Why your emails should be bloody
I taught a blogging mini-course at the University of Wisconsin this month and one of the things I told the students was, “the more you bleed, the more they’ll read.”
An email list or blog becomes one-dimensional so quickly when there are no stories.
Here’s an example of someone who gets it right, in a niche you might not expect:
Cellist Zoe Keating has prospered online selling 35,000 of her self-produced albums through her website and iTunes.
She says telling stories and divulging personal information is a key to her success. ““They want to buy my records five times just to support me because of that.”
“It’s important for me to always be authentic. It’s me on those websites. If I were to use my Twitter account just to publicize things, it wouldn’t be authentic.”
By the way, she has 1.3 million followers on Twitter. She didn’t build those followers by giving cello tips (unlike the many marketers who think they have to tweet endless marketing tips – ZZZZZ) but simply by being real. The world doesn’t need another tip, but it can always use another story.
So when you write an email or blog post, ask yourself if there’s a detail you could add to make it more real, more personal…more bloody, if you will.
As sportswriter Red Smith once said, “Writing is easy. You just sit down at the typewriter, open up a vein and bleed it out drop by drop.”
