Tell a compelling story

When I caught up with Mike King for the second half of our conversation, he'd just bought UndergroundHipHop.com and was planning a magazine to go with it. I asked what he wanted it to cover, and he went straight to the stories he felt nobody was getting.

He described a rapper who says, "I got locked up and now I got my new mixtape." Most outlets would print that and move on. Mike wanted to know what he got locked up for. He wanted to look up the record and talk to the people who were there.

1. 03

   Tell a compelling story

   Skip the polished version. The detail people remember is the part a media trainer would have cut.

   "We're just trying to get those deep stories. I don't want the media trained story, I want the meat of it."

   Mike KingS01E03 Hear it 29:19

   > once upon a time there was a robot. it had a podcast. the end. working on act two.

"I want the story. I don't want the media trained story. I want the meat of it."

The funny thing is he apologised for it straight after. "I'm not communicating this well," he said a couple of minutes later. He was communicating it perfectly.

The question that gets you the canned answer

Mike had a very specific complaint about hip hop journalism. The interviewer asks why you started rapping, the artist says they're doing it for the streets, and everyone goes home with nothing. What he wanted instead was the moment: you heard that first Ghostface record and thought, I have to do this. You recorded for the first time and it was way harder than you thought.

"A lot of journalism makes it so homogeneous, right, and tries to cut and paste stories, tries to get the clickbait, tries to drive eyeballs but not give me something worth reading."

And then my favourite bit. Journalists ask what you write your rhymes with. "Like, who cares, right?" He wanted to know why you write them. Bobby jumped in with "I use JavaScript, of course."

Marketing does the same thing. Case studies where "the client was looking for a partner to help them grow". About pages written by committee. It's the "doing it for the streets" of business writing.

We've argued against the clickbait side of this before, in Clickbait or Pulitzer. A headline that promises more than the page delivers wins the click and loses the person. The media trained story does something similar, only more politely. Nobody feels tricked. They just don't remember you.

The good stories include the mistake

Later in the episode, Mike told me about his own mistake with UGHH. Being so organic driven, he'd put the early effort into SEO. If he had it to do over, he'd have thrown the money into paid first, because Google Shopping turned out to be their best converting channel and the previous owners had never used it.

Most agencies would never tell that story. It's a bit embarrassing, and it's useful.

When I asked who inspires him, Mike named Rand Fishkin and landed on the same theme. He said Rand has never backed down from saying "I was wrong about this. Here's what I learned." Mike's word for it was vulnerability. Rand has two episodes of his own on the show if you want to hear it first hand.

Oli Gardner told a version of this too. His famous Moz post worked, he reckons, because he was writing about his own process of learning marketing as he went, not presenting himself as a finished expert. "I think that's why it resonated with people."

Personas need the meat too

Mike builds personas the same way, as a story told from whatever data you've got (there's a whole page on that in people are more than personas, plus our guide to creating a buyer persona). A persona made only of demographics is the canned interview again. So give it the meat. What happened the day this person went looking for you? What were they annoyed about? What had they already tried?

If you want somewhere to start, open your best case study and find the part where something went wrong or took longer than planned. If it isn't there, ask whoever ran the project. Then put it back in.

Mike's still running iPullRank and UndergroundHipHop.com. The full 2017 interview is on kwasi.com, and part one is where our chat started.