One of the must-have skills on your road to Financial Independence is selling. Even if you don’t work in a marketing or sales position, we often find ourselves in situations where we have to sell, or loosely speaking, persuade people to act in our favor, may it be applying for a job, asking for a raise, or perhaps getting a pretty lady’s number.

As an engineer, however, I don’t have a lot of experience selling physical stuff. Much more, writing copy for it. I live in a binary world where the solutions that I build or recommend will either work or fail.

Not so with selling, I found out that making some subtle tweaks to the formula can make for entirely different results.

Take, for example, this Sears Newport typewriter, which I bought for $5 at a local garage sale when it struck my interest to resell the thing on Facebook Marketplace.

To be honest, nothing is special about this typewriter— something made in the late ’70s won’t even qualify as an antique.

But I went ahead and wrote the original caption as follows.

Vintage 197x Sears Newport typewriter. Made in Portugal. Comes with original case, brand new ribbon, and manuals. Fully functional.

I ran the ad for several days but got no response from any interested buyers. I’ve gotten not a single inquiry, not even a single “like”.

Then it occurred to me that I need something more creative.

Something that is simple yet engaging.

Impress your girlfriend by typing your love notes using this vintage 197x typewriter… Or standout from the rest of the pack by sending a typewritten resume to a prospective employer!

And the response was overwhelming…

Writing an effective copy does make a big difference!