You need an edge. You can’t simply blog and hope for the best. Competition is too intense, and attention is too scarce.
The most enduring competitive advantage is a deep understanding of what makes your readers tick – specifically, how they build rapport with experts and mentors in their lives. As a professional blogger, you are trying to position yourself as your readers’ mentor; to do this, you need to insert yourself into their day-to-day story.
Here’s an interesting strategy for doing just that.
The Hero’s Journey
It seems that George Lucas had a secret template for creating the original Star Wars trilogy. For that matter, so did J.R. Tolkien with Lord of the Rings and the Wachowski brothers with the Matrix trilogy. It’s called the Hero’s Journey, and it forms the story-telling skeleton for our most enduring tales.
I suspect that if George Lucas blogged, he would use this template to hook and entrance his readers.
Here’s how the Hero’s Journey template works:
The complete journey has 12 stages. I’ll map the stages against the Star Wars epic to help you get your head around how each stage works.
- The Ordinary World
- Call to Adventure
- Refuse the Call
- Meet the Mentor
- Cross the Threshold
- Test, Allies, and Enemies
- Approach the Inmost Cave
- The Ordeal
- Reward
- Road Back
- Resurrection
- Return with Elixir
- Luke living on Tatooine
- Obi-Wan’s request to help Princess Leia
- Refuses the request, family killed
- Realizes that “Uncle Ben” is a Jedi Master
- Learning the Force
- Meets Han, R2, and C-3PO
- Captured by the Death Star
- Surviving the Trash Compactor
- Saves Leia
- Returns to the Death Star
- Uses the Force, destroys the Death Star
- Luke returns triumphant
The Hero’s Journey is so ingrained in our psyche that we go through versions of it in our daily lives. If you look closely, I bet you can see the echo of the Hero’s Journey in your own day-to-day challenges.
Now that we know that it’s there, we can effectively use its power to persuade and mentor our readers.
Your Reader’s Journey
The goal is to insert yourself as an ally and mentor in your readers’ journey. To do this, you have to recognize which stage your reader is experiencing. The first step is to identify the “call to adventure” for your readers. Here are a few examples:
- Weight loss: the call to adventure is losing 50 pounds
- New parents: the call to adventure is surviving 30 days without sleep
- Small business owner: the call to adventure is not going bankrupt in the first year
Since we know the steps of the adventure, we can write content that resonates with them.
Let’s map out the journey of a weight-loss blog reader:
- The Ordinary World
- Call to Adventure
- Refuse the Call
- Meet the Mentor
- Cross the Threshold
- Test, Allies, and Enemies
- Approach the Inmost Cave
- The Ordeal
- Reward
- Road Back
- Resurrection
- Return with Elixir
- Living with extra pounds
- Challenged to lose weight for health reasons
- Too tired, discouraged, to commit
- Finds the weight-loss blog
- Sees initial results
- Connects with accountability partner, fitness trainer
- Injury makes exercise difficult
- Adapts and overcomes difficulty
- Rapidly loses weight
- Confronts circumstance that used to trigger binging
- Beats the temptation and proves dedication
- Shares experience with others
I’m sure you can see how you can write posts to guide, encourage, and provide tools for each step. Imagine the 50-pound overweight woman who visits your blog.
What if she reads a series of posts encouraging her to move forward in her weight loss journey? Next, she sees specific posts with strategies to overcome her resistance to exercising or dieting. Then she sees posts on picking an accountability partner, and so on.
It’s easy to see how this kind of blog would quickly become a trusted ally – even a mentor.
All you need to do is map out your content to match, support, and propel your readers on their adventure.
Is Every Reader on a Journey?
Yes. It’s just my belief, but I’m willing to bet my homemade lightsaber that every reader is on an epic or mini quest of their own. I would go one step further and say that they pick their friends, jobs, and life partners based on this journey. The people who “get it” are the ones that intuitively understand the challenges they face.
I want to be the one that “gets it”. How about you?
Hey Stanford,
Just stopped by to check out this article everyone seems to be talking about. Rocking man!
What most intrigues me most about your post is how scaleable it is. You can use this framework for individual posts (storytelling) but also for complete business positioning.
I’m currently evaluating a potential venture and this framework will help me best understand whether we can make a solid value proposition.
Glad you liked the post Martin. You are right about scalability. I’m finding that I can use the Heroes Journey in almost every marketing and business situation.
What a creative/basic storytelling way to give content a coherent arc. This template will be added directly to my toolkit. Thanks.
This is like a light bulb coming on in a dark closet where in the very back hiding behind last year’s weathered double breasted blazer, lurks the brilliant mind of a lost blogger who when the light switch is turned on, gets it. Thanks Stanford for turning on the light. (or light saber)
This is good stuff – and doesn’t relate only to writing blog posts.
I’ve used “sagas” – based on pure storytelling – for a couple of years now to help provide a longer term, more strategic view of how a project’s deliverables will look. It gives some texture and context to otherwise difficult to sell “roadmaps” and “project plans” and fits into the “user story” concept quite well that developers are oft prone to using.
This is where George Lucas got it from– The Master, Joseph Campbell
It has been a couple of months now since I am looking for good blog strategies for my own blog – to create. When I got this post by mail I was really surprised – as a real starwars fan:-) French would say “je dois ramasser ma machoire” which sounds like my mouth fel open so far that I had to grap my jaw that felt as low as my knees.
It will take some time to really integrate this but I think this is a great approach. Thanks for sharing.
Stanford…
Taking your readers on a Journey is excellent.
Do you recommend doing this through your blog posts or through same an email Auto-Responder course?
What do you the advantages and disadvantages of each would be?
Both. For blog posts, I match the Hero’s Journey to my editorial calendar. I make sure that I have posts that hit each step throughout the month. I do the same for emails that are structured as autoresponders. So if I send out 10 emails in sequence, I try to hit each stage in the campaign. I’m not particularly religious about hitting every stage (especially the later ones) but I make a point with making sure that I clearly associate with the my reader’s Call to Adventure, Finding a Mentor, and Collecting Friends, Allies.
Make sense?
That’s a good idea to match the steps to your editorial calendar. Neat approach!
Excellent approach to writing a series of blog posts. Thanks for the inspiration, Stanford.
Thanks YOU for stopping by Carole! Glad you could use the info,
This is great. Love it. I am going to use this. Wonderful 12 step program er ah I mean list.
Of course, the other thing Lucas would do would be to go back and rewrite classic blog posts so they were less good.
Hero’s Journey is great stuff, we’ve been talking about it quite a bit behind the scenes on Copyblogger as well.
Totally. I’m choosing to ignore the 3 prequels! It’s amazing how much of the Hero’s Journey applies to content marketing.
Ha! Ain’t that the truth?! Lucas would also know how to monetize the heck out of it too.
Gotta love this post, Stan. You know how I love Star Wars wisdom for blogging!
What an intriguing approach to writing a blog! I’ve been struggling for several months, trying to reinvent my blog (or scrap it all together). I’d lost focus and energy and haven’t been able to figure out how to get it back. I love writing about young children – why they do what they do from a child development perspective – but that wasn’t motivation enough to stay in it for the long haul. Your epic story framework may be just the key I’ve been looking for! I LOVE a great hero story and your ingenious application of it to blogging has gotten me more excited about possibilities for my own blog than I’ve felt in a long time. Thank you, Stan!
You’re welcome! May the Force be With You