You want to persuade. You’ve got great facts. You’ve got a great, well-reasoned argument. Now what?

Facts and argument are information. People aren’t looking for more information. Today they have more information than they want or can even process. They don’t need more facts. They need faith. Faith in you. Faith in where you’ve been, where you’re going, and how you’re going to get there.

Faith is more than credibility. While it’s popular to talk about building credibility today, focusing merely on credibility misses the point. Credibility is sterile, factual, and most importantly, impersonal. One can be credible without inspiring faith.

Faith, on the other hand, is immensely personal. You inspire faith when you let people see your humanity. A great way to show your humanity is to tell a meaningful story. A meaningful story allows others to experience what you’ve experienced. It allows them to share your journey with you and then reach your conclusion on their own. Telling a meaningful story encourages others to decide for themselves to believe you.

People usually don’t argue with their own “facts” and conclusions. If you want to influence others, tell them a meaningful story about who you are to let your hearers choose to have faith in you.

[note: this was my second blog post on the squarespace platform way back in 2005; just happened to run across it today when I was looking for something else. Oh if I had just gone with WordPress from day 1!]

If you’re struggling to create compelling content for your blog or enewsletter, here are some simple steps you can follow for a never-ending supply of great blog content ideas.

Here are some simple steps for creating compelling content

1. Pay attention to the big news stories
2. Pay attention to the online universe
3. Think “story”
4. Connect the dots

The Big Story Everyone’s Paying Attention to
Our beloved Apple (the company formerly known as Apple Computer, Inc.) has changed. It was once the scrappy underdog with serious creative attitude. But then something happened. They became wildly successful, released a “magical and revolutionary” new product, which they followed up with another great product that “changes everything, again.”

The Online Universe is Paying Attention to and Talking about the Big Story
At the moment, Apple has stumbled. The product that “changes everything, again,” the vaunted iPhone 4.0, apparently doesn’t work right. A Google search of “iPhone recall” at 10:00am on July 16, 2010 returned 7.8 million documents. A tweet from the parody Twitter profile CEOSteveJobs saying, “The only recall you’ll get on your iPhone is from pressing redial” has been retweeted over 400 times within the last nine hours.

Think Story
You’re probably already thinking about the story most of us in the Western world might connect with the Apple story. It’s a story connection that popped into my mind when I saw the cover of FastCompany’s latest cover. They called Apple “invincible.”

Connecting the Dots
Olivier Blanchard, who is quite well-known as @thebrandbuilder, is skilled at  picking up of the major undercurrents flowing through both traditional media and online media. After the BBC contacted him to get his thoughts on Apple’s looming fall from grace (Olivier Blanchard quoted in the BBC), Olivier wrote a thorough blog post analyzing Apple’s past, present, and possible future. He started with that story we readily recognize—David and Goliath.

There’s only one Olivier Blanchard, so don’t be intimidated by the length or thoroughness of his David and Goliath Apple post. Instead, see how he saw the archetypes and masterfully crafted a modern day story from them by combining a current news story and online chatter.

If you’ll pay attention to the current news stories and what the online world is saying about them, you can call up your favorite archetypes and create compelling content for your blog.

Sources for archetypes
The Hero and the Outlaw: Building Extraordinary Brand Through the Power of Archetypes by Margaret Mark and Carol Pearson
The Hero Within: Six Archetypes We Live By by Carol Pearson
Awakening the Heroes Within: Twelve Archetypes to Help Us Find Ourselves and Transform Our World by Carol Pearson
The Springboard: How Storytelling Ignites Action in Knowledge-Era Organizations by Stephen Denning
The Story Factor by Annette Simmons (see her Six Types of Stories for helpful story categories)

“There is that which is too much” Arthur, in the probably never-to-be-released script So That’s Life by Trey Pennington

You know I love social media, especially Twitter. The speed, volume, intensity, breadth…so many cool people, incredible ideas, fantastic expressions of passion, creativity, ingenuity, compassion. Sometimes, I suppose, it can be too much.

A friend of mine, Pete Hansen, a brilliant videographer with a passion for relieving the suffering in Liberia, followed me on Twitter. A few days later he wrote to me (via Facebook), “Do you do anything but tweet? I got, like, 20 tweets from you yesterday. You filled up my screen!”

When I checked, he was only following a few people. I was, by a long shot, the most prolific tweeter on his list. The solution, I suggested, was for him to follow a lot more people! (that way my tweets wouldn’t seem so intense)

Maybe it IS the case that we can overwhelm people with too much communication.

Jay Smooth experienced something similar. His video recounts his encounter with too many caramels. The video is a beautiful model of storytelling and creativity. After I watched this one, I was compelled to seek out more of his videos. Now if I could only craft tweets as compelling as his videos…

Note: Sometimes you gotta just ignore “what that little hater” inside your head is telling you and just do it.

Jay Smooth: Twitter | Blog | YouTube