Two Gary Halbert newsletter issues today. Both were pretty short and not… that… interesting. At least they aren’t interesting from the copywriting point of view, but GH is not shy about giving advice in all corners of life. After all, he’s selling success and happiness, and making money through copywriting is only one path to it.

Anyhow, here are my notes from the newsletters.

Insane Idea

GH’s insane idea is to take a book he wrote about sex and a piece of copy he wrote to promote the book, and to get other people to work with him to run the ad in different media. He’s lazy to do it himself, so he’s willing to split the profits if somebody else bankrolls the ads and does the paperwork. Not very insane.

Not much else in this issue except for this proposal. This issue was written shortly after he attended John Reese’s seminar (early or mid 90′s). There is a point at which GH laments that the Internet age is here, there are too many ways to make money, and that he is adapted to an older time.

By the way, I signed up for John Reese’s Marketing Secrets mailing list. The first mail arrived today, and Reese is promoting a program in which he teaches you how to outsource effectively. There are two selling points:

You’re never going to get rich unless you outsource most of your work
He can teach you to hire somebody full-time for $400 a month. Or in more direct terms, he can teach you to hire somebody and pay them to work for you full-time for the same amount that people usually pay for short, one-off jobs.

And now that I’m already on the topic of mailing lists, AppSumo is advertising some kind of effective copywriting course today. I tried to open it but apparently they screwed up the link and it took me to something about developing for the iPhone.

Update: the link is fixed, and it is actually Neville Medhora’s Kopywriting Kourse, now on offer for $69. I watched the Mixergy interview with this guy, and it was here that I fell down the copywriting rabbit hole (he hyped up GH’s Boron Letters). I even considered taking the course, and I still might, if I ever make any money. Unfortunately, I’ve also started following the guy’s blog, only to be annoyed by lame posts like – sorry for not having anything relevant to say, but here are some pictures from the beach to make you jealous of my life. Jackass.

Boxes Of Nuggets

Ahhh, the second of the two Halbert newsletters. This one is about preparation… GH is going to reveal something massive. Basically, he’ll teach you a fool-proof way to make money. All the details revealed. It’s your own fault if you don’t succeed after he gives you all these amazing tools.

Bad news is, the details are coming in the next issue. This issue, as we said, is about preparation. More precisely, it’s about how to live your life so that you won’t overdose on heroin once all that new money (following next month’s issue) hits you.

Ok, bullshit aside, this issue of the newsletter is basically a series of aphorisms that GH thinks you should live your life by. Here are the ones I liked or found striking:

Never take someone out of their comfort zone when you’re trying to sell them something.
Get out of your comfort zone regularly to achieve something.
It takes almost the same time and energy to manage tiny projects that yield tiny profits as it does to manage massive projects that yield massive profits.
Always pay retail – it’s cheaper in the long run [not sure what this means].
Better to ask for forgiveness than for permission.
Do what you’re best at, and delegate the rest.

How do you know what your comfort zone is? A long while ago I read a book called Stumbling on Happiness by a psychologist named Gilbert. One interesting nugget (!) is that people are generally very bad about remembering how they felt in the past, and they are even worse about imagining how they will feel in the future. The only reliable way to get people’s evaluation of a situation is to ask them how they feel while they are living it.

What I mean is, you can’t reliably know what your comfort zone is by sitting at home at your computer. Writing down nasty things as they are happening during the day might be more like it. Then you can come back and put yourself in those same nasty situations again and again until… something good happens.