THANK GOD NOT EVERYIHING PRINTED
BY IHE U.S. GOVERNMENI LOSES ITS VALUE! This book was a modest commercial success (about $250,000.00 in sales) and
working on it was good therapy for me.

Soor after writing the stamp book, I became interested in trading cormodi-
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ties and I developed a system that I used to execute 78 consecutive winning
mail promotion I created to sell this book was spectacular. The book sold for
$35.00 (a dumb price) and one list pulled as high as 35%! Are your greed glands at full secretion yet? Are you starting to see the
possibilities? Just to make sure, let's look at a few more examples. Do you
remember this headline?

...... was such de
posit ate you freed go and tune 1 to at to you starting to te the
HOW TO BURN OFF BODY FAT
HOUR-BY HOUR! The hottest diet ad ever written. It did up t
25 times ad cost in daily newspapers! Or how about this one? ERNEST BORGNINE TELIS THE TRUI
ABOUT IHE MAFIA
(to promote a 1-man play)
Or this one? THE AMAZING CASH FLOW SECRET
OF A MARKETING GENIUS WHO IS
AFRAID TO FLY
(No, not me. This one was about Jay Abraham.)
All three of these ads were very different but they were all enormously
successful. Let's see what else? Oh yeah, Let me tell you about another little piec
of work I did for the Borgnines. what happened is that Iova Borgnine came au
Beverly Hills. Spelling and her boutique is located at 345 N. Canon Drive in Beverly Hills and I
doubt if it would hold more than 150 people at any one time. So anyway, what I said to Tova was, "Look, if I'm going to do the ad for
you, you're going
to need a much larger place."
In fact, I said,
"What you better
do is rent the entire Century Plaza Hotel."
lova tured pale. You're right. Please on me a sex and old me one my out on at or the can eig
And guess what I did? I wrote an ad for her that got so many people to
come to the hotel that the place got so crowded that the fire marshalls wouldn't
Let anybody else come in. We got newspaper and IV coverage and we even got
written up in TIME magazine. How did I do it?

Well, what I did was create a full page ad and, if you
are any kind of marketing man at all, you will realize that the ad almost had to
work as soon as you read the headline. Here it is:
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TOVA BORGNINE SWEARS UNDER OAITI
THAT HER NEW PERFUME DOES NOT
CONTAIN AN ILLEGAL SEXUAL STIMULANT! There was also a subhead which said: "Wife of Famous Movie Star Agrees To
Give Away 10,000 Free Samples of Her New Fragrance Just To Prove It Is Safe To
Wear In Public!"
What you have just read is only a handful of the promotions I have
created and,
if you are not convinced by now, you never will be. These promotions
have generated literally hundreds of millions of dollars and ail sorts of prob
I've been robbed,
tied up, put inside a bag,
incarcerated,
damned, praised and a participant in more looney experiences than you can
shake a stick at. But it hasn't been dull. And now, I'm going to tell it all. I'm going to teach every single sub-
scriber of my newsletter exactly how to
create the kinds of ads and direct mail
pieces that will bring in the kind of money I an writing about! Have I captured your attention? If so, let's get down to business. name of my newsletter is simply "The Gary Halbert letter and here are some
previews of just a few of the exciting secrets I intend to reveal:
Preview #1:
THE AMAZING DIRECT MAIL SECRET
OF A DESPERATE NERD FROM OHIO! It is my conceit that this is
the single most important article on direct
marketing you will ever read.