Storytelling is crucial to creating content that is engaging and keeps the readers or watchers engaged. The attention spans of people have reduced and, hence, you don’t have a lot of time to grab their attention.
With storytelling, you can keep your audience engaged! In this blog post, I will share the top 5 methods you can implement to improve your storytelling. These methods will help you become a phenomenal storyteller so that when you host a sales webinar or create content for your affiliate product, you will know how to present the product.
Tell Stories!
Yes, this is the first method! Although it is easier said than done, anyone with practice can become a great storyteller.
“How can I practice? I don’t have good stories.”
I hear you!
Suppose you met your friend and you are going to tell them about a hike you went on last Sunday. When you share your hiking experience, do not say this:
Story 1
“Hey, you know, I went on a hike last week, bro! We went to the top of this mountain! The sight was mesmerizing!”
That is not a story! It does not hold your listener or reader. It is just a simple paragraph. There is no substance or content to it. You are only sharing your observation and diving deep into the story.
Let us rephrase it and narrate it like a story.
Story 2
“Hey, bro! You know, last week I had many client tasks. I was in the office (or working from home) from 9 AM to 9 PM. I and my colleague would always talk about the nearby mountain.”
“We would always talk about the picturesque view from the top. But since we were burdened with work, we waited for the coming Saturday.”
“On Friday we decided that will go hiking. On Saturday, we met at 6 AM and went climbing that mountain. Let me tell you that the hike was not an easy one. The mountain top was at a height of 1,600 feet.”
“Although the climb was difficult and our legs started to pain, we pushed ourselves and finally, reached the top.”
“Our legs were paining like anything, but the view was so mesmerizing, that we forgot that we were in pain.”
“We saw the pond, the buildings, and the forest in the other direction! The view was something I have never seen! To add a cherry on the cake, we saw an enthralling sunrise!”
Now, which story do you think is gripping? Story 1 or Story 2?
Story 2, right!
You should try and narrate a story like Story 2. Now, it will take some time, but try and share stories whenever you can. When you share information in the form of stories, your audience will connect emotionally and stay engaged for long.
Create A Structure
You can create a structure for your stories in the following five ways:
Giving A Context
When you narrate a story, don’t start with the main part. You could build up to the main part, by giving the context or background. You should lead your audience to the main scene.
Your context should make them feel like they understand the story. A context is crucial because if you start directly from the main scene or the main part, they will not understand what leads you to it. So, setting the content is key.
The Challenge
After you have set up the context, share the challenge you faced to reach the end of the goal.
If we go back to our hiking example, the goal was to climb to the top of the mountain. But the challenge was leg pain. So, if you face any difficulty to reach the goal, it could be a challenge.
For example, if you are promoting an email marketing tool, the challenge could be high ad costs on Facebook and Google, okay?
So setting up the context and following up with a challenge makes a story catchy and your audience will be compelled to stick till the end.
If you follow the structure, your audience will be curious to know more and see how you achieve your goal.
Share What Pushed You Away From Your Goal
When you narrate the story, you should also share the obstacles that pushed you away from your goal or forced you to take another route.
The things that push you away from the goal could be included in the “Giving a Context” phase of the story. These could be technical limitations, lack of experience, etc. And, that’s the beauty of content creation.
When you set out to create content, things could haywire, things could not go as planned, etc. So when you share a story, you should also include the things that pushed you away from the goal, as they become a crucial part of it.
The Result
Your audience wants to know how the story ended. They want to know if you achieved the goal. They want to know if you failed.
When you start a story, you set the context, lead to the central part, and share whether you achieve the goal or not. Whatever the outcome is, you should share it. If you failed, you should share the lesson you learned and also tell how you will overcome the failure, okay?
What Did The Experience Teach You?
When you share your content in the form of a story, you should include the change or lesson that you experienced. I agree there won’t be changes or lessons all the time, but every experience teaches a lesson, no matter how small.
You should still look for the lessons or things you learned, even when there were no breakthroughs.
Why? Because your audience will set out on the journey with you and they want to know how the journey or the story affected or changed you. I know it is too much work for a blog post or YouTube video, but you will observe that Super Affiliates always present information in the form of stories. Therefore, they have a high retention rate or view duration.
If you want to learn storytelling, you should watch MrBeast YouTube channel. You will see his videos are composed of the story structure I shared here.
Watch/Listen To Stories
One of the crucial points to becoming a better storyteller is to consume more stories. The more stories you consume, the more you understand the structure of the story, and the better you will be able to write blog posts or record videos.
When you hear or watch stories, listen attentively, think about the elements that we covered here within them, and apply the elements to your stories.
Write Down Stories
This is the most laborious part of becoming a better storyteller is to write down the structure of the stories that you consume. When you listen to a story, you should enjoy it first and after it ends, go back and break it down into the steps above.
You can follow the structure I shared in point no. 2 above and apply it to the stories you read, watch, or listen to. This will strengthen your story analysis skills and you will start to catch stories that do not follow the above structure.
You will also realise that stories that do not follow the structure shared earlier are not that compelling and you will not stay engaged for the entirety of the story.
As you do it regularly, you will observe that you will craft stories within minutes.
Become A Visual Storyteller
If you love YouTube to publish your affiliate content, you understand that it is a visual platform. You can follow the structure I shared earlier and see how you can incorporate it within your video content.
When you demonstrate a product you promote, you could tell your audience what is happening rather than just walking through the steps. Cover every minute detail! Do not spare anything!
During product demonstrations, take your audience on a journey from the beginning, usually the registration process, to the end, to the successful implementation of the product.
Conclusion
If you want to keep your audience engaged in your content, you should hone your storytelling skills. You can get better by practising regularly.
Don’t be demoralised if your story does not sound exciting the first time. It will take time and with each repetition, you will become a better storyteller.
Follow the below structure every time you want to turn normal informational content into a compelling story:
Step 1: Give a context
Step 2: Highlight the challenge you faced
Step 3: Share what pushed you away from the goal
Step 4: Share the result with your audience
Step 5: Share what the experience taught you
