Written on July 23rd, 2007 at 09:07 am by Darren Rowse

Tell a Story - Rediscovering Your Blogging Groove Day 7

Miscellaneous Blog Tips 33 comments

Rediscover-Blogging-Groove--1Today’s task in the Rediscover Your Blogging Groove project is to tell a story.

One of the more helpful books that I’ve read in the last couple of years is The Story Factor by Annette Simmons. In it she talks about six different types of stories and how they can each be important in influencing people.

These six types of stories are:

  1. “Who I Am” Stories
  2. “Why I Am Here” Stories
  3. “The Vision” Story
  4. “Teaching” Stories
  5. “Values-in-Action” Stories
  6. “I Know What You Are Thinking” Stories

I’m looking to write a series of posts on these types of stories in the future so won’t go into great depth about each one except to say that stories are incredibly powerful ways of communicating for bloggers.

Stories are effective because they:

  • engage the imagination of readers
  • go beyond facts and theories
  • reveal something about yourself as a blogger
  • trigger emotions and the senses
  • provide hooks for readers to latch onto in your blogging
  • are relatable to readers
  • illustrate your points in ways that can be much more convincing (and convicting) than other types of information

The key with stories on blogs is making them tie into the rest of your blog - ie make them relevant and ensure that they have some point to them that is useful to your readers on some level. While telling the story of how your dog dug up your vegetable patch might interest you, the readers of your blog about (insert your blog’s topic here) may not be quite as fascinated - unless you use the story to illustrate something about your topic.

So what type of stories could you tell on your blog?

Here’s a few starting points:

  • Personal Discovery Stories - tell how you discovered a lesson. These stories show your readers how similar you are to them.
  • Stories as Analogies and Illustrations - tell a story that on the surface has nothing to do with your topic but which illustrates a principle that is very relevant
  • Success Stories - tell how you achieved something. These stories can be inspirational and motivating for your readers.
  • Failure Stories - I find that these stories are incredibly powerful - particularly if you are able to show some lessons learnt through a failure
  • Tell Someone Else’s Story - sharing the journey of someone else and how/what they learned can be effective
  • How I did it Stories - these practical stories can be effective because they talk your readers through a process in a relatable way
  • Picture Stories - using images or video can be another great way of communicating a story because it engages the senses in a way that text can’t (similarly - audio posts/podcasts can do this too).

I’m sure there are plenty of other types of stories to tell. Feel free to suggest your own in comments below.

Homework - Tell a Story

It’s time to write your story post. Post it on your blog and then come back to the comments section below to share it with us so we can see how your approached it.

Examples of Story Posts

If you’re looking for some examples on story posts - here are a few stories that I’ve written here at ProBlogger.

Read the rest of the Rediscover Your Blogging Groove Project

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