Why You Should Use Once Upon A Time To Sell

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I was reading one of the books by Seth Godin (the picture gives you a hint) and in the beginning chapters, he talks about how people can weave stories to make their products sell.

If you are running a home business, are you using stories to sell whatever it is you’re trying to sell?

Why does Once Upon A Time work?

People have been entertained as children with Once Upon A Time and the stories stuck with them. I’m positive that the mention of Once Upon A Time brings up certain memories for you.

If I say “The Three Little Pigs” – what memories will that bring up?

How about “Little Red Riding Hood”? “Sleeping Beauty”? “Goldilocks and the 3 Bears”? “Cinderella”? “The Tin Soldier”?

If you think about it, how long ago was it that you’ve heard someone retell the story? But even after so long… can you still remember what the story is about? If you can, that is storytelling at it’s best – it places an anchor in the mind of the reader that sticks.

As people grow up, children stories grow up into news and stories – we read newspapers, magazines, talk with other people, et cetera. Even though the format has changed, stories still continue to engage. Stories have merely taken another form of TV shows and movies.

Using Once Upon A Time to sell online.

Now, of course, it’s important to have a good facts and figures kind of comparison between products but that only works for people who are looking to buy.

For people who have decided to make a decision to buy, a comparison is just the next step to encourage them to make a better decision. If you are selling something online to someone for the first time – you need a story to engage the person (any copywriter knows this works) to carry on reading down the page.

The story starts right from the headline because that’s what captures the reader. Getting the reader to continue reading the sales letter and increasing your chance of making the sale depends on how you can engage the conversation that’s going on in the reader’s mind – stories engage.

Check out the popular sales pages (or if you have a swipe file, you know what I mean), the successful sales pages and sales letters will always weave around a story. People love to see numbers but they also love to see how whatever-it-is-you-are-selling has changed someone’s life as well.

This will apply to the selling of online stuff and services.

Can you use Once Upon A Time selling offline stuff?

How can you use the power of Once Upon A Time to sell in an offline business? You create it.

Seth Godin talked about how a wine glass maker weaved a story about how wine tastes different when you use different wine glasses. The wine will taste different when you use their glasses instead of a normal drinking glass because their unique wineglass appeal to the human senses.

What he did was to weave his story around the wine glass, the shape of it, the material, etc would impact the taste. People bought into the story and he was able to sell his wineglasses for $20 while the competition was selling them at $1.

And it wasn’t a fluke, his glasses sell exceptionally well!

Scientific testing, however, revealed that the glass had absolutely nothing to do with the taste of the wine. Blindfolded participants could taste no difference when different glasses were used.

Then again, his business still continued to flourish – because people bought into his story, not into the hard, actual facts of how heavy a glass should be, what colour, what shape, et cetera.

Use the power of storytelling to sell – you’ll be amazed at how well it works.

By the way, have I ever told you the story of how a desperate restaurant worker made more than $10,000 a month on autopilot?

Tagged with: sell stuff • stories

Filed under: Copywriting • Work From Home Strategies

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