It’s common knowledge that people won’t long remember a fact, but they will never forget a feeling. 

If you can provoke a feeling – whether positive or negative – you’ve got that person’s full attention. Without it, they will forget you as if they never knew you. 

That’s why it’s so important to tell stories about your business. If you don’t think your business has a story, think again. Everyone has a story. It’s just a matter of finding it. But not everyone recognizes a good story and fewer yet can tell it well. 

If you want successful content, you will need to tell your brand’s story and how you approach your customers. 

First, you need to understand what storytelling is and how to best use it to reach your customers. 

How People Think

Why do people remember feelings over facts? If you look at how we talk, it becomes clear. People say, “I am angry” or “You made me angry”. 

People don’t usually say “I feel angry” or “You made me feel angry.”

I think that’s because we are what we feel. Our feelings are so part of who we are we don’t instinctively parse them apart, not even in language. 

So that’s why the best teachers use stories to teach because stories are more relatable and memorable. 

That being the case, how can you use stories to reach your customer?

The first step is to understand what a story is. It’s not just a retelling of events. That’s just as boring as spewing forth facts. 

A story has a likable main character, a beginning, middle, end, high stakes and conflict. 

When I was a journalist, people would ask me why I didn’t write any positive news. I did. But they didn’t remember it. So when I wrote positive stories, nobody seemed to care. I got little to no feedback.

But if I wrote anything controversial, they remembered that for week if not years later. People sometimes still ask me about stories I wrote years ago and not of them were positive news stories. That’s why the media tends to focus on controversial stories because people gravitate toward them. 

So to tell a good story – not just any story – you must have the right elements. 

What is your story? Or what is your company’s story? You must ask yourself who you are and what you are trying to do. You might not have ever asked yourself that, but you must to it now. 

The big story is why you went into business in the first place. It’s best if you have that story written out and understood. 

Starting a business, let alone running one, is a daunting task. So ask yourself:  

• Why did you want to go into business?
• Why did you do it when you did?
• How long did you want to before you did?
• What obstacles stood in your way?
• What conflict did you meet along the way?

What are your values? What do you believe? What don’t you believe? What makes you likable? What are your best traits as a company? 

You must formulate the main character of the story, which is your business. A good character is a decent person with some flaws. Your business shouldn’t advertise its flaws, but you can’t please everyone in the sense that the branding isn’t about pleasing everyone. It’s about pleasing your target customers who is loyal to you because you are the right fit for them personally. 

So, it’s about pleasing some people a lot. Your target customers come back to you because you represent something in you that’s a value that’s important to them. So it’s imperative to define who you are to tell your story.

Another aspect of storytelling is the beginning, middle and end. The beginning of a story is a status quo until something enters the picture to change everything.

The middle is the struggle against the odds, but somehow you make it through all the conflict through your effort and become better along the way.

The end ties up loose ends and reveals what you’ve learned in the end.

This is your story that customers will be able to relate to on a regular basis. You can use this story on your webpage, print collateral and webinars. People will remember who you are if you own your story.

But that’s the big story. What are the smaller stories you can tell about your brand? Remember, a good story has struggle, so you can’t sell a story about something great you did that had no conflict.

Giving money to the food pantry is not a story. There’s no main character, no beginning, middle and end and no conflict.

But if you find a person who had a specific problem that was hard to solve. But your company heard about the problem, wanted to tell help but wasn’t sure how.

Then you found a way that was fraught with conflict and obstacles, and then you were able to solve the problem for this person.

These types of stories happen at companies all the time, but everyone is so busy that they don’t recognize them.

But if you are producing a new product line, you can tell that story. At one time, there was a status quo when you didn’t have this product.

Then you found a reason to create this product. But it likely wasn’t easy. You had to go through many prototypes and found many obstacles along the way. But then you found the right path and produced the final product and you’ve learned something in the process.

That’s an interesting story versus we have a new product that does x, y, z. You can tell your audience why they need this product, how you struggle to bring it to them and how you changed in the process.

They will likely remember that more than a new product that does whatever it does.

You want to use this tactic in social media as much as possible. If you look at the phenomenon of TikTok, a short video platform that’s growing exponentially, it focuses on stories for a lot of its content. While dance is important on TikTok, it’s become a place where stories are told using this same method. The best storytellers on TikTok start off with a bang and then release critical information as they go while unraveling their tales.

