Welcome to Your First Blog: Story Telling 101
Are you spending a large amount of time crafting the perfect blog post? Blogs can be a great way to improve your SEO and website traffic. You have awesome graphics, a great message, and the perfect length. Your audience should love it, right? Wrong! Just because your blog post hits these three marks doesn't mean it's going to be a success. If it's boring, your audience won't engage with it no matter how much time and effort you invested.
If you have low audience engagement, you need to remember that your audience doesn't want to hear about your technology or the features of your product. What they want to hear is a story and a good one at that. If you can weave a story into the message into your inbound marketing.
The Power of Words
Words are one of our more powerful tools; they have crushed enemies and built empires. They're also an addiction. We crave them because we get the thrill of a daring new experience without having to risk the pain or hardships of enduring it ourselves. A good story will inspire others, move an audience, and make them feel alive. They are the perfect way to reach out and emotionally connect with people.
David Mamet, a famous author, once said, "The audience will not tune in to watch information. You wouldn't, I wouldn't. No one would or will. The audience will only tune in and stay tuned in to watch drama." It's this drama that you must capture within your blog post. It will help make your content much more memorable.
Tips for Storytelling in Your Blog Posts
Are you feeling less than creative at the moment? Here are some tips on how to incorporate storytelling into your blog posts:
- Create memorable characters: The characters in your story should be able to speak for themselves, so you need to make them personable and relatable. Channel your audience and give your characters qualities you know are representative of your target demographic.
- Make the story engaging: You should already know that people have horribly short attention spans thanks to the internet. Therefore, you need to keep your audience interested the entire time. They should be wondering what's going to happen next or about how events will turn out. You need something in your story that's going to make your readers sit up and take notice.
- Make the audience feel something: If you don't care about something, you're not going to give it a second thought. If it made you feel something, though,—anger, sadness, pain, etc.—it will make the story memorable and engaging. It will show your readers that your content is worth their attention.
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Selling in Stories
Once you have the storytelling part down pat, you can start weaving in selling points of your products and services. Here's how to do it:
- Add interviews: One thing you can do is to frame your questions with stories. If you want to talk about the success of the company, you can do so through a challenge story. If you had only a few customers in the first months compared to thousands now, find out what tools helped make the company a success and how it overcame the initial hurdles.
- Work in opinion pieces: If a particular experience has helped shaped your opinion on a matter, describe it through a story. Look at the topic of your blog post and find an association that holds a story. Talk about your opinion and describe how it shapes your behaviour.
- Write a wake-up call post: Is your product so good that it changed someone's life? Paint the future story of the worst and best case scenarios. What will happen to the reader if they don't change their behaviour? Will they suffer some consequence? What will happen if they do change? If you're writing this kind of blog post, you need to show the domino effect of good or bad events with or without the involvement of your product.
Stories are a form of communication that captures everyone's attention if they're compelling. When you're writing your blog posts, you need to incorporate storytelling to make your content and product information stand out.