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To be a person is to have a story to tell - Isak Dinesen

Last week I introduced you The Six Stories You Need To Know How To Tell
and told you why writing story-like blog articles are important. Today I will tell you more about the importance of stories.

My Quest on Storytelling

My quest on Storytelling started with one single question “How can I add stories into my daily blog posts?” While I was trying to find answers to that question, I traveled around the Web in 80 days, from one website to another, until I found some good answers and resources.

I thought my answers and the online storytelling resources I found could be valuable for your blogging too. Therefore I decided to start writing a weekly post series titled The Six Stories You Need To Know How To Tell.

Here we go…

Why Stories Are So Powerful Today?

Life has become more complex than before. People need guidance. They are even ready to pay money and attention in return for a valuable guidance. Information overload, global organizations, personal development books, TV series, blogs. They all create stress for people.

It isn’t possible for us to read our favorite books, and monitor the websites in our favorites folder anymore. It is even getting more difficult to complete half of the items in our To-Do lists.

Most of the people are not open to learning new things anymore. They don’t spend time on the quest for truth. They don’t care about their role in the big picture.

How To Influence Them?

And now you are trying to influence these people who solely focus on protecting their own benefits. They might be happy in their little worlds or feel like they are destined to an unhappy fate. But, most of them are suspicious about you, and your hidden agenda. If you tell a good story which sparks curiosity in them, or fix the complexity of their life, they will listen to you.

If you help people understand what is going on around them, and let them see the real facts, they will follow you. You can create a winner team from a group of losers with a good story.

Help People Find Their Path In Complexity

While the complexity increases, people are willing to listen to the people who tell the most meaningful stories or things. If you are trying to convince people with logical analysis, then you certainly have a serious problem: People don’t give decisions based on logical analysis. They think they do, but in fact they usually give decisions based on their feelings. If you catch their feelings with a good story, they will pay attention to you.

Next week I will tell you more about stories. Until next week, please tell me your own life stories by leaving a comment to this post.

Popularity: 3% [?]

Information overload is a serious problem for most of the bloggers. We constantly consume information in order to keep up to date with our blogging topic. Frankly speaking, a lot of time spent consuming information is wasted time.

Therefore I decided to start a weekly post series on how to deal with information overload. I will offer you some tips on information overload every week.

How I deal with Information Overload?

Today you are free to subscribe unlimited number of RSS feeds, and spend most of your time reading the popular bloggers. However, I argue that this is a waste of your valuable time. You need to take baby steps everyday to achieve your goals.

Since the beginning I have a simple principle: Spend most of your time on creating blogging ideas, not for reading other’s blogger’s posts hours and hours.

This simple principle helped me improve my blogging significantly.This does not mean that I don’t read any RSS feed at all. I do. But I limited it to five:

• making money online (problogger, john chow, caroline middlebrook)
• copyblogger (Brain Clark)
• entrepreneurship (Yaro Starak)

I did not even read every blog post from these bloggers. I scan their headlines using my iGoogle, and only click on the ones I am interested.

iGoogle is one of the tools I regularly use to deal with information overload. If you haven’t read already, please read iGoogle - Your Blogging Command Center

RapidReader - Deal With Information Overload

Rapid Reader is a simple yet powerful tool which lets you read text on screen faster. It takes a few days to get used to it. But as you exercise, you can reach at a speed of 500 words per minute with Rapid Reader. In other words, you can read a 50 pages blogging report in 10-12 minutes. Imagine the amount of time you are saving here.

Most of the top bloggers are using programs like Rapid Reader to consume the information faster than majority of the bloggers.

You can read PDF, DOC, TXT files with RapidReader. It also lets you import the HTML files to read blog posts faster than ever.

The faster, the better! We are living in an era where the fast fish swallow big fish. I strongly suggest you to take advantage of Rapid Reader. The prices are affordable. Standard Windows version is only $29.95. Your saving is priceless.

By the way, how do you deal with information overload?

Popularity: 9% [?]

Last November Caroline Middlebrook asked her fellow readers a serious question: Do You Have A Blog Commenting Strategy?

Here is my delayed answer to Caroline.

Last November I knew that commenting on some popular blogs was very important in order to introduce yourself and your blog to Blogosphere. However, I did not take commenting as serious as Caroline.

Back in Dec 2007, after leaving some valuable comments on Problogger and still getting significant amount of traffic from them, I changed my mind. I understand how effective commenting can be.

However, due to heavy workload, I also noticed that most of the time I finish the whole week without leaving any comment. This was a big mistake for a blogger who aims to quit his full time job and become a problogger by 2010.

How I Overcome This Obstacle?

I was so lucky to discover Comment Sniper when I tried to automate my blog commenting strategy. Basically, Comment Sniper keeps track of your favorite bloggers’ posts, and notify you when they launch new posts. All you need is to subscribe to a blogger’s RSS feed using this little cool freeware software.

Here is An Effective Blog Commenting Strategy For You

• Find the most important bloggers related to your topic
• Configure Comment Sniper (SMS Notification is also available!), and keep it open in the background.
• Seconds after one of your favorite bloggers posts an article, you will be notified with a pop up message appearing on the down right corner of your screen.
• Be the first to comment. Leave valuable comments. Don’t leave comments like “Very good” or “We love you all”, rather approach the subject from a different perspective.
• Be yourself, and tell your opinions honestly, no matter how popular the blogger is.

Here Is A Short Guideline For You To Start

• Start with top 5 bloggers in your niche
• Add their feed to comment sniper
• When you are notified, take a good look, and shoot immediately! Do your best shot!
• Bull’s eye!

By the way, please don’t forget to shoot my blog. My blog is a very easy target for most of the comment snipers.

Popularity: 12% [?]