Storyselling

I believe the story is the most powerful part of an ad.

This is where you get the chance to build a real, deep connection with your market… so they like you, relate to you and trust you.

In order for this to work however, you NEED to have done your research right! If not, you’ll hit all the wrong emotions, and you’ll come off as a phony. How do you really know? Well, you won’t be 100% certain until you test it… but that’s a topic for another occasion.

Now, here is one way of telling a story that works really well:

First Person, Personal Story

What you are going to do is tell a story from your perspective.

For example, if you sell a book on how to lose weight… you would tell the story about

• how you started gaining weight and all the bad things that caused that..
• all the pain that came in your life because of your weight problem (including the deep emotional stuff… like that your hubby stopped paying attention and how it made you cry at nights, which made you get up and eat six gallons of ice cream)
• how you tried everything and nothing worked…
• specific incidents that happened (this makes it believable) (like the one time when you were on the subway commute on the way home from work, and a 3-year-old in a baby stroller stared at you and pointed and whispered to mom, and how horrible and embarrassed that made you feel) (you also never need to make anything up or lie… because truth is stranger than fiction)
• bring up where and when you went through all this emotional pain, that you know your market is suffering from too
• tell them about how you stumbled across the surprisingly simple solution that made you lose 130 pounds in 12 months… without starving yourself or taking expensive drugs with dangerous side effects

Again – NEVER lie… only phonies, fakers and conmen have to lie. Dig deep enough in the research and the stories will come out.

If it didn’t happen to YOU – then it happened to someone, and you can tell it as a third-person story, or a first-person story from their perspective (with their permission).

For space reasons, I’m not going to give you an example… this lesson is already far longer than I planned it to be… but look: nearly every successful sales letter in history has at least one story element.

A good story (telling the right message to the right audience) has the ability to carry a sale all on its own… even if you royally screw up everything else.

This is one of those skills most worth practicing.

Now, let’s move on to one of the most important parts…

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