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083 Proof That Stories Can Increase the Value of Even ‘Worthless’ Items

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Previous Episode:082 Could Podcasting Make You a Better Writer? More Episodes Next Episode:084 The Two Things That Make a Dull Product Irresistible

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102 The Beautiful Message Joseph Campbell Was Really Trying to Tell Us

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100 The Episode That Explains the Future of Rough Draft

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093 A Creative Email Trick for Becoming a Plain Spoken Writer

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092 Let This Stupid Machine Read Your Copy Out Loud

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091 This Free App Will Help You Write Bold and Clear Copy

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090 Four Writing Lessons I Learned from This Depressing Music Project

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089 The Clear-Copy Rule of Writing for the Web

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088 Three Ways Writers Must Adjust in a World Dominated by Social Media

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087 How This Social Media Thing Kicked Web Writing Right in the Feels

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086 An Elegant Story on Outsmarting Career Obsolescence

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085 Raise the Stakes! 13 Writing Ideas That Really Work

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084 The Two Things That Make a Dull Product Irresistible

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083 Proof That Stories Can Increase the Value of Even ‘Worthless’ Items

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082 Could Podcasting Make You a Better Writer?

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081 When Do You Abandon the Editing Process?

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080 Four Ways to Get Attention by Rocking the Boat

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079 A Brief Introduction to the Art of Catching Hell

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078 Six Storytelling Lessons from a Famous Urban Legend

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077 Vexed by Your Bankrupt Vocabulary? Listen to This

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076 Why Writers Need to Develop a Sense of Humor

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075 Listener Challenge: Could You Read 100 Books in a Year?

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074 How to Get Massive Attention with a ‘High-Concept Pitch’

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073 A Lesson in Swagger from a Wooden-Legged Civil War Soldier

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072 Six Ways to Becoming a Completely Original Writer

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071 The Oldest Writing Trick in The Book

July 9, 2015

070 Eight Things Every Writer Should Know about Landing Pages

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069 The Fascinating Truth about Boring Topics

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068 How to Craft an About Page That People Actually Read and Share

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067 The Psychology Behind Winning Email Subject Lines

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066 All Great Writing Boils Down to These Four Emotional Appeals

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065 A Mildly Spooky Illustration of “Reason Why” Copy

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064 A Mild Warning for All Headline Writers

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063 How Every Creative Must Think about Marketing and Advertising

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062 Do Millennials (Really) Hate Long Copy?

June 24, 2015

061 These 4 Sales Principles Can Improve Anyone’s Writing

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060 How to Use the 5 Stages of Audience Awareness to Dominate Online

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059 Why The Most Hated Headline Structures Work So Well

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057 The Doomsday Cult School of Specificity

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056 How to Sweep Away Skepticism with a Dramatic Demonstration

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055 Meet the Tragic Poster Boy for the Emotional Brain

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054 A Straightforward Research Method for Finding a Potent Hook

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053 What You Don’t Know about Your Product Can Kill Your Copy

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052 Three New Ways to Write a Headline (and When to Use Each)

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050 The Curious Secret to Building Trust and Credibility

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049 My Second Most Favorite Copywriting Formula in the World!

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048 How to Get Lazy People to Care about Your Ideas

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047 My Favorite Copywriting Formula … Ever!

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044 The Profanity Princess on Finding Your Voice

May 26, 2015

043 The Oddest Story About Overcoming Obscurity You’ll Ever Hear

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042 10 Odd Books That Will Improve Your Writing

May 20, 2015

041 How to Read a Book in 2 Hours

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040 The Shocking Way to Master Any Book

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039 Nine Copywriting Books for Web Writers

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038 The 8 Rules of Ruthless Editing from David Mamet

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037 Revealed: The Perfect Blog Post Length

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036 The Aggressive Work Ethic of Highly Creative People

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035 The 10 Rules of Rough Drafts

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034 5 Ways to Create the Perfect Ending that Your Content Deserves

