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Every story has an emotional response to elicit. When campers are
sitting around a fire in the dark woods, they tell stories that
generate fear and excitement; stories about psychotic killers
with hooks for hands, and teenagers who pick up strange
hitchhikers.
When women have lunch with their girlfriends, they tell amusing
stories about their husbands and boyfriends to relate to each
other. And when you tell a story on your website, in an article,
or even in an ad, you are letting people know that, "this
product, service, or business opportunity worked for other real
live people, so it could work for you, too!"
People don't remember statistics, but they have a special storage
compartment in their brains for stories. Stories are an innate
part of human beings. As long as there have been people, there
have been stories. They are a part of every culture that is or
ever was, ranging from writing on walls, to oral traditions, to
dramatic plays, to the modern novel. Stories capture our hearts
and imaginations, so we tend to pay more attention to them than
we would, say, hard-sell ads.
Consider how often you leave the room during commercials, as
opposed to how often you leave during Friends or E.R. Maybe the
difference is no more than the mode of presentation. If
commercials were 30 minutes long and told a story, maybe we
wouldn't lunge for the remote or leave the room when they came
on.
I'm kidding about the 30 minute commercial, but I'm not kidding
about using stories to sell. Let's talk about how you can use
stories in your own copy to keep people's attention, build trust
and credibility, and, most importantly, sell.
After reading a fair number of popular novels, you may begin to
notice a pattern in how the protagonists of the story develop.
Although you aren't writing a novel for your website, ad, or
article, you can use this same process of development in your
stories to help you sell.
Let's take a closer look at character development in popular
writing and see what we can incorporate into our own stories, to
increase sales and build credibility:
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