Tell a story: how to add depth to your blog posts

When I was blogging about small business marketing, one of my favorite ways to add depth and value to my instructional posts was to tell a story and then relate it back to marketing principles in some way. Although that blog no longer exists, here’s an example from one of the posts:

I was making the point that a business owner shouldn’t hurry through the steps of planning a marketing effort, and related this concept to my efforts at home to grow marigolds from bedding plants vs. sowing directly from seeds. I told the story this way:

I struggled for a long time to get marigolds to grow in my garden. They should have been easy: they are not a picky plant, and they bloom all season long. But for sixteen years, I spent untold dollars on lovely little bedding plants that simply refused to grow.

Then one year, I received a solicitation from my Alumni Association which included a packet of marigold seeds. Long about the end of May, I threw these seeds rather haphazardly into a sunny spot  - mostly as an after thought, because I didn’t want them to go to waste.

What happened was that the seeds took root and flourished where no marigolds had done so before.

The anecdote is only part of the overall post, of course. The trick is to tie the story back into the general topic of the blog, which was small business marketing. I wrapped it up this way:

What’s this got to do with marketing? Simple: it’s the difference between throwing money and time at something in anticipation of instant results, versus taking time to work through the natural cycle of things and find value in the process as much as the result.

(It) seems likely that if you make the choice to do things well, completely, and right, you’ll flourish in a way you never have before.

Here’s why this is valuable:

Anecdotes help personalize the blog, making the reader feel that they are connecting with a person rather than a faceless “teacher entity.”

Anecdotes help you make your point without being preachy. Use a story to illustrate your point, and the post becomes more about a lesson you learned and are sharing, rather than a lesson you are trying to teach.

Fiction writers are admonished to “show, don’t tell.” By sharing an anecdote that makes your point, you’re showing readers why something is true rather than just asking them to take your word for it.

Story-telling fosters the kind of lively back-and-forth exchange that makes for great conversation.

A relevant story not only illustrates your point but also illustrates the universality of the problem being addressed.

Each of these benefits is bound makes readers a little more likely to interact with you, to share their own experiences via your comment section, and to contribute to the greater conversation around your central theme.

photo from the Flickr stream of Adwriter.