The secret to writing a great blog is to tell a great story.
Great stories succeed because they are able to capture the imagination of a large audience.
Blogging and storytelling are subtle art. Surprisingly, the minimum detail a blogger pens down, the more powerful the story becomes.
How do you write a great story?
Average humans are not so good at understanding things that are very far away in scale or time. Starting with your experience and assuming it matches their own is a trap.
All marketing is not telling the whole truth. Alluring people’s fantasy is the marketer’s key rather than telling truth or finding flaws in their reasoning. The ethical policy may not find this appealing, but be more critical rather than emotional.
Not telling the truth is not the same as deceiving. When the marketers lie, it is the middle ground between true and false — the grey area. Decieving will never build trust. Speaking too much truth will fire back.
Remember, a great marketer is not a revolutionary and neither a blatant rebel who tries to destroy the people’s assumptions, but he just reproduces the people’s beliefs, even sometimes if that stacks upon people’s ignorance.
In general, People look for patterns that match their habits and beliefs. When they find a pattern match, they embrace it without evaluating their beliefs.
It may be tempting, and also important, to create new beliefs, but when blogging it will be far better to match them.
The great storyteller incorporates such understanding in his communication.
Intelligent marketers who understand human psychology know that it is important to allow people to draw their own conclusions rather than announcing the truth, which contradicts the reader’s deep belief system.
Great stories are also like first impressions — They happen fast. The reader forms a mental image of your blog and your offerings. The better the story the greater the first impression.
Great blogs do not always need 2000-3000 words. A blogger is either able to create a powerful first impression or fails.
Remember bloggers, the great part of blogging or any form of marketing is to tell only what the audience wants to hear. Do not be too critical to enforce your conclusions. You are not testing readers’ critical intelligence, but pampering their egos.
Great stories, and thus great blogs, are not always tuned to people’s logic, but to senses. People mostly react rather than respond. Blogging and storytelling should be appealing to the senses rather than intelligence.
Pheromones are not a myth. The Internet has created a nonphysical entanglement.
Blogging is great storytelling, which in turn is the art of creating the first impression — The online pheromones effect. People like something at first glance or they refuse in just a sniff.
Every person on this earth is a prisoner of their own interpretation based on their experience and social engineering. The great story should agree with the worldview of the reader. The great blog writers don’t teach anything new.
Bloggers should remember that the best stories agree with what the readers already knew and make the reader feel smart, and secure when confirming how right they were in their own conclusions.
Storytelling is the art of persuasion. Storytelling doesn’t invent interpretation but just confirms the old ones.
Great bloggers never write stories that contradict themselves. Customers are clever. Don’t misguide them. They can see through your deceit at once.
If your stationery shop is in the right location but doesn’t have enough inventory, you lose. If your restaurant is in the right location, but you have the wrong menu, you lose.
Great stories rarely aim at everyone. Target and tell your story to a selected audience. Do not target the average people.
Average people are satisfied. Average people are good at ignoring because they are less exploratory. Average people have too many polarized points of view.
Do not water your storytelling targeting average people. If you try to appeal to everyone, it will appeal to none. The most effective blogs match the world view of a small section of the audience — and then these segments of tiny audience spread the whole story.
Great bloggers write great stories and through their stories they make a promise.
The promise is of fun, of safety, of a shortcut. The promise should be appealing and that is possible when the promise is audacious and bold. The promise should be exceptional else it will not attract readers’ fantasy.
The great storyteller sells trust, and trust is a rare resource. Great bloggers write stories that build trust. The more life a person has lived the more he loses the innocence to trust others.
People trust their favorite cinema or sports stars in commercials, advertising pharmaceuticals drugs, or Vodka because they like or love those celebrities. They wouldn’t have trusted the CEO of the manufacturing company. Celebrities are the star marketers and the star storytellers. Bloggers are also storytellers, the stars with their keyboards.
No blogger has ever gained trust by writing stories that no one trust. Understanding the buyer’s psychology and writing a story that can develop trust.
Fun Factor: Scholars of Columbia University conducted research that concludes that the more fun a buyer has to visit your website the more likely he is going to make a transaction.
Bloggers should write stories that are built on two psychological pillars of consumer fun: Hedonic Engagement and a sense of liberation.
Furthermore, Hedonic Engagement, in turn, depends upon the perception of novelty and connectedness. The sense of liberation depends on a sense of spontaneity and the impressions of boundedness.
We think we are conducting a sober comparison but, in reality, our brains are following orders from our guts. Our normal habit in life is to develop a quick belief about a situation and then seek out information that bolsters our belief. And that problematic habit, called the “confirmation bias,” is the second villain of decision making.