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033 6 Simple Rules For Writing Effective Dialogue

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032 Use Internal Cliffhangers So People Never Stop Reading

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031 226 Transitional Words and Phrases Every Writer Should Know

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030 The Great Paragraph Hoax

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029 5 Ways to Write a Seductive Sentence

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028 How to Be Smart in a World of Dumb Verbs

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024 The Beginner’s Guide to Writing Bullet Points That Work

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022 Four Safe Ways to Find Your Writing Voice (and One Dangerous One)

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020 The Crazy Thing Writers Do to Become Exceptional

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018 Four Things That Can Make Writers Famous

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017 A Small Gift for Your Dark Days as an Obscure Writer

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016 Steal This Episode

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015 David Sedaris’ Guide to Writing Brilliant First Sentences

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014 Six Proven Ways to Open an Article With a Bang

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013 How I’ll Make You Read Every Single Line of This Article

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012 The Ugly Truth About How People Read Online

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011 The 3 Pillars of Great Web Writing

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010 How to Use RSS to Write Better Headlines

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009 How to Write Headlines that Get Results

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007 A 12-Minute Crash Course on Link Building (Ugh)

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006 An Idiot-Proof Guide to Writing Blog Posts That Google Loves

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005 Keywords: Your Love Affair With the Language Your Audience Uses

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March 16, 2015

003 How Search Engines Work, Part One

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002 The Unbreakable Law of the Web

March 2, 2015

001 Two Challenges All Digital Content Must Conquer

August 3, 2015

083 Proof That Stories Can Increase the Value of Even ‘Worthless’ Items

Marketers are agog over stories. For good reason. Your stories lift a prospect out of her ordinary world … and then takes her on a journey that ultimately leads to a vision of herself as a better version of herself.

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In 1984, Apple brought it’s own story to the market, one in which agile, nonconformists can break the mold … liberated by a busty Norwegian body builder wielding a sledge hammer … I am, of course, talking about the 1984 inspired “Think Different” campaign.

But do stories really enhance a company’s products? Its reputation? Is there evidence? I think we have some evidence here. And in this episode is a strange bit of evidence.

In this 11-minute show you’ll discover:

  • A quasi-anthropological eBay project based upon the hunch that “stories can add measurable value to near-worthless trinkets”
  • The story that sold a one dollar UTAH snow globe for $59.00
  • The mistake writers make with statistics

Listen to Rough Draft below ...

083 Proof That Stories Can Increase the Value of Even ‘Worthless’ ItemsDemian Farnworth
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The Show Notes

  • Significant Objects Project
  • UTAH Snow Globe
  • Birthday Candles
  • Seahorse Lighter
  • Miniature Pitchfork
  • Flannel Ball

The Transcript

Proof That Stories Can Increase the Value of Even ‘Worthless’ Items

Voiceover: Rainmaker.FM is brought to you by The Showrunner Podcasting Course, your step-by-step guide to developing, launching, and running a remarkable show. Registration for the course is open August 3rd through the 14th, 2015. Go to ShowrunnerCourse.com to learn more. That’s ShowrunnerCourse.com.

Demian Farnworth: Howdy, and welcome back to another episode of Rough Draft, your daily dose of essential web writing advice. I am Demian Farnworth, your host, your muse, your digital recluse, and the Chief Content Writer for Copyblogger Media.

And thank you for sharing the next few minutes of your life with me.

Marketers are agog over stories. For good reason. Your stories lift a prospect out of his ordinary world … and then takes him on a journey that ultimately leads to a vision of himself as a better version of himself.

And one way to think about this process is episodic education. We are taking a playbook out of cable television, motion pictures, commercials, radio, and animation.

Long ago LL Bean was doing this with their customer testimonials in their catalogs. They would turn those little letters of praise into mini stories.

Customer: “I just wanted to write to tell you that when I was abducted by aliens while trout fishing the other day THANK GOD I was wearing my seventeen year old pair of waterfowl PRO waders because they not only prohibited those little guys from performing some routine probing and allowed me to kick my way out of that ship!”

