When I got dumped from my corporate job years ago and decided to try my hand at direct marketing and sales copywriting, one of the first things I latched onto was the book How to Make Maximum Money in Minimum Time, by Gary Halbert.
The “book” (and this was before the eBook era ever started) was really nothing more than a buncha issues of Gary’s famous marketing newsletter, photocopied and roughly bound together with cheap clamps.
That tattered old thing is still always within arm’s reach of my desk.
Gary, who died suddenly just a few years ago, was one of the godfathers of direct sales. John Carlton worked with Halbert. Dan Kennedy worked with him.
Halbert was, to put it very bluntly, the master.
I don’t know where you can find How to Make Maximum Money in Minimum Time anymore (and I sure as hell ain’t gonna loan out MY copy to anybody).
But I think most of the newsletters in that book are probably available in the free archive of The Gary Halbert Letter…
http://www.thegaryhalbertletter.com/
If you’re really serious about making lots of fungolas, you might wanna start breezing through that archive. Hey, like I said, it’s free.
If you’re even MORE serious, you might grab the new Kindle edition of Gary’s The Boron Letters.
This baby’ll run you ten bucks, but I can’t begin to tell you what kind of education you’ll get reading it (and then reading it again and again).
The Boron Letters is a compilation of correspondence Halbert wrote to his then-teenaged son Bond when Gary was doing time in Boron Federal Prison back in the 1980s. (That’s another story for another time.)
Gary’s letters talk about everything from marketing, to writing, to nutrition, to mistakes made. It’s great.
And what’s particularly cool about this Kindle edition is that it includes new notes from Bond himself about what was going on when Gary wrote each letter.
Treat yourself to a copy.
(I don’t make a dime passing either of these links along to you, by the way.)
If you’re serious about the “money-making thing,” you’ll read Gary Halbert.
Yeah, he’s been gone seven years now, but I think most everything he had to say was valuable and potentially profitable to you.
So check out his stuff.
But only if you’re really serious.
