It amazes me.

Quite often, a subscriber will email to ask my opinion of the recently launched "XYZ course." Inevitably, it's some flavor of yesterday's successful traffic tactic or a coaching program.

Now, I spring for a lot of these things myself. Besides being an easy mark, I find a routine diet of desire as a customer is one of the surest ways to bottle it for my own promotions as a marketer.

But what gets me is how so many keep chasing the dragon to discover the latest secret when all the while…

The secret is right in front of their noses

I know the secret.

You know the secret.

You do know it. Don't you? More on A Million Dollar "Marketing Course" for $100?

An insightful, free report I just downloaded from Drayton Bird's website led me to recall some unusual advice from an acquaintance back in New York, who was one part psychologist, one part prankster.

He advocated that everyone in the workforce should apply for a job while at their peak of security, solvency and job satisfaction.

His point was most applicants approach job seeking as supplicants and never experience the process from a detached, devil may care perspective. (This does carry some risk, as I've known more than one Wall Street person to get sacked when their present employer discovered they were seeking greener pastures.)

But there are things you can do when applying for a job with an aura of unassailable strength that you can't do otherwise. Like, going for positions that are "over your head" or for which you're "under qualified." What you may lack in technical knowledge is compensated for with bolstered confidence and lack of emotion over the result. You can also play hard ball when/if you reach the salary negotiation stage for the same reasons.

Though I'm now on the other side of the fence and plying topgrading strategies to avoid mis-hires in my own company, I found Drayton's report to be irresistible from a marketer's point of view. And who knows if one will need this again?

I especially like the letters he includes in this report, one of which landed a position for his associate across the Atlantic.

Drayton Bird eats, drinks, breathes (and teaches) direct marketing and this fine report is typical of his high standard.

"How To Get A Better Job" requires an opt-in and you'd be doing yourself a service to get on Drayton's list.

Here's a lead generation ad Gary Halbert ran in the Wall Street Journal in 1990.

I counted several insertions so this little lead gen must have gotten the phone to ring and there were few as persuasive as Gary to handle the incoming calls. The fact the leads were coming from the Journal was qualifying in itself.

Gary just picked a half dozen of his most intriguing bullets, slapped a headline on top, a toll free number on bottom and presto.

Here's a large image of: "Hot New Reports From Top Ad Expert Reveal 6 Amazing Secrets!"

Imagine having to wake up each morning and come up with a startling, new headline to sell your product.

Furthermore, imagine you're in a cut-throat industry in which yesterday's laurels mean diddley and constant threats like union strikes hang over your head.

To top it off, industry or niche specialization offers no advantage. Your market is any literate person with a pulse. Your only job is to sell, sell, sell.

Your headline must be so arresting, it causes an i-banker racing down the street…with a briefcase in one hand…a Starbucks cup in the other…and a Bluetooth headset on his ear…to crane his neck and soak up the marvel of copy calling out to him like a blue collar siren.

Tough assignment…huh?

This is precisely what the publishers and editors of the New York City tabloids have had to deal with for decades and that's why they house some of the deftest headline writers.

Take, "Headless Body In Topless Bar." If this isn't the most elegantly compact and titillating crime headline ever written, then I'll freely stand in the way of that hood's front page kick.

Or New York Daily News editor, William Brink's masterful "Ford To City: Drop Dead," a day after Ford vowed to veto any proposed Federal bailout of the City.

These are two of the most memorable newspaper headlines ever written. The Post and The News seem destined to battle each other in this gladiatorial headline game till one or both of them drop.

And what of the "old gray lady," The New York Times?

Unintentionally, it can be just as entertaining as its lesser colleagues. Like this 1984 classic, "Unknown Arm of Sicilian Mafia Is Uncovered in the United States."

The following article about Joe Karbo is excerpted from an interview entitled, "The Creators" from the now defunct publication, The Capitalist Reporter, circa 1975.

But was the mail order magnate who penned The Lazy Man's Way to Riches, himself lazy?

Here's some rare info about this direct marketing legend.

The wonder is that Joe Karbo works at all anymore. He is the millionaire author, publisher and mail-order advertising salesman of The Lazy Man's Way to Riches, after all. With more than 400,000 copies of the paperback sold in this country alone at $10 each - versus 50 cents per copy production cost - Karbo can afford to take it easy. Foreign markets now have begun to open up in a big way.

Karbo, 50-year-old son of a Russian Jewish immigrant who worked as a tailor in Los Angeles, now spends about half the year in LA, where he maintains a posh suite of offices overlooking the Pacific to tend to his various ventures that make him $300,000 a year. The rest of the time, he and the family (wife and nine children, although not all the kids still live at home) are at a sumptuous retreat in Washington State, about 50 miles south of Olympia - an ideal place to be, well, lazy.

