Want to make more money with your blog or site? Tell a story. Engage your users with your storytelling prowess. In almost any aspect of sales, you can make a bigger impact if your “pitch” is told in an interesting and engaging way. People relate to stories, so use stories as a way of helping your readers visualize how your product will benefit them.

Let’s say you are promoting a particular digital camera in a blog post. Tell a story about how you actually used the camera to capture an incredibly funny moment. Describe the funny moment in detail, and let the reader visualize how the camera managed to capture that moment so that everyone can share in the laughter.

There are millions of ways you can use storytelling to create sales impact. I’d love to see all the ways you come up with to use storytelling as a means of increasing sales, so I’ve designed a little exercise. This is simply to sharpen your storytelling skills.

Write a very, very short, short story that illustrates something that relates to software. The goal is to sell more of a particular piece of software (you can decide what type of software if it is pertinent to your story). The story has to be very short however, with a maximum of 4 sentences. This will force you to create an introduction (first sentence), a middle (two sentences describing the action), and an end (last sentence summing things up).

Be as creative as you can be and leave your stories in the comments below. If you can tell a story, based around a product, in only 4 sentences, imagine how creative you can be when you can write as much as you want.

(from Smash Mouth. "AllStar" Astro Lounge. Interscope Records, 1999.)

Posted on September 14th, 2007 by DazzlinDonna
Filed under: Making Money Online