How to Use Storytelling in Your Online Business

I'm really excited to talk to you about storytelling in today's article. On the last article, I talked about how your story is a very important part of messaging. And I said that I was going to talk about good storytelling. So that's what I'm going to do in this blog.

There are three main elements of any good story. The beginning, the middle, and the end. That sounds simple, right? But I'm going to go through each part and tell you the important things that have to be within them.

1. The Beginning

The beginning is like a hook. It is where you hook people into the story so they have to keep going through the story. In that beginning, you ask questions that you don't answer.

You need to really build up your main character and you need to be able to build some sort of emotional rapport between the reader, or the listener and this main character.

Make them care about them and what happens to them or you're going to lose them.

2. The Middle

The middle of the story is where the action happens. This is where things are going to happen to the characters.

The important thing about the transfer from the beginning to the middle is that it's a one-way doorway.

Something happens at the end of the first act that forces that character through into the second act and he must go, pretty much, reluctantly for it to be believable. No one wants to read about some gung-ho hero who's like “yay, ra-ra-ra” all the way through. We, ourselves, are reluctant in a lot of things that we do. So, when people are reluctant, we can relate to that a lot more easily and therefore, your main character has to be relatable as well.

They need to have their flaws and their weaknesses so that people can build a rapport with them because nobody is perfect.

Something happens at the end of that first act that drives them into the second act and there can be no going back. So, it's kind of like the reluctant hero, basically going forth into battle, into the middle.

The middle has to have ups and downs.

It can't just be all smooth sailing. There has to be gains and losses. You have to have people on a rollercoaster through the middle to keep it exciting. If it's all just too easy, it's boring. It needs to be hard but then they get a little reprieve from that.

At the end of the middle, once again, something happens that drives them into the final act. But what normally happens is that it's not something so much but a piece of information that is given to the character that now allows them to go forth into the final battle. It's normally the case that at the end of that second act, it seems like all is lost. But all of a sudden they get given this piece of information that makes them realize that perhaps they have a chance.

3. The End

And so, continuing, they go forward into that last act and then that is when you resolve any unanswered questions that you opened up in the beginning. You opened a loop in the first act and the end is when you make sure that all unanswered questions are closed down. Give the reader either the success or the failure or the ending that you have chosen for that character.

Example – Star Wars: A New Hope

1. The Beginning

In the first act in Star Wars: A New Hope, Luke is working on the farm of his aunt and uncle. He dreams for more but he's stuck on the farm. And then a droid turns up and within that droid is a message from Princess Leia to Obi-Wan Kenobi. So, he takes the droid out to Ben Kenobi, not realizing that he actually is Obi-Wan Kenobi. Ben decides that he has to go and enter an old battle. He was a part of the dance between good and evil and he needs to go back into that battle to save Princess Leia and he wants Luke to go with him.

Now, Luke would love to go with him, but he can't. Luke is loyal so rather than just running off on his poor aunt and uncle, he decides to go back to the farm. But when he gets back there, stormtroopers have killed them. So, that is the end of the first act.

2. The Middle

Luke goes through the door into the second act so there can be no return. He can't go back to that life he had on the farm because it no longer exists. Instead, he's forced forward into somewhere, like an adventure that he might have chosen willingly but he didn't because of what was happening in that first act. He would never have asked for the death of his aunt and uncle. So, not only is he forced through the door because of their death, but also because of what he now knows. He's forced into his ethics and his moral takes him forward into battle.

During the middle part, there's ups and downs.

So, they find out where Princess Leia is. They find a pilot that can take them there. But when they get there, a tractor beam catches their ship and draws it in. They now know that once they've got the princess, they can't get away. So, Ben Kenobi goes off to try and dismantle that. The rest go off to find the princess. They were able to find the princess but they have some close moments where they're almost caught. Then they free her and in their escape, they jump into a room which turned out to be a garbage compactor. And they nearly get crushed to death so you can see the ups and downs here. They escape and they're on their way back to the ship. When they're almost there, they see Darth Vader and Obi-Wan Kenobi fighting and they see Obi-Wan Kenobi die.

They manage to get back to the ship. They go back to the rebel forces home base and they find out that the Death Star is going to kill the planet they were in. They've only got a certain amount of time before it happens, and it seems that all is lost. Except for a piece of information.

This is the piece of information that drives Luke forward into the third act.

The information is that there is a weakness in the Death Star that they can exploit but it's like a one in a million shot that they have to make. If they can make this shot, the Death Star will explode. And so, Luke decides to go into battle against the Death Star so that he can try and take it out.

