Why Story Power
Today is National Bat Appreciation Day… …which got me thinking about how much I appreciate BATman. He’s my favorite superhero. It’s no contest really. Why BATman? Because he’s merely a man. He didn’t rocket in from Krypton with the power to leap tall buildings in a single bound. He wasn’t bitten by a radioactive spider.…
A shout-out to my friend Bill Mueller — a storytelling standout who wrote a great email yesterday about showing up as human. In recent emails, Bill has shared ways to “tell a story in an email without telling a story.” Yesterday, he wrote about why that matters: “(These tips) all exist to make your reader…
I heard an interesting tidbit recently about Eugene Schwartz, the legendary copywriter who never suffered from writer’s block. He had a secret move for understanding his target market… He went to the theater and watched every hit movie. And not just once. He watched the blockbusters twice. Why? Because if you want to generate massive sales…
A long, long time ago, I was on the lower east side of Manhattan when I saw… …a big, fat rat, walking backwards… …dragging a foot-long slice of New York style pizza across the sidewalk. He pulled the thing with his teeth a good 50 feet before he and the slice disappeared into his hidey…
When Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman were a couple, she bought him a star. Nicole broke open the piggy bank, dished out a few shekels to one of those star registries, and dubbed the celestial body, “Forever Tom.” I thought that was kind of amusing and interesting so I wrote an email about it several…
Yesterday, during a meeting of my Content Transformation Academy Mastermind, we were helping VIP member “L.D.” rewrite some bullets for sales letters she’d drafted. I shared with the group an email I wrote four years ago… …because it contains a quick and easy way to create story-powered content that attracts leads, keeps them tuned in,…
My last dispatch re: Perry Marshall’s Ultimate AI Seminar which I attended this week… Before I ventured to Chicago for the seminar, I read this in Perry’s “New Renaissance Newsletter:” “Everything’s a parable. Everything is a story. You are living the story you will one day tell, right now. This runs contrary to the prevailing world view that says,…
Happy World Storytelling Day. Let’s celebrate with a quick story about the client-attracting power of stories. At Stanford University, Chip Heath asked his students to give one-minute speeches that contained three statistics and one story. Some time after the speeches, Heath quizzed students on what they heard. Only 5% of the students remembered a single…
Come and listen to my story ’bout a man named Fred… …(named changed to protect the guilty)… …a poor marketer, barely kept his family fed. You see, Fred was one of those marketers who spouted unproven “rules” — as if they were commandments from the mountaintop. “Rules” full of more bullsh*t than the compost pile…
I bumped into a marketing agency owner who wants help finding new clients. He posted his cry for help in and online forum. He described his claim to fame: “What sets us apart is that we strive to offer quality services at affordable rates.” Ummmmmmmm, no. “Quality services at affordable rates” is not set-you-apart stuff.…