Who you are as an artist or creative person is one of your most potent marketing materials. You should be looking for opportunities to tell you story everywhere. Whether through traditional media (newspapers, radio, television) or new media (blogs, Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, Pinterest, Instagram etc) your story should be available in as many places as you are able.
Everything related to where you’ve been and where you’re going is relevant. Who has influenced you. Who has helped you. What has inspired you. Where you have been. Where you’d like to go. It’s all fodder for you marketing stories.
Every good story has a setting, a hero/heroine, someone or something that acts as a catalyst, a problem that has to be overcome, a journey to solve the problem, incidents that happen along the way, people that assist our hero/heroine & those who stand in the way of our hero/heroine. There’s a climax, a resolution and lessons that have been learned.
It’s a pattern that you see in any great epic story – The Illiad, The Odyssey, Star Wars, The Lord of the Rings, Harry Potter, even the Bible. Joseph Campbell calls it The Monomyth and it is something you can use to make your stories more compelling.
I encourage you to start today. Write your stories down and also get up, whenever you can, in front of an audience and talk about yourself and your work. It’s terrifying and rewarding in equal measure. And it has the potential to change your life.
If you want to know more about how to use stories I invite you to come to a talk I’m giving this Wednesday May 21 at The Impact Hub in Westminster. You can find all the details here.
Also, if the idea of public speaking, getting up in front of people and telling your story, fills you with dread, I encourage you to come to a workshop I’m leading on 28 June with only 5 people called Speak Up! They’ll be loads of individual attention in a small and safe group. By the end of the day you’ll be confident about using your voice and speaking in front of other people. You can find all the details here.
With that, I want you to think of one place where you can either share a written story of you and your work or somewhere where you can speak to a group of people about your work. I guarantee you that if you do this you will start to see doors open up like they’ve never done before.
Once upon a time….
Those four words are PACKED with marketing power.
Start to use them!
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