The Art of Money Getting; or, Golden Rules for Making Money
P. T. Barnum's success lecture, printed as a short book of 20 rules that run from choosing the right vocation and location to avoiding debt, persevering, reading the newspapers and preserving integrity.
What it is
P. T. Barnum's success lecture, printed as a short book of 20 rules that run from choosing the right vocation and location to avoiding debt, persevering, reading the newspapers and preserving integrity. It opens on keeping money rather than making it: true economy means income always exceeding out-go, not saving candle-ends while spending on ribbons. A friend's new sofa led to new furniture, a new house and 11,000 dollars a year in upkeep. The section for marketers is Advertise Your Business. Barnum says only a good article should be advertised, because a spurious one sells once and then the business dies; that three insertions in a weekly paper are wasted money; and that novelty buys attention, citing a shop sign reading DON'T READ THE OTHER SIDE and Genin the hatter, who paid 225 dollars at auction for the first Jenny Lind ticket.
Why read it now
Most of the book is personal finance and conduct. The advertising and customer pages are the reason to read it now, and three ideas there hold. First, advertising multiplies a good product and speeds the end of a bad one, the same point as the line attributed to Bill Bernbach that good advertising kills a bad product faster. Second, stopping early wastes the spend. Barnum's seven-insertion ladder from a French writer is an ancestor of the rule of seven, and no study supports that exact number; what modern work does support is continuous presence, as in Ehrenberg-Bass research on mental availability and Binet and Field's findings on sustained campaigns. Third, service keeps the customer: the usher story is a retention argument. What has dated: the Genin sales figures come from the man who brought Jenny Lind to America, so they are a sales story, not a measurement, and the advice on health, debt and hiring belongs to 19th century America. Use: before cutting a campaign after two weeks, check how many times the audience has actually seen it, then judge it.
Passages worth keeping
True economy consists in always making the income exceed the out-go.
الاقتصاد الحقيقي ليس التقتير في الأشياء الصغيرة، بل أن يبقى الدخل أكبر من الإنفاق في كل حال.
if a man has ever so good an article for sale, and nobody knows it, it will bring him no return.
جودة السلعة وحدها لا تجلب مالًا، فالسلعة التي لا يعرف بها أحد كأنها غير موجودة.
You may advertise a spurious article, and induce many people to call and buy it once, but they will denounce you as an impostor and swindler, and your business will gradually die out and leave you poor.
الإعلان عن سلعة مغشوشة يجلب شراءً واحدًا ثم سمعة سيئة، والتجارة تعيش على عودة العميل لا على صفقته الأولى.
The reader of a newspaper does not see the first mention of an ordinary advertisement; the second insertion he sees, but does not read; the third insertion he reads; the fourth insertion, he looks at the price;
القارئ لا ينتبه للإعلان من أول مرة، بل يمر بمراحل من الرؤية ثم القراءة ثم السؤال عن السعر، ولذلك يحتاج الإعلان إلى تكرار.
if a man has got goods for sale, and he don't advertise them in some way, the chances are that some day the sheriff will do it for him.
من لا يعلن عن بضاعته بأي وسيلة قد ينتهي به الأمر إلى أن تُعرض بضاعته في مزاد إفلاس.
What it teaches best
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