The trouble is, Karbo doesn't like being lazy. "The idea of being lazy is appealing, but doing it, or rather not doing anything, is not my idea of a way to pass the time," he says. More on The Lost Joe Karbo Interview…Was He Really Lazy?

Copywriters…throw down your ballpoints.

Direct marketers…prepare to change hats.

At least for a while.

An important signal just flashed here at headquarters about a larger and potentially far more lucrative opportunity.

And unlike the online world where it often seems like a handful of Internet marketers chase the same dollar from a hyper-respondent (while their followers scrap for leftovers), this is a largely offline world with fewer players and far bigger stakes.

Yes, I’m talking about consulting to the vast universe of small businesses. But not in the proposal-submitting, conventional sense most know of.

A trusted source just forwarded some inside info about a small business consultant who’s pulling in upwards of $50,000 a month with a combination of old school space advertising and advanced take-away selling.

And from what my source has shared…she’s just getting warmed up. That’s because… More on 6 Rules to Break for Consulting Success in 2008

Here's a lead generation ad from the mid-80's which ran strong for over ten years in major newspapers from coast to coast. It's a proven template which can be modified for almost any type of seminar.

The man running the ad was Howard Shensen, "the consultant's consultant," who taught countless others how to do the business of consulting.

This is the ad Ted Nicholas wrote for Shensen's book, "Consulting Success."

Shensen not only made a fortune selling his how-to-consulting info to paid seminar attendees but also made a killing on the rental of his list. I knew someone who rented Howard's list in the 90's and discovered it was very dirty — lots of dead people were on it. It was just too profitable for Howard to take them off his list.

Nevertheless, no one has managed to replace Howard Shensen since moving on to that great consultancy in the sky. I predict we'll be seeing a migration of real estate gurus to "how to be a consultant" gurus this year.

Could You Make $766 a Day As A Consultant?

Here's an ad Ted Nicholas wrote 20 years ago for Howard Shenson's book, the "Complete Guide to Consulting Success."

Ted has probably conducted more split run tests and knows more about space advertising than just about anyone in direct response marketing. For my part, I must've purchased just about everything he's put out.

Ted's copy is timeless. Notice how Ted masterfully breaks down the consulting process into fast reading and captivating bullet lists. Pay heed here: for many informational offers, a bullet list often outpulls blocks of dense ad copy. Look to Mel Martin's copy for Boardroom and Bud Weckesser's for Green Tree Press for further examples.

Ted whets your appetite throughout the ad, rounds out the bulleted lists with a juicy quote from the L.A. Times, tosses in an irresistible bonus and then closes with an unprecedented money back guarantee.

As direct marketers, we all know what the mark of a great ad is — after reading it, you place an order. I found a few copies of it left on Amazon.com while Ted is replenishing his supply.

The following comes from a five page story entitled, "The Creators," in The Capitalist Reporter circa 1975. The article covered three of the world's greatest mail order copywriters. Paul Michael and Joe Karbo were the other two writers, besides Gene Schwartz.

When copywriter Gene Schwartz decided to go ahead with the promotion of the book Sex May Be Dangerous to Your Health, his staff, he says, “wanted to throw me out the window.” And just how bad they felt about the spreading about such a rumor is evidenced by the fact Schwartz’s offices are 11 floors above Madison Avenue.

Schwartz grinned, took another gulp of coffee and said he didn’t concur with the thesis of the book either. “My staff and I were in agreement. We all think sex is marvelous”.

“The point is, if a person has an idea which is kooky, not correct, who’s to say he has no right to be heard?”

Along the lines of that belief, Schwartz has written promotional copy for, and published books by past presidents of the American Medical Association and by chiropractors – who are mortal foes of one another indeed.

Schwartz was discussing one of the oldest questions about advertising and about those who, like himself, write advertising copy: is it ethical and what are his own ethics?

First, he says, he won’t do anything illegal. “Controversial, yes. Illegal, no”

Then, he won’t write ads for bad products – or ads that in themselves are bad. The latter he compared with being an athlete who to win must stay in shape. It’s just the same in copywriting, he says. If you loose your honesty – and if you break these rules you do – you can’t write good ads again, any more than an athlete who allows himself to get out of training can hope to win a gold medal.

It was not all that long ago that Schwartz was broke and his ethics put to the test: He was offered $7,000 to write promotional material for a land deal. He turned down the offer he says, because he didn’t believe in the proposal put forth by the man with the $7,000.

