Content marketing tools and training.
What’s that? You didn’t realize you had an enemy?
Don’t tell me you’re unfamiliar with that procrastinating self-destructive demon that’s thwarted so many of your best efforts.
You know, that troll standing on the bridge between your actual life and the un-lived life within you, the dream of which likely started you down this crazy blogging path in the first place.
Yeah, that bastard.
How is it possible that a string of fake pearls, purchased at Bergdorf Goodman for about $25, eventually sold at auction for $211,000?
Well, it certainly helps that Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy had worn this particular necklace in almost every historical photograph featuring herself and her husband President John F. Kennedy.
As Lynda Resnick, the woman who later bought the pearls interestingly said, the pearls had become “the icon of the icon.”
But they were still cheap baubles on a string, a handful of glass beads and nothing more.
Were they really worth that much just because Jackie had worn them?
So there he was, bleeding arms tied to an unnecessarily slow dipping device, hovering over a pool full of hungry sharks, his beautiful companion’s fate bound up with his.
Everything depends on his next move. What does James Bond, perhaps the most iconic action hero of all time, do?
He cuts himself loose with his Rolex Submariner, which just happens to be equipped with a miniature buzz saw.
Have you ever been inside a money booth? People rent them for parties and events.
If not, let me describe it for you:
You’re in a clear glass booth and money is swirling in a breeze all around you. Bills are brushing your cheeks, your hair.
You want to get as much money as you can in the thirty seconds you’ve been given, so you grab for the fattest clumps.
Pulled away. Distracted by twitter, e-mail, FaceBook. Every reader has it happen several times a day. Will your readers be any different?
Not unless you hook them.
And the secret to hooking your readers comes from the storytellers of the world.
A storyteller can’t rely on the copywriter’s standby WIIFM, because, well, the only thing that’s in it for the audience is the storyteller’s ability to engage their interest.
That’s why they’ve made an art of hooking the reader, and why screenwriting guru Robert McKee has crystallized that art into one key lesson.
I bet you didn’t know that the main characters of HBO’s Sex and the City represent one of the better examples of the four personality temperaments, did you?
Just about every personality typing system—from Hippocrates’ humors to Myers-Briggs/Keirsey or DISK—groups personalities into four primary temperaments. Only the labels differ:
and so on.
