Video Monday 4: Applying the Storytelling Blog Formula

This post applies my storytelling blog formula (story, content, offer) to a friend’s blog project. Hopefully this illustrates it a little better and shows how you can approach your blogging projects.

Transcription:
Sings: Video Monday, video Monday, it’s a Monday so here’s a video!

So on today’s Video Monday I just wanted to, I’ve been talking about the story, the content, and the offer as being a key part of a story telling blog. And if you’re trying to make a new blog for your company, your organization or just for yourself and you wanted to have, well a purpose, a sense of meaning for readers, make them want to care about it and keep them coming back, then these could be some elements that you’d want to try.

So I thought I’d give a practical example of this. Of someone who’s going to be trying out a blog and wants to start off on the right foot, and we’re going to try the story, content, offer format for it.

So I talked earlier about helping my friend who’s an artist start promoting himself online more, or at least just become more conversational in his marketing. So for his blog, here’s basically the story, content, offer. So you can take away from this sort of thing and see if this format can work for you too.

So his theme is likely going to be something like ‘what they didn’t teach you in art school.’ Namely how to make money off of any of this. You know, and a lot of art schools, at least a lot of people I know who have been through art school have suggested that there’s almost this feeling that there’s some virtue in not being able to make money. The whole starving artist thing is actually, something that people enjoy the idea of to some degree. So you don’t really get taught all that much about how to make money. Selling out, etc.

So the offer for his blog then is pretty simple. Here’s how you can make money. If you’re an artist here’s how you can make money doing art. The content will be tips on what he’s doing, what he’s trying, the things that he’s testing out, and the ways that he’s promoting himself. You know, how to network, how to find people that might be interested, how to get commissions, how to talk to the right person.

How to basically display, you know, do you take like a Mark Earls “Herd” thing in lighting lots of fires and showing people you know, hey, this person bought my art, this person bought my art, why aren’t you buying it? To some degree. You know, show that there’s this group of people interested so you should be too.

So the story then is basically him trying to figure out how to make money off of his art. By teaching others and by talking about it and by giving it this offer you’re learning along the way that he’s, you know, he’s kind of new to this whole making money off of his art to the degree that he wants to. Obviously he is a professional artist but he wants to get out there more and wants to expand beyond just the region where he’s at right now. Not to suggest he’s not already making money as an artist, but he wants to go further with it using online marketing and social media tools and what not.

So the story throughout it then will be his journey. You follow the blog, you come to it every day, every week, and you’re learning more about his process in discovering how to promote himself online. You’re going from making okay money as a local professional artist, to making more money, to expanding beyond, to figuring out how to blog, how to use twitter. How to, you know, network better. How to find more commissions and get other people interested in it.

You’re along for the ride. And what this tells you – the meaning and why you should care, it says that you can do this too. If I figure out how to make money off of this, if I figure out how to do things better, so can you. Not just if you’re an artist right now, but if you’re working some crappy office job and have always dreamed of being a writer or a painter, a sculptor, maybe by reading this blog you’ll figure out how you can quit your crappy job and start doing what you really want to do.

So story is you’re along for his journey and you can take part in it too.By reading it everyday you’re getting a little bit closer to pursuing your dream. The content is, here’s how you make money, here are the things I’m trying, you should try them out too, and the offer is, read this blog and you’ll be able to make money off of art as well. So, that was Video Monday!