3. The End

We're taken into that final act where Luke goes into battle and that he has to trust in himself. He gets rid of his headset thing that everyone else is using and it's through the force that he manages to have the success.

So, that is the exciting Star Wars. But how do we bring that back to our story? I'm going to give you the pointers of my story.

What I do with my stories is that I pull little bits of it out and I use and weave it into other stories to show that I know and understand and I've been there and done that in a lot of cases.

1. The Beginning

So, my story is that I was trained as a dentist and then I had my own dental practice. I felt trapped by dentistry- not only by the dental practice but also by my income as well. This is because people always think that you earn a lot of money but the thing is, when you gear yourself up to earn a lot of money, all of a sudden, you're trapped into earning that same amount of money. I hated being stuck in a room all day. Some days, I don't even get to go to the toilet when I need to go. Also, there are some days where I don't get to eat because I'm running late.

It was quite a stressful environment when I had my own practice as well and I felt very trapped by it.

Then I had a really bad car accident which gave me some bulging discs in my neck. And so, not only am I feeling trapped by my profession but now I also have an incredible pain in my neck. The chances of me being able to work full-time as a dentist for the rest of my life is just not going to happen. I had to actually sell my practice and start to work part-time.

So, it was that neck injury that finally gave me the thing where all of a sudden I had no choice.

I was reluctantly staying within it like Luke was reluctantly staying on the farm even though I longed for more.

But it was a neck injury that forced me through the door and into the middle act, which is, basically me trying to work out how to have an income some other way.

We bought a bathroom renovation business which was a disaster but I learned a lot. What I learned from three years of running was that I needed a business that had no overheads. That drove me to online.

So then I decided to write books.

I loved reading. I thought I was pretty clever so I thought I could write a book. So I spent a year writing a book and then I couldn't even get a publisher to look at it because, by then, the whole publishing system was changing. With online marketing, the competition was steep and they were no longer looking at new authors. So, I realized if I was ever going to have the book published I had to do it myself. I started to learn how to self-publish. That took a little while. I finally learned how to self-publish.

I published my first book and I sat back waiting for the millions to roll in. And that first month, I think I sold one book and I suspect it was my mother who bought it. That first year, I went on to write another book and with two books out there, I think I sold a total of 72 books. Now, I put my books and won awards for them and I thought that that was going to make a difference but it didn't.

I decided to learn how to online market myself because I found that the Amazon algorithm was becoming less and less effective in marketing my books.

It was because I wasn't in control of the situation or of who they'll be getting put-in that I turned to online marketing back in 2012. That was when I really started to buy courses to try and learn how to take control of my own author income.

Now, I started to realize that if I was going to become an overnight success as an author, it was going to take years. That's a joke we make where it's will take 10 years to become an overnight success. But I realized it was going to take years and I didn't have the sort of time.

I got into network marketing and then affiliate marketing.

That was all great because it taught me a lot of things about funnels and copywriting and all this stuff that I probably wouldn't have learned if I hadn't have gone down those rabbit holes. So, it was the end of the first act.

2. The Middle

In the second act, I was getting pretty desperate. I invested a really large sum of money that I really couldn't afford into an affiliate marketing program. Basically, it came out with nothing. I put the money in and then I did what they said. And then it just wasn't working but what I got out of it was a piece of information. I learned that everyone out there who was teaching on online marketing wasn't teaching what they were doing. There was a whole strategy they were putting together that was what was making them successful. And that was the information that drove me from that middle act to that final act.

3. The End

So, I clarified in my head what it was and how it was working and then I did some more research. Then I found Steph, my business partner and we talked about how best to use this information. We decided on Social Media Bomb. And here you are now and our program Boomers where we basically teach the strategy to client-based businesses. Honestly, this strategy works for any niche and even network marketers and things like that can use this strategy to sell their product and to build a team. And now, that's what we're doing. Basically, that's the end of my story.

Now, as I go on, obviously, that story will grow as we become even more successful and we branch off into different ways my story will keep growing.

But you can see there how I've broken my story down into the three acts: the beginning that drove me into the middle; the information that drove me into the end; and the ups and downs that I had through the middle. And that is how you tell a story.

So, a hook at the beginning is a character that people can relate to and that they want to win the ups and downs through the middle and then a piece of information that drives them through into the final act and that's where they either have their triumph or they don't.

I hope you got some value from this article.

At Social Media Bomb, we specialise in teaching coaches how to build the online-marketing machine that will allow them to grow a predictable, sustainable and scalable income. If you would like to talk to me about how we can help you, just click this link so you can choose a time to have a chat: https://go.oncehub.com/DonnaJoy