Why You Need To Start A Cult

So I accidentally started a cult when I was in middle school.

And now I am convinced that you should, too.

My family and I were living in an RV and traveling the country when I was 12 years old. Basically, we invented van life before YouTube made it cool. But that also meant spending all my time with my parents and sisters. I had very little social interaction.

So I joined a writing board for my online school.

I’ve always been a writer. When I was a kid, I wrote a child’s book with my mom. I mean, I was the only child to ever read it. But we bound it and everything. Now, I work as a copywriter. And I’ve always spent my spare time writing. My biggest flex is that I type over 90 words a minute because of how much time I’ve spent writing.

But I digress.

On this writing board, we all posted short stories and little articles for others to read and critique. So I decided I was going to write the story that got the most interest.

And, oh boy… I did not know what I was in for.

The story was about a high school girl who hit every hurdle in life possible. Her best friend died, her parents got divorced, and (the big one) her boyfriend broke up with her. Of course, it just started as a few chapters, but the story quickly had a following.

I had to put together an email list outside of the writing board to meet my readers’ demands. They wanted new chapters every week. And when they didn’t get them, it was rough. If I was even an hour late sending on that week’s chapters, I would get emails demanding content.

(My first demanding client… The nostalgia brings tears to my eyes.)

People were holding discussions to talk about who the main character would end up with. There were conspiracy theories. My readers really thought I was a lot smarter than I was.

Then summer came. The school closed off our emails. And I came home to my friends… The story fizzled. My cult disbanded.

The funny thing is that I never actually finished writing the story. But for those months, I had my readers wrapped around my finger.

Now, over a decade later, I’m still writing. I write a lot more than fiction now. But I learned some really key lessons in that experience:

• Your writing needs to identify with the reader more than yourself. You have to speak authentically from a stance other than your own. My readers felt my main character’s pain and that made them connect to her and want to keep reading. I had experienced none of the things my character had gone through, but my readers had.
• Your writing doesn’t have to be perfect and elegant — especially if your audience reads at a middle school grade level. My inner novelist cringes when I read that story now. The writing was atrocious. But my inner copywriter says, “Hey. It’s written at a 6th-grade reading level and it’s very easy to understand.” And if you’ve hung around the copywriting world, you know that’s about the level you want to write at. The text lacks depth. It’s simple. The sentences are short. But it’s super readable and understandable — and that’s what the audience needed.
• There’s nothing quite like the power of an engaging story. Because I wrote in a way my readers understood and connected with, they kept reading. They wanted more. Constantly. All the time. All throughout history, we have used stories to connect with one another, and that’s true in creative writing but also in copywriting.

And that’s why you need a cult.

Your business needs a cult. You need an audience that keeps wanting content from you. An audience that keeps engaging with your content.

Because that audience will also buy from you.

They will feel heard by you — they’ll identify with you. They’ll find your product or service so invaluable that they have no choice but to buy it.

Your audience will demand more from you.

So you need to start a cult.

How do you do that?

You create a narrative — a story they connect with.

The narrative gives the brand a voice and life. And you do it through blogs and emails.

In blogs, it keeps them reading. In shorter form emails, it keeps them looking forward to the next one.

And for the business owner, it keeps their engagement and reach up. It’s the cornerstone of a solid content marketing plan.

So start building your cult today — contact a copywriter. Talk about blogs. Talk about emails. And talk about content marketing.