The Simple Letter That Launched a Nine-Figure Business

The year is 1979. And entrepreneur Bill Bonner sits down to write a simple sales letter for a new publication he’s ready to launch.

Bonner’s letter starts like this:

“You look out your window, past your gardener, who is busily pruning the lemon, cherry, and fig trees… amidst the splendor of gardenias, hibiscus, and hollyhocks.

“The sky is clear blue. The sea is a deeper blue, sparkling with sunlight.

“A gentle breeze comes drifting in from the ocean, clean and refreshing, as your maid brings breakfast in bed.

“For a moment, you think you have died and gone to heaven.

“But this paradise is real. And affordable. In fact, it costs only half as much to live this dream lifestyle… as it would to stay in your own home!

“Dear Reader,

“I’d like to send you a FREE copy of a unique — and invaluable — report.

“It’s called…”

The letter continues, explaining how you can get a free report titled “The 5 Best Retirement Destinations in the World” just for trying Bonner’s International Living newsletter.

And how, if you read International Living, you’ll learn to live in luxury on a modest retirement income by moving to one of the most beautiful — and most affordable — paradises in the world.

Does the newsletter sell?

Boy, does it!

Out of the box, every marketing dollar spent on sending out Bonner’s letter brings back $3 in orders.

And even today — three full decades later — that letter has barely been changed and still sells subscription after subscription to International Living.

Starting with this letter, Bill Bonner grew his company, Agora Inc., first to $1 million, then to $10 million, past $80 million, and now well into nine figures. (That’s over $100 million per year.)

On the heels of this success, Bonner went on to launch dozens of successful newsletters. (You probably wouldn’t be reading ETR if it weren’t for Bonner’s letter.) And Agora now publishes books. And puts on conferences. And arranges travel and “discovery tours” for business owners, retirees, and others looking to move to some of International Living‘s recommended paradises.

New Agora subsidiaries and affiliates are created all the time.

What’s Bonner’s secret to nine-figure business success? Brilliant marketing copy. Being able to write letters that sell.

When you can send out a sales letter at a cost of $1 or even $2 and it brings back $3 or $4 or $10 in return, you have a license to print money.

In fact, there are copywriters who charge well into five figures to write sales letters. And smart business owners make this investment over and over again because of the enormous profits these letters can generate.

But you don’t have to pay skilled copywriters tens of thousands of dollars to write sales letters for you. You can learn to do it yourself.

Any business owner who can write a letter to a friend can write a successful sales letter. All it takes is following a few specific rules:

• Know your customer — who you’re writing to.

You spend every day with your business and your customers. It’s your life to know your customers well. Just reading Bonner’s letter above tells you the people in his target audience want to live like royalty — without blowing their retirement savings. That’s knowing the customer.

• Make the message about your readers’ dreams, desires, fears, and frustrations.

Bonner’s letter goes right for the jugular on this. It puts his readers right into their dream of living in paradise… and plants them firmly there before even mentioning the “free report.”

• Spell out all the benefits your readers will get by taking the action you recommend.

While the features of your product are important to you, what your customers really care about are what your product can do for them. So talk about what they care about.

• Make the benefits clear and easy to imagine. Make them concrete.

Look back at Bonner’s letter. It doesn’t start with a rant about expensive retirements and theorize about how to save money. It puts the reader in his seaside retirement estate, beautiful garden, hired help, and all.

• Prove what you’re saying in every way possible.

Without proof, your pitch is an empty promise. Your reader has to be so confident by the end of your letter that what you have is perfect for them that they’d be stupid not to respond. Bonner’s full International Living letter tells the stories of actual people who have done what the letter promises, surprisingly easily. Specific details prove the promises are real.

• Keep it simple, building your entire message on one “big idea.”

It may surprise you, but test after test has proven that demonstrating one benefit to exhaustion will almost always make more sales than presenting every benefit your product offers. The big idea of Bonner’s letter is that you can live in paradise, far better than you’re living now and for less. And it demonstrates this powerful idea over and over again until the reader sees no alternative but to subscribe to the newsletter.

But even with these rules for writing successful sales letters, you may still have some questions. For example:

• How do you get someone to pay attention and start reading your sales letter?

• Once they’re reading, how do you hook them into reading the whole thing?

• As you tell your “story,” how can you introduce your product and get your reader excited about it?

• Once your reader is excited about your product, how can you present the offer in a way that makes them want to respond to it?

• How do you get the reader to go from excited about responding to actually placing the order?

If you’re asking these questions, you’re on the right track. Soon you’ll be writing letters that will grow your business quickly. Maybe some day you’ll even surpass Bill Bonner’s nine-figure business success!

What pain and suffering are you willing to endure to achieve success?

If you won’t stick it through — if you can’t cut it — maybe you should bail now.

Go get a job digging ditches.

Or making widgets in the factory.

They may be mind-numbing and physically-grueling.

But at least you know what to do.  And when you clock out, you can forget about work until you clock in again.

Copywriting and direct response, on the other hand, consume you.

And sometimes, they consume you with pain and agony and regret and depression.

In fact, there are long periods of time in most good-to-great copywriters’ lives when there’s more suffering than pleasure.

