Your Business and the Story of a Tree Part Three

You’ve heard of the J. Peterman catalog, right? Or State Farm Insurance? Want to know what they have in common? (Besides currently being profitable ventures, though J. Peterman was in trouble a few years back.)

I bet you do.

And that’s the point of today’s Money Monday’s lesson.

You want to know. That element alone is sometimes referred to as the curiousity factor. I didn’t invent it. I’m not, by far, the first person to mention it on the web, or as it relates to business.

You can bet I get a lot more mileage out of it than other people do, though. Today I’d like to give you some ideas about how you can do this too.

Telling a Business Story

Stories. We all love them. Many an internet marketer has revealed this fact. You’ve probably done it to yourself in your own life. Remember that TV sitcom you watched, that was so awful? And yet you could only turn during commercials because you Had to know how it ended.

You had to know. Part of you didn’t care and the process might have been mentally excruciating. But you watched until the end.

Or think about the commercials for the news, now often cleverly dressed up as actual news. (Imagine that. A commercial for the news is now known as a news brief. Every day they say “Here’s a headline you could have read in the paper or online yourself. We’ll tell you the rest at 5, 6 or 11.”)

It’s amazing how much you get that stuck in your brain, and not even know it. If something in that broadcast even remotely appealed to you in the beginning, then you’ll feel like it’s essential for you to know the end, sometimes subconsciously.

You can use that in your business. If you’re blogging you can say the magic words, “tomorrow we’ll discuss”. That alone can get people to come back and find out what you said.

Even better is when you tell them … without telling them.

I did it to you this week – I said:

Find out what made me say:

If you were ever to see it on the web anywhere else, you might be tempted to rename your first-born child to access it. But you won’t. No one else has it. No one else ever will.

More people clicked on the link following that text than anything else in that newsletter issue.

And whether you’re blogging or not, you can tell a business story. Somewhere on your site, you can relate an analogy of life to business.

So what do State Farm and the J Peterman catalog have in common? They tell stories to promote their business and their products, and set themselves apart from the pack.

You can get car insurance or clothes from a dizzying array of outlets. But some people remain steadfastly loyal to State Farm and J Peterman. What’s their secret?

I wish I knew it all. But I can speculate on the one part I have experience with.

In the next article, I’ll talk more about what State Farm Insurance is doing that anyone can do, and how the J Peterman method is a god-send to bloggers.