A few days ago, I exchanged some emails with a business owner who was in a bad way.
“At the moment,” he said, “I’m feeling a bit like Halbert sitting in the dark trying to figure out what to write in that sales letter to get the power back on.”
If you don’t know the story of Gary Halbert, he was a well-known direct marketer and a better-known copywriting guru.
In the early days of his career, Gary was not very successful.
He would often spend his family’s utilities money to pay for stamps for sales letters to market some new scheme.
Those sales letters went out into the world. What came back were orders and some money, but never as many orders or as much money as Gary would have liked. Sometimes not even enough to cover the utilities bills.
The story goes that Gary was sitting in his kitchen one night, in the dark, with no water because he hadn’t paid the bills.
He was sick and tired of the stress and the visible signs of failure all around him.
And then — because that’s what makes a good story — the lights came on. Not in the kitchen, but in Gary’s head.
Gary had his moment of genius.
He figured out a new product and a new way to market it.
The result was a major success — millions of new customers and a multi-million dollar company, built on the back of one good, I mean, perfect, sales letter.
Now that I’ve told you this story, I’d like to propose that it’s proof that Gary Halbert was what I call a B-pile marketer.
We know of Gary today because his “sitting in the dark” moment actually produced a success. But it equally could have produced yet another failure. In fact, more than equally, because new direct marketing tests fail more than they succeed.
Had that happened, maybe nobody would know of Gary Halbert today, just like we don’t know the millions of other B-pile marketers who repeatedly failed and eventually disappeared.
Compare this to marketers I’m calling “A-pile.”
A-pile marketers aren’t well-know either, but that’s because their story is not as dramatic. There’s no “sitting in the dark” moment. Instead, they build large, stable, cash-spewing businesses that work year after year, without ever being at risk of having the lights turned off.
What’s the difference between the A-pile and the B-pile?
Hark unto me, Buckwheat:
The difference is a marketing strategy that has the highest chance of being successful — of bringing back lots and lots of orders and lots and lots of money.
It’s a strategy that Gary Halbert must not have known early in his career. Or maybe he knew it and was just unable to practice it. I know for a fact — because I heard Jay Abraham say it — that it’s something Gary didn’t apply even later in his career, when he shoulda known better.
Maybe this proven, stable, cash-generating strategy went against Gary’s romantic and heroic nature.
If that’s your nature, too, then maybe this strategy won’t be right for you either.
On the other hand, if you’d like to keep the lights on, and keep the orders flowing, without having to produce a moment of genius, you can find this strategy described in detail in chapter 3 here:
https://bejakovic.com/a-pile