We kind of live for it.  Knowing that if we go through it, the rewards on the other side more than justify the pain.

Rewriting the promo — over and over again…

If you think copywriting is genius flowing from a pen, you should know it’s anything but.

My friend and colleague Henry Bingaman wrote an excellent essay about this recently.

He called it “The #1 Trait of ‘A-List’ Copywriters.”

I’m just going to quote him here…

—

My first drafts are garbage.

I’ve seen early stage copy from some of the “biggest name” copywriters in the world.

Their first drafts are garbage too.

The difference is, in the direct marketing behemoths I’ve worked with, like Money Map Press and Natural Health Sherpa, there’s a team of really smart people who work with you to make the copy better.

There’s obviously some talent factor involved in copywriting.

But the biggest difference between the “A-listers” and everyone else is much simpler.

The A-list copywriters don’t give in to copy fatigue.

—

He went on to describe copy fatigue as that desire to give up on yet another rewrite of your copy.  To just dial it in to get it out the door.

Pro copywriters know the feeling all too well.

You’re tired of people telling you that what you wrote is uninspiring garbage.

And you have two choices.  You can ignore their best advice and try to force it.  Or you can accept their advice and keep rewriting.

The difference between the best and the rest is that the best will rewrite.  And they’ll rewrite.  And they’ll rewrite.  John Carlton talks about his 18 rewrites of the first ad he wrote for Gary Halbert.  The 17th was trash.  The 18th made them and the client a ton of money over the next few years.

If you need 18 drafts and you give up at 5, you’ll never write that great ad.  If you give up at 10, you won’t get it either.  Even if you give up at 17, you’re not 17/18ths of the way there.  You’re just coming out of the starting gates.  You have to get to 18 to get the win.

I know the pain!

I’m working with a junior copywriter on a client project.

We have all the right ingredients for a really powerful promo right now.

But we’ve had them in the wrong order.  Organized in the wrong way.

And we’ve been finessing them.

Rearranging them.

Rewriting where necessary.

Still, it wasn’t clicking.

Then last week, we realized that everything was upside down.

What we needed to put first was last, and what we needed to put last was first.

That’s a simplification, but it’s close enough for the story.

And so this week, we’re working through how to rearrange the entire story upside-down from where it had been.

Reorganizing where we can.  Rewriting where we must.

Aiming to get ever-closer to the promo that “sings.”  That — in this case — grabs a hold of the prospect’s greed glands and doesn’t let go until they’re fully bought into in the investment idea we’re selling.

It’s not easy.

It’s frustrating.

Agonizing.

The emotional toll is high.

But if we truly want this to work, we know this is what we have to do.

I actually learned this from the world’s first billionaire copywriter…

If you don’t know who Bill Bonner is, you should.

Today, he’s majority-owner and (I believe) CEO of The Agora, the parent company of Agora Financial, Stansberry, Money Map, Oxford Club, Palm Beach Research, and a whole pile of additional financial and health publishing companies — all of which thrive thanks to direct response copywriting.

The Agora companies’ publications are read by more investors than The Wall Street Journal.

Their revenue is not public information, but it’s somewhere north of $500 million, likely closer to (if not more than) $1 billion.

And it all started with a sales letter Bill Bonner wrote in 1979, to sell subscriptions to his International Living magazine.

That letter spawned a variety of publishers that became Agora, and grew into the company we know today.

And if you learned anything about copywriting from AWAI, you should know that they’ve long been an unofficial “Agora Training School” as most of their copywriters have at least some experience inside Agora.

Today Bill Bonner’s net worth is very likely somewhere north of $1 billion.  Which makes him, to the best of my knowledge, the world’s first billionaire copywriter.

And I still distinctly remember how he opened his AWAI Bootcamp keynote a few years back.

I paraphrase…

“I really don’t know why you’re all here, or want to be copywriters.  I’ll tell you, if you do decide you want to be a copywriter, here’s how you get started.  You get a fifth of whiskey, and put it in your left-hand desk drawer.  Get a loaded revolver, and put it in your right-hand desk drawer.  Then get out a pen and paper, and prepare to suffer.  Knowing that you may have to use either or both of the methods of escape you’ve prepared yourself with.”

Grim, I know.

Some of the newer copywriters soaked it in with a deer-in-headlights look.

But it’s the truth.  Based on now four decades in the business.

This isn’t easy.

Sometimes, it’s incredibly difficult.

Sometimes, it’s pure agony.

Constantly having to figure out what the market wants, and how you can actually present it in a way that people will care about.

Constantly facing rejection and failure.

Constantly being challenged by the next guy or gal who is trying to drink your milkshake.

And then, getting up the next day to do it again.

You can try to do it better.  You can try to avoid past mistakes.

For example, on another new project I’m starting with another junior, we sent the roughest of rough drafts of the first few hundred words and an outline to the client, to get a first reaction before digging in more.  Hoping to avoid some of the rewriting issues of this other project.

But this is the reality of this business.

You can’t avoid it.  You can’t face it unprepared.  You must be willing to welcome the adversity and suffering, knowing it is inevitable.

Then with that attitude, you can move through it and to the breakthroughs on the other side.

Yours for bigger breakthroughs,