Final Thoughts

Storytelling is one of the most important vehicles to impart information. You can use it to build your brands so that your customers will remember who you are. But it’s not merely a retelling of what happens. The best storytellers know what information keep and what to cut for a compelling story. They understand how to increase the stakes and then put it in perspective in the end.

If you want to bond with your customers, remember how important stories are. It’s best if you write your own story so that your customers and employees understand what you are trying to do and can better relate to your company.

When I first heard the phrase – Google Analytics – I thought that sounds hard like math, so I don’t want to learn it.

I was right about it being hard, but I was wrong about the second part. Now I rely on Google analytics and look forward to seeing how my work has fared online.

I check it most days with the hopes that my content has done well or at least I can see what’s working.

I want to know:

• Are people responding to social media?
• How are they finding my website via search
• What is the mode of referral?

Google Analytics is not an option for content marketers today. If you’re a content creator, you might think it’s someone else’s job to sift through all that data, but you’d be wrong.

While you don’t need to know the entire black hole that is Google Analytics like hard-core digital marketers, you must be able to maneuver around it and figure out what content is working for you.

In the end, what’s the point of creating content that nobody wants? If you can figure out what people want, you can make more of it and then gain more traction.

Here are the basics that I think content marketers should know at a minimum.

Google Analytics – Acquisition

In Google Analytics, there are five primary sections:

• Realtime
• Audience
• Acquisition
• Behavior
• Conversion

I spend the majority of my time in the acquisition tab, and you should too. I need to know how people are finding my website or one that I’m managing.  In other words, how did I acquire my readers?

Under the acquisition tab, you have five dropdown selections:

• Overview
• All Traffic
• Google Ads
• Search Console
• Social
• Campaigns

Of these, I focus mostly on Overview, All Traffic and Social sections.

I look at the number of users, new users and sessions over a specific time period to see how many people came to my site.

The next metric I look at is bounce rate, which is the percentage of people who visited one page and then left without doing much on the page.

So if I have a bounce rate of 40 percent, that means 4 out of 10 people came to my site and left right away, probably because they didn’t like what I had to offer, or they got there by accident and aren’t my target audience.

Think of it like this. You’re invited to a party. You walk in the door and walk out in less than five minutes. That’s usually because you didn’t like what you saw there. Maybe the party was boring, or it wasn’t what you thought it would be or there’s somebody there you don’t want to see. In any case, you bounced out of there. It’s the same idea.

So the higher the rate, the worse your audience thought of your website. So you want a low bounce rate.

When I look at my bounce rate, I’m hoping for a bounce rate that is 30 percent or less. The average is between 30 percent and 70 percent.

Seventy percent and higher is considered a high bounce rate, which means you’ve got problems. Seven out of 10 people came to your website and didn’t like what they saw.

Next, I look at where the traffic is coming from and ending up on my site. I want to know:

• Did keywords bring them to my site?
• Was it a tweet link that viewers clicked on that brought them to my site?
• Did an article that references my site cause them to type in the name into a search engine?

If I get traffic from social, I can determine platforms, including Facebook, Twitter or Instagram, are bringing me traffic.

Then I go back to my social media metrics that I track. I review the engagement that my posts had to figure out a pattern, which I should see.

Next, I look at traffic from organic search – which means I ranked high for the certain keywords that visitors put into a search engine to find my website.

If I get a lot of traffic from direct search, meaning they typed in my exact name into a search engine, I can go my public relations calendar to see if there’s an alignment between my website being mentioned in articles or by influencers and direct search.

If I see a spike here, what likely happened is that I likely placed a story that increased my exposure for that site. If that aligns, I can write more press releases around that theme since it directly brought people to my site.

Next, I look at Pages Per Session, which, like bounce rate, is another way to see if people liked my content.

The Pages Per Session section indicates how many pages readers flipped through on my website. If the number is high, my content held their attention, at least for them to scroll through page to page.

I also look at average session duration, which is another indicator of how well my content is working for them.

These tabs offer a deeper dive into my website data that will tell me more accurately how people are coming to my site.

You can compare data using primary and secondary dimensions. I use this feature every so often to look at the sources and landing pages to see how readers came to my site. That usually confirms what I already learned previously. But knowing what the primary landing page will give you insights.

You need to review Channels, which are the marketing traffic sources for your site. Examples of channels are organic, direct, social, email, affiliates, referral and paid search.

Also, you need to look at Source/Medium, which is a more detailed report on traffic. For instance, a Source would be like Google and the Medium could be organic. That means viewers used Google to type in a keyword that led them to your site.

