When I first started online, I was writing blog posts for $4 each. I had quit my management job with benefits, sick time, a steady paycheck and all that good stuff… I was starry eyed and certain that if “Mike the YouTube guy” and “Brandy the PPC whiz” could do it, I could do it.
In my mind I was already laying on the beach collecting checks, sipping Margaritas with beautiful people all around me. Isn’t that what they said would happen if I bought their program? Haha.
I excelled at writing so I thought, “I’ll write blog posts” and responded to an ad for $4 blog posts. I thought I could write at least 5 in an hour and $20 an hour sounded good at the time. Well, it took me an hour per post and I was making enough money to get my heat shut off in December and ask my friends to come over with groceries.
“The internet life” lol.
I got a lucky break when my writing started to take off and I was hired by Max Simon, Founder of Big Vision Business. Max’s late father, Dr. David Simon, was Deepak Chopra’s silent business partner and he mentored me in content marketing and strategic partnerships. This job regularly put me on the phone with people like John Assaraf, Arielle Ford, Mark Victor Hansen and working with teams like Bob Proctor’s, Brian Tracy’s and that caliber of entrepreneurial savvy.
My online career took off from there.
I worked for 3 multiple 7 figure companies in the coaching and “information/transformation” industry before starting my own brands “Storypreneur” and “Success Stories.”
Being behind the scenes and managing launches, paid traffic campaigns, content, affiliate programs, and writing copy helped me to see what the glue was that held it all together.
STORIES
After generating a somewhat ridiculous amount of money for other people telling their stories, I became an obsessive student of the craft of story and here is what I’ve discovered.
Stories capture immediate attention.
You’ve got less than a second to get someone’s attention these days.
If you start talking about your product or service or why you are so great or why they should listen I can almost guarantee they’re gonna keep scrolling or just click away.
But tell a story, and make them the hero of it…
You’ve got their attention. They need to know what’s next. The human mind cannot STAND not to hear the rest of the story. It’s in our DNA.
Stories build rapport and relationships.
People who have built traditional offline businesses, or who are natural networkers understand the power of rapport in business building. Online marketers seem to have forgotten this, saying whatever it takes to get a click and leaving the relationship on the backburner… In short, most of them don’t care about you, they are just chasing the Almighty Dollar.
Tell great stories about who your potential client is, what they want, their dreams, their desires, what keeps them up at night… and cut through the smoke and fluff push-now-click-here-adrenal-pulling disaster – that does make money… yet does NOT benefit anyone, and you will begin to build a lasting legacy, one relationship at a time.
Marketers who continue “adrenal pull” will be left behind as humanity evolves and the market gets smarter, which is already happening.
Don’t be one of them. Start telling stories.
Stories overcome people’s strongest objections to working with you.
If you are selling something, people will naturally object to you and not trust you. Your job is to overcome that. Using facts, figures and logic won’t really do it.
You’ve got to sell to their hearts.
If someone’s objection to working with you is that “they don’t have time,” or “they don’t feel they have the money,” (the two most common objections I hear about) it’s your job to tell them a story about the time you felt the same way, (or a client felt the same way), how you were feeling, what part of your belief system the obstacle was coming from, and really paint the picture of what that was like.
Show them the incredible transformation that happened when you took a risk, invested in yourself and made the changes necessary to achieve your goal. Growth never happens without risk, and where there is risk, there is objection.
Lovingly challenge people through their objections with a great story so they can create the transformation in their life that you are best suited to facilitate.
Of course, none of this is intended to be used in a manipulative way.
As the father of modern creative advertising, John Powers, says:
The first thing one must do to succeed in advertising is to have the attention of the reader. That means to be interesting. The next thing is to stick to the truth, and that means rectifying whatever is wrong in the merchant’s business. If the truth isn’t tellable, fix it so it is. That’s about all there is to it.
