The Opening Image is your before snapshot. It’s how your life (I’m going to use “your” throughout this course but feel free to replace it with your customer or student or fictional character) was before you found the transformation.
This is important because it’s where your reader builds the connection to see if you are like them or not. If they feel you aren’t like them then they will move on. This doesn’t mean you have to be an exact replication of them but they need to see some similarities.
We’ll use an example throughout this course. We can use my friend Paul Scrivens. He runs Makers Mob which is a cool brand that has a number of mini-brands under it.
Running all of these brands isn’t easy and it can make it even harder when it comes to telling stories. For this course, we’ll choose one of the brands that I helped him with, Odd Noodle.
Paul likes to use Big Value Assets (BVAs) on his brands. These are things that provide a ton of value upfront to help people move along their journey which is a fancy way to say to get them to buy whatever he is offering.
This course is a BVA. However, Paul’s problem was that there wasn’t any great storytelling in his BVAs. They were filled with massive amounts of information that was helpful but that much information without any story can cause people to lose interest.
Add a story and then things become much more valuable. So we applied this framework that we are going to walk through to one of his BVAs and things got instantly better.
The Opening Image sets the mood and tone. This is a great opportunity to introduce people to your personality.