Schwartz isn’t broke anymore of course. His copywriting skills have been rated as about the best in the business, and included among his fans is Paul Michael. He commands considerable fees. “Before I pick up a pencil I get $3,500,” he says. And if the piece he creates pays off, the client shells out an additional $4,500. Among his triumphs: a campaign for a self propelled fishing lure, which purportedly made $500,000 for his client, and his ads for a newsletter called Boardroom Reports (“Read 300 Business Magazines in 30 minutes), which helped to sell 60,000 subscriptions at $36 a year.

Although he has been involved in a variety of mail-order products – “You name it, we’ve sold it” – Schwartz specializes in marketing information on self-help topics such as health, dieting, memory-aids, and money making. He runs a group of companies that sells this information in a variety of forms, including books, pamphlets, newsletters, audio cassettes, and video tapes. He says he most enjoys “mail order money machines – successful products that generate equally successful spin-offs. As he explain it, a book can lead to a newsletter, the testimonials for which can lead in turn to a catalog, all of which produce mailing lists of names which can be rented.

The practice of taking a book that has sold poorly in stores and promoting it successfully through mail order is now commonplace, but Schwartz claims to have originated this technique in 1961. How to Get Thinner Once and For All had sold only 7,500 copies in book store. After his mail order campaign sales rose to 150,000.

Back in the 1960’s Schwartz became involved in what he remembers as one of the greatest experiences of his life. Appalled by the fact that a group of black children who were bussed to a school on New York’s Eastside couldn’t read, he went to Harlem to teach remedial reading and also to find out why such a problem existed with obviously intelligent children. Typically, he found the answer, and later published, How to Double Your Childs Grade in School. Although he didn’t publish a book about it, four years of teaching these kids gave him a chance to teach three, white, middle-class teachers a parallel lesson; he took them through a course in advanced algebra which left the three feeling how dumb they were, a major problem is why the kids couldn’t read. Then he explained how algebra worked, and the teachers self assessed dumbness vanished.

Schwartz’s working days fall into three different parts. In the afternoons, he goes to the office and runs his corporations. In the mornings he stays home, thinking up concepts and writing copy. Sometimes at night, even, he will leap out of bed, rush to his book lined den and scribble down the ideas and themes which woke him. He keeps a diary in which he records such themes; on the second day of the month, he already filled out half a page.

Schwartz believes that mail-order’s “get-rich-quick” reputation is a fair one. “This is still one of the most accessible and easily entered of all businesses. Anybody can do it. All you have to know are the techniques and traps,” he says. He says it’s impossible to lose unless you go crazy – and yet at the same time believes that an element of craziness is necessary to be really creative. But, “you don’t have to be intelligent to be brilliant,” he says. “Brilliance can be taught and learned.”

Schwartz and his wife, who is a successful interior designer, live in a sumptuous apartment on Park Avenue. Their home is filled with their collection of modern American Paintings and Sculpture and in fact was decorated to complement the art.

Being broke is a memory even though Schwartz doesn’t believe that he himself is any different today even though he is one of the country’s top-paid copywriters. He points out that his father always said he had no money sense – and died disappointed.

Nearly every promoter of real estate investment today owes his existence to a 47 year old, breakthrough ad.

However, unlike many of today's promoters who are 95% pitchmen/5% real estate investors, Bill Nickerson was the real deal. He was as blue collar as it gets — a telephone company employee — who started off in his part time and built substantial wealth through real estate investing.

At the time this ad was published, real estate investing was not something the average wage earner got involved with. That's hard to imagine today considering the deluge of late-night infomercials.

And that's why this was such a breakthrough ad.

Take the title of this now out-of-print classic: "How I Turned $1,000 Into A Million." It's spot on specific…and infinitely stronger than…"How I Got Rich in Real Estate."

It's an evergreen headline that's swiped successfully to this day.

Even forty seven years later, the copy is very strong in this ad. Look how the very first sentence sides with the skeptical reader and builds momentum from there.

Who ever heard of an ordinary wage earner like me amassing a fortune of half a million dollars in his spare time?

Yet that's what happened to me. And the money making formula I used can be applied by almost anybody, almost anywhere.

Maybe you'll make less than $500,000. Maybe you'll make more (as I did later on.) In any case, I see no reason why you can't accumulate enough to retire on a handsome income while you are still young enough to enjoy it to the fullest. Your chances for success in this field are far better than 400-to-1. In fact, 1600 times better than if you went into business according to actual US government statistics.

Notice too, the sophistication of this approach. Nickerson says: "the money making formula I used can be applied by almost anybody, almost anywhere." This adds volumes of credibility to the claim because we all know there's no way everyone, everywhere can make something work successfully. More on Real Estate Advertising (William Nickerson: How I Turned $1,000 Into A Million)