Let me preface this by reminding you that the greatest selling tool in all the world isn’t the internet, or sales letters or sales videos or even word of mouth. It’s stories.
Stories sell like nothing else because we are hard wired to listen to and love stories. It’s in our genes. There was a time when storytelling could literally save our lives. Think of primitive man coming back from a hunt and telling everyone in camp the story of how ‘Bob’ was killed by a saber tooth tiger in the sixth valley to the south.
Do you think anyone would venture into the sixth valley to the south after that? No way, because they knew the story of how Bob got killed by the tiger who lives there.
Now then, here’s how to get experts to practically write your blog posts for you AND get them to do it in story form:
Ask them a question that invites a personal story.
For example, your blog is about investing in commodities. This week you want a blog post on pork futures (I’m making this stuff up right now) so you send out an email to every commodities expert you know of, asking them about their most memorable pork futures story. It doesn’t matter if they made or lost money, you just want to hear their story. A dozen of them write back and you put those stories together into a post.
You’re doing a few things here:
First, you’re getting experts to weigh in on an interesting question, which means you get to ‘borrow’ on their credibility, making you look good to your readers and customers.
Second, you’re doing this in story form, and since people love stories, they are coming back to your blog every week for more of these stories.
Third, you’re building a relationship with these experts. Sure, some of them won’t respond to you, but others will be eager to share their stories. And down the road, who knows what might happen. They could end up promoting your product to their lists, or asking you to do a JV, or even becoming good friends with you.
Fourth, blog posts like these tend to get shared on social media which brings in more traffic.
Fifth, your experts might also share your posts with their followers. “Hey, my hog futures story is featured in this post, check it out.”
The trick here is to phrase your questions in such a way that it invites personal stories.
And don’t forget to ask your readers the same questions. Sometimes it’s the everyday guy or gal you don’t know who has the best story – the one that makes your article go viral or even get referenced on other major sites.
