Content Isn’t King. “Content Inside a Story” Is King

I just heard a great comment by JD Roth, who started a personal finance blog titled Get Rich Slowly, and sold it for 7 figures.

In an interview with Jaime Tardy, author of The Eventual Millionaire and the successful podcast of the same name, Jaime asked JD about whether great content is enough to separate yourself from all the other people in your field shouting their message.

He responds by explaining how you won’t differentiate yourself simply from your advice, because there are millions of others giving same or similar advice. In other words, just having good content will not make you stand out from the crowd.

In the interview, he uses the example of someone writing about why people should invest in index funds. Well, notes JD, there are thousands of articles out there on the value of investing in index funds. You won’t differentiate yourself by writing another article giving this advice.  What will make you different is the story of WHY YOU became a fan of index funds–i.e. YOUR story.

This is what I call a Pain and Promise Story. You talk about the Pain you were experiencing due to the problem your audience is currently dealing with, your discovery of a way to solve that problem, and the “good news”–aka The Promise–of what it’s like after you have solved the problem. So in JD’s example with the index fund article, you might write about all the years you spent time you didn’t have trying to track and compare various funds and still find they underperformed the market, and how you discovered just how much you were paying for an “expert” to manage these funds, yet their management didn’t translate into better returns, just a higher management fee…etc. etc.

You get the picture.

By telling YOUR story, you become much more real. Much more bond-able than if you simply make your recommendation from On High.

Besides being more interesting and persuasive, storytelling also helps you accelerate the Know-Like-Trust process, which accelerates your ability to persuade and therefore your ability to make a positive difference.

To listen to JD talk about this, go to 17:35 in the interview (although I recommend the whole interview if you are a blogger).