Creator Stories - by Prewrite.com

The Art of Storytelling: Finding Your Story  

We all know people who are gifted storytellers - people who can captivate a crowd with their tales. While most of these people are charismatic and have a flair for language, they also have one important quality that you don't see: they know what makes a story worth telling.  

All good stories have a few elements in common: they contain interesting characters, who are involved in dramatic situations, and they all have a point, or a controlling idea. No one will be enthralled by a story that lacks these key elements.  

You may already have a sense of what makes a good story, but you may not be sure where to start when crafting a story of your own. Do you start with an interesting character? A dramatic moment? An intriguing idea?  

A good story should have dramatic characters and a good dramatic idea. However, when you're writing short-form content, there's a third possible starting place: the dramatic moment.   

Longer-form content give you more time to explore character, to develop plots and subplots, and to suggest ideas. But in the short-form content, you need to be economic and find a quicker route to your story.   

A truly dramatic moment has everything a good story needs - interesting characters in compelling situations, who are wrestling with a big idea. If a moment strikes you as dramatic, and you learn how to unpack it, you'll have all the important elements of a good story.

Also available on YouTube: https://youtu.be/XDnNwZaSmPI

Follow on Twitter: Twitter.com/trentanders0n

It’s one thing to build an audience — it’s another to monetize your audience.  

There are infinite products and services you can sell, but success in doing so ultimately hinges on one thing: Alignment.  

The audience you target, products you offer, and ways you position them must be in alignment with each other.  

To ensure your efforts to monetize your audience are not mismatched, consider the following six questions…   

1. Will you monetize an audience of the many or the few? 

2. Will you sell to an audience seeking a solution or an audience who doesn’t know they have a problem? 

3. Will you teach people how to do something or do it for them? 

4. Will you sell something that earns or costs? 

5. Will you target new money or existing spend? 

6. Will you sell to people once or on repeat?

Say you’re selling widgets. You know your widget is 39% lighter than the competition, works 53% faster, costs 13% less, and has 29% more support.

Your client is asleep by now.

But maybe, three years ago you had a friend who struggled with their widget, who complained about the cost, the size, and how frustrated they were because a widget part broke, and they couldn’t get any support to fix it. So you decided to do something about that. And you designed this better, cheaper widget, and have around-the-clock o-call support, and your friend’s company has now doubled their production capacity.

This is the difference between fact-telling and storytelling, and it's even more effective when told via video.

Ali Hammoud and his team at Vidyard have cracked the code on effective video selling and video marketing.

Now we examine video selling and video marketing through a storytelling lens. 

Key Points:

"Video storytelling becomes effective when you treat your prospects as if they were archetypal characters in a story."

You have to figure out their:

* character traits

* wants

* needs

Then you can weave in your narrative.