The art of Sales, (Not So) Secrets from Old School Marketers

Marketing on the internet isn’t much different from Marketing on any other medium.

So let’s go back a hundred years to get some inspiration.

Inspiration from the 1920s

After selling 100 million books of his series Little Blue Book marketer Julius Hadleman wrote a book analysing all the data he had collected.

The book title is “The First Hundred Million” and it came out in 1928 (email me if you need help finding it) and features an interesting collection of proven Titles that work and insights on what we’re interested in reading.

I found out about this book when watching a video by Gary Halbert, in which he defines is as the “Most Informative book on Publishing ever written”.

In this book you can find tons of good ideas for titles that get people to read and that have a proven track record.

The best titles are, in order:

• How to …
• Secrets of ..
• The Art of …
• An Amazing Way to …
• What every [your audience] should know

Hadleman was also among the first to find out that by just changing the title of books he could increase sales buy up to 500%.

Does this work for clicks on articles too? You bet it does!

If you’re interested in learning more on this I suggest you skim through the book.

The Wall Street Journal Letter

Going back ten years earlier, in 1918 we can find one of the most iconic sales letters ever.

It’s the story of two men that fought the civil war:

This sales letter was so good that its plot was used over and over by marketers and from 1975 to 2003 it was the Wall Street Journal’s sales pitch, netting them over 2 Billion dollars in sales.

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