Copywriting Secrets

The Trailer Park That Built a Career

In the fall of 2000, Jim Edwards sat in a spare bedroom in a Virginia trailer park with two chihuahuas on his lap for warmth. He had spent six years there after a string of business losses, his wife was working, and his options were thinning. What he did next sounds melodramatic only because it worked. He decided that whatever it took, he would learn to persuade strangers through writing. He read Claude Hopkins's Scientific Advertising and My Life in Advertising. He turned a twenty-page website into a one-page long-form sales letter and watched sales jump two hundred and fifty percent overnight. The next summer he wrote a single sales letter for a ninety-seven-dollar CD-ROM that brought in one hundred thousand dollars in three months. Six months after that, the company that owned the funnel he had built fired him. His wife gave him thirty days to replace the income. Within four months he had earned more than he had in the previous four years combined and paid off the family home eighteen months later.

That is the spine of Copywriting Secrets, and it is also the argument. Edwards is not selling a theory. He is selling the idea that one specific skill, learned by a man who could not keep a sales job for the first eighteen months after college, paid for the house he now lives in. The book is his attempt to compress twenty-five years of that learning into thirty-one short chapters anyone can apply on a Tuesday afternoon. Russell Brunson, who wrote the foreword, calls copywriting "the great amplifier" and admits that building a great product did not make him rich, nor did building a funnel, nor did driving traffic, nor did building a list. The thing that finally tipped him into wealth was being able to make people want what he was selling badly enough that they would do almost anything to get it. Edwards is teaching that capability, and he is doing it without flourish.