How to Make Your Advertising Make Money

How to Make Your Advertising Make Money – John Caples

John Caples was one of the most influential copywriters in the history of advertising. Best known for writing the famous headline about people laughing when he sat down at the piano, he spent decades at a major advertising agency testing which ads worked and which did not. In How to Make Your Advertising Make Money, he shares the lessons he learned about creating advertising that sells.

Caples was a pioneer of measuring advertising results. Through careful testing of headlines, copy, offers and layouts, especially in direct response advertising, he discovered which techniques consistently produced the best results. In this book, he passes on that knowledge in a practical, accessible way.

He explains how to write headlines that grab attention and promise a benefit, how to write copy that holds the reader’s interest and persuades, how to use testimonials, offers and guarantees effectively, and how to structure an ad so that it leads the reader to take action. He discusses the importance of understanding the product and the customer, and why advertisers should test their assumptions rather than relying on opinion or creative instinct alone. Numerous examples of successful and unsuccessful ads illustrate his points.

Although written for an era of print, radio and direct mail, the principles in the book, such as clear benefits, compelling headlines and testing, remain highly relevant for digital marketing and copywriting today.

Practical and timeless, How to Make Your Advertising Make Money is a valuable resource for copywriters, marketers, entrepreneurs and students of advertising.