Google Analytics – Behavior

After the Acquisition tab, I head over to the Behavior tab with a drop-down:

• Overview
• Behavior Flow
• Site Content
• Site Speed
• Site Search
• Events
• Publisher

While the Acquisition tab tells me how readers got there, the Behavior tab tells me what they did when they did get there.

Under the Behavior tab dropdown menu, I focus mainly on Overview, Behavior Flow, and Site Content.

I will check Site Speed periodically to make sure my site is opening fast enough for a positive user experience, which is usually is.

Behavior Flow tells me how viewers moved from page to page and what page my viewers left my site.

Under Site Content, I look at the content drilldown section to analyze metrics for the individual pages people viewed. I also look at landing pages and exit pages to get more information about viewer behaviors.

Google Analytics – Audience and Conversion

I don’t spend as much time in the audience and conversion tabs as I do acquisition and behavior tabs.  

The Audience tab can be helpful, but I don’t check this every time as I do that other two tabs. I  want to see if there is any fluctuation in the type of users visiting my pages. But if there’s an uptick in visitors, I want to know if it’s due to a new cohort that’s visiting my site.

I look at the Conversion tab if I have specific goals I want to track. This tab requires a deep understanding of Google Analytics requires a sophisticated digital marketer who understands ads and goals and how to track and implement them. I rarely use this tab as a result, but I plan on using it more in the future as I grow my site.

If you are a for-profit e-commerce site, I think you will need this level of expertise on staff. If your site is more informational, you may not need this ability at all times.

Final Thoughts

Google Analytics is an invaluable tool, but there’s a steep learning curve. Not all the tools will be useful to you depending on what you’re trying to achieve. No matter your goals are, you need a rudimentary understanding of what your content is doing for your users.

By educating yourself enough, you will see what is resonating with your users and then plan accordingly. Without it, you’re working in the dark and maybe creating content that nobody wants.

Let me know what you think in the comments below.

Also, follow me on social media for more on content strategy and writing.

When I started writing about 10 years ago, I’d sit in front of my computer fully intending to write, but I always found something else to do.

Maybe I’d walk the dog, email a friend or even do the laundry – anything to stave off the pain of staring at a screen with nothing to say.

Over the years, writing hasn’t gotten easier. It’s always painful, but I found a system that works for me. That’s why I’m a big fan of outlining. Some people jump right in, but I never do. I always have a plan.

Blogging is a lot more labor-intensive than simply writing an article. Photos, graphics SEO, visual elements, links and keywords are all part of the process – all of which need to be managed properly or else the blog doesn’t reach maximum efficiency.

In other words, you can write the best blog on the most important topic, but if not one reads it or can’t find it, your blog is a failure.

Here’s my blog process that might help you with writing.

Outlining is Critical

I outline not only to organize my thoughts but to prevent procrastination, which I suffer from as most writers do. I’ve learned a few tricks along the way, one of which is breaking down a big writing project into little steps.

If you’re writing for a client, it’s even more important that you start with an outline, which you show him or her before you start writing.

That way, there are no surprises, and you can gauge whether you’re going in the right direction. If not, you can course-correct before you hand in an article that’s not what was expected.

If you’re outlining one of your own blogs, the outline can be more free-form, but it follows the same principle of organizing all your thoughts in a linear fashion.

You want to write down what each section will be about. Don’t worry about writing the perfect subheading now. I do that after I’ve finished the blog. Right now, jot down the main points – the beginning, middle and end.

For instance, here is the cursory outline that I created for this blog: 

1. INTRO – nutgraf – around the third sentence is the meat of what you’re writing about. 
2. WRITE – freeform writing after outline, not more than 5 lines in a paragraph, use bullets, list point to makes, simple construction. don’t be overly academic. simple is better so it’s understandable, use a long sentence and follow that up with a short one.
3. COPY EDIT– Fact check – Names, etc.  
4. PROOFREAD – Use editing software tool, read backward
5. VISUALS – Visuals – create on graphic design software, highlight important words in my brand colors 
6. SOCIAL MEDIA – create graphics, list type of social media to create
7. HEADLINES – Three suggested headlines
8. FINAL – Final Thoughts – CTA

The outline is basic and doesn’t directly correlate with what I finally produce. It’s simply a starting point. As I wrote this blog, I added more stuff that I thought of along the way. 

