From 10% English Exam Humiliation To £50,000 Sales Letter

What’s the worst grade you’ve ever got in an exam? How did you feel when you opened the little brown envelope to reveal the shocking truth? Did the result prevent you from getting into your first choice of university? Or worse… did it prevent you from believing in yourself?

The worst mark I ever got was 10% in an English exam. The sharp sting of that failure still hurts today.

I couldn’t tear the paper up and hide it from my friends. I couldn’t tear the paper up and hide it from my family. No I had to face the music. The stupid-jokes from my friends. The look of pity from my teachers. The stone-cold silence from my parents.

The good thing about failing this badly, is that it attracts a lot of attention. At the time, it’s unwanted attention. This attention gave me a much needed helping hand. Help that enabled me to fail away from public humiliation. With repeated failure and learning. Failure and small improvements. My grade at the next exam was 55%.

This is by no means a stunning success. I moved from terrible to somewhere in the middle. The experience taught me a powerful lesson:

The process of failure and improvement gives you what you want

Now that I had proved that I could ride the English exam bike, the training wheels came off. The extra help from my teachers stopped. The failure behind closed doors, stopped. And my improvement, stopped.

The rest of my school days were spent believing that I couldn’t write. This steered me towards math’s and science so that I could hide from my failure. But exams without essays don’t exist.

When I discovered marketing that gives you a measurable result (also known as direct response marketing) one thing became abundantly clear. Nothing happens until the copy is written!

If you want to get leads, nothing happens until the ad is written and the lead magnet is written. If you want to nurture your new leads with a video, nothing happens until the script is written. If you want to inspire your audience with a customer success story, nothing happens until the story is written. If you want to convert leads into sales, nothing happens until the sales letter is written.

You get the point. Good copy or salesmanship in print lies at the heart of marketing that gives you a measureable result.

So, What Does Good Copywriting Look Like?

And how does an English exam failure write a sales letter that pulls in £50,000 in sales?

My journey into marketing that gives you a measurable result, began with managing a team. On the team was a freelance copywriter. My job was to brief the copywriter on what we needed and to approve what he wrote. Sounds simple enough, right? If you know what you are looking for.

So, I jumped down the rabbit hole of education. Reading books, attending seminars and taking online courses. Learning for a minimum of 3 hours a day. Year after year. 

What started out as briefing talented copywriters soon changed to writing myself. And just like all those years earlier, I went through the behind-closed doors-process of failure and improvement.

What Made Salesmanship in Print Finally Click?

The biggest difference was found in the most work. Several books, and online courses said the same thing. Every great copywriter has written out by hand the ads from those that have come before him.

Now, I’d already bought a swipe file of the best performing ads from the most prestigious copywriters. And for over a year that pot of gold sat untouched on my computer.

Why would I want to write an ad out by hand? I didn’t have the time to do something so boring. I certainly didn’t have the patience.

Then after reading Gary Halbert’s book on a beach in Romania and hearing the same thing yet again, I finally bought a Moleskine notebook and did the hard and necessary.

The slow process of writing an ad by hand immediately made my writing ten times better. I analyzed every line, every paragraph, the architecture that takes you from story to sale.

Once I experienced the thrill of the copywriting triple summersault, I was hooked. I studied more and more ads for hours, every day, until I had created my own internal reference library. This is my writing foundation on which I construct my own edifice of persuasion. Using stories to carry customers across the decision-making wasteland to the promised land of a better, happier and more fulfilling life.

What’s the Moral of The Story?

Don’t let past failures determine your future.

For many years, I let the humiliation of getting 10% in an English exam shape my decisions and beliefs about what was possible. Then I read about a form of marketing that gives you measureable results. It might as well have been a fantasy novel because it was so far removed from what I knew. But I wanted to be the hero. And I wanted it badly enough to learn something new. To fall down and get right back up. To fail forward fast.

This let me unlock the secrets to salesmanship in print. It was this that let me write a sales letter that pulled in £50,000 in just 9 days.

There’s no such thing as failure. There’s only feedback. Recognise it. Learn from it. Use it to drive you forward to where you want to be.

Carpe Diem

Roland Eva