And it was full of such gems.

In 1984, Apple brought it’s own story to the market, one in which agile, nonconformists can break the mould … liberated by a busty Norwegian body builder wielding a sledge hammer … I’m of course talking about the 1984 inspired Think Different campaign.

But do stories really enhance a company’s products? Its reputation? Is there evidence? I think we have some evidence here. And this is a strange bit of evidence.

A Quasi-Anthropological eBay Project Based Upon the Hunch that “Stories Can Add Measureable Value to Near-Worthless Trinkets”

Take quasi-anthropological Significant Objects project. It started with the hunch that “stories can add measurable value to near-worthless trinkets.”

Journalist Rob Walker and writer Josh Glenn bought cheap trinkets at thrift stores and garage sales, paired each object with a writer (such as Jonathan Letham or Nicholson Baker), who then wrote a fictional story behind that object.

A photo of the trinket and the story were then published on eBay. Here’s how some of those items fared.

  • Package of generic birthday candles, an item that was donated, sold for $21.50
  • Sea horse lighter, originally bought for $1, sold for … $36
  • Miniature pitchfork, originally bought for 69 cents, sold for $19.50
  • Flannel ball — a ball of flannel, bought for $1.50, sold for $51.00

The Story that Sold a One Dollar UTAH Snow Globe for $59.00

These stories are all over the map. Here’s a flavor:

Utah Snow Globe, UTAH printed on the base and a badly printed image of the Delicate Arch in Utah, bought for 99 cents, ultimately sold for … wait … for $59.00

Written by Blake Butler.

My granddad’s granddad had a box under his bed. If you got to open the box (you had to beg) you would find a little door. The little door had a combination on it that you had to know to get inside the second box, which I did. I had the combination tattooed on my spinemeat when I was four while on a trip to see the circus. The tattoo was free. My granddad’s granddad was very powerful and rich.

With granddad’s granddad in the bed asleep above me, I opened up the box inside the box. My knees were bloody from the begging. I could see way down into the box. There was a black pattern, then a ladder. I fell forward and grabbed ahold. The inside of the box smelled like the backyard where the money got made from skin. I began to climb along the ladder, getting older every rung. I was a very special boy.

The room under my granddad’s granddad’s room was octagon-shaped. As I climbed into the room, the mouth to it closed. The walls along the room were lined with little cubbies. There were more cubbies than I have days I’ve lived, or hairs that I have grown, which is also more than how many mouths I’d put my mouth against if I lived to be very, very old.

In each of the cubbies there was a little globe. Each globe held another little thing, each named with a label for what the thing was. There was a cubby with a globe containing FIRST EVER REDWOOD TREE. One containing PERRY MASON. One containing PEAS. The globe containing JOYOUS LONGING held a bright pink liquid smoke. PERRY MASON looked pissed off.

The globe containing UTAH made a burning sound against my head, and there were all these people chanting, and my face got all sandy and all wet. I shook it and it made my blood tingle and some coins appeared in my hands. I had so many gold coins I could live forever. Some of the coins were chocolate, which was food.

The ladder would not come back down. I could find no door in all the cubbies. No doorbell or key or gun.

In one cubby I could see out of the room beneath granddad’s granddad’s room. I could see back into the house where I’d grown up. In a little mirror on the counter across from where I was I could see back onto the label underneath the cubby in the house that held the globe I was inside now: MY GREAT GREAT GREAT GRANDSON.

Nobody in their right mind would pay more than a dollar for these items.

So why were people bidding these insignificant objects up on eBay? Especially since there is no shortage of both meaningless and worthless things to buy on eBay in the first place?

Stories. Reminds me of the fact that our consciences are moved by the story of one African orphan rather than the staggering statistics that get thrown around.

So keep that in mind next time you sit down to write … stories get and keep people’s attention.

Until next time. Take care.

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