The Guts of Your Blog

Before I start writing, I make a list of keywords that I want to rank for on Google. You want to sprinkle these words through your blogs. It’s a good practice to have a keyword in the first 150 words or so. Try to put the keyword in the blog title as well.

I find keywords using online platforms like Google Ads and Ask the Public. What you’re trying to do is figure out what people want to read. When I was a journalist, all I had to do was convince my editor that my story was valid.

I had no way of figure out if anyone else wanted to read my story. I used my instincts and best judgment, but now I don’t have to do that because I can use online tools that help me find what people are typing into search engines, which is what they want to read.

I then start a list of links that I add as I write. The list is a starting point and not an exhaustive list at this point.

These links will be placed throughout the blog. These links are to reputable websites that enhance your readers’ experiences.

Don’t add these links just because you think you need them. Be organic about it and think of your reader. If it helps put what you said into context, then add a link. If not, don’t waste your time.

Also, try to add internal links to your blog. So if a blog you wrote last month is relevant to the topic, add it too.

Why are you adding keywords, links and to your blogs? It’s for search engine optimization, better known as SEO. That means when a person types in a term into Google, and your article is about that particular topic, your blog shows up on the first page of that search.

Boredom Equals Death

Now that you have your outline, keywords and links, it’s time to dive in.

One trick that I use is to set a timer for 15 minutes. That way I trick myself into thinking the pain will last only 15 minutes. When the timer goes off, I’m usually so immersed in the blog that I shut it off as an annoyance and keep going. The hard part for me is starting.

Here is another tip. Many writers use a tried-and-true method that I picked up as a journalist – it’s the anecdote and nut graf format.

You start off with an anecdote. One rule of storytelling whether it’s fiction or nonfiction is to start with some form of action. In fiction, it’s called medias res, which roughly translates in Latin to in the middle of action.

The point is you can’t bore your audience. If you notice how I started this blog, I began with an anecdote about me. It’s not super exciting, but it’s a lot more exciting than, “This blog will teach you about blogging.”

I told you a little story about myself that hopefully piqued your interest enough to keep going. An anecdote can be a statistic, quote, fun fact, personal story – whatever might grab your readers’ attention.

Now the nut graf or the nutshell paragraph spells out the point of the story. I try to place this about three paragraphs in. When you start off with the anecdote, which is designed to pique interest, you need to quickly tell your reader your point, otherwise, you could lose them.

In the nut graf, you want to be straightforward here, so your readers know what they are actually getting, and it puts the anecdote in context.

Another tactic is to write a straight lead. Forget the anecdote and dive right in. Don’t back into your writing.

You don’t have to use these formats, of course, but I hope it got you thinking that you need to grab the attention of your reader quickly. Boredom is the death of all blogs. 

Time to Beautify

Reading online is more fatiguing to the eye than reading on paper, so you want to add visual breaks for readers.

I add a graphic every 500 words or so. I’ll usually use a stock photo from Shutterstock. Then I’ll go into Canva to create the graphic that I place throughout the blog.

I then bold certain words like names and titles and important words throughout the blog to again break up long passages of text. I use my brand colors that match my website to give my blogs more depth and connection to me.

No, You’re Still Not Done

Now that you have your blog written, it’s not over yet. If you write a blog, how will others find it?

What I do is create social media graphics and draft the text for my blog. I know that I must promote it on social media to get others to my site. I do this directly after I write my blog, so I can pull quotes or facts from it.

You won’t want to do it later, and it’s imperative that you promote your blog, otherwise no one will find it. So create your social media as you write your blog. Your social media post text doesn’t have to be perfect at this point. I put it in a google sheet as a draft, knowing I will revise it when I actually schedule it online but write the basic sentences so you have something to work with later.

Then I write at least three headlines for it. I clean up the subheads, add more links, if I find them.

Now how long should a blog be? I write my blogs with no length in mind. I write them for what they are worth and then see how long they are. I usually end up with blogs that are between 1,000 and 2,000 words, which I think are best practices these days.

Final Thoughts

So as you can see, writing a blog these days is a lot of work, but I assure you it’s worth it. Many people give up because it’s so labor-intensive. For that reason, blogs require tremendous dedication on your part.

But by following defined steps, you will be able to mitigate some of the more frustrating aspects. So put your head down and plow through. Afterwhile, you will be rewarded for your efforts.

What are your thoughts on blogging? Let me know in the comments.

Also, please follow me on social media for more on writing, content strategy and digital marketing.