Susan Friedmann [00:00:00]:
Welcome to Book Marketing Mentors, the weekly podcast where you learn proven strategies, tools, ideas and tips from the masters. Every week I introduce you to a marketing master who will share their expertise to help you market and sell more books. Today, my special guest is Cheryl Evans. Cheryl is a true Renaissance woman and fearless wanderer with over 20 years of experience. She's a marketing magician, tech wizard, business strategist, author and AI expert. She's an anti hustle evangelist helping entrepreneurs work smarter, not harder. An openly neurodivergent storyteller, Cheryl brings heart, humor and hard earned wisdom to every conversation. Whether she's inspiring transformation or bridging gaps across industries, Cheryl leaves audiences uplifted and armed with real world, actionable clarity.
Susan Friedmann [00:01:05]:
Cheryl, it's an absolute pleasure to welcome you to the show and thank you for being this week's guest expert and mentor.
Cheryl Evans [00:01:13]:
Thanks so much for having me. Susan, I'm thrilled to be here and.
Susan Friedmann [00:01:17]:
I'm thrilled to have you. And one thing that you and I believe in very strongly and that is authentic marketing. Let's talk about that. And I know that we're going to sort of transition into AI because that's an important part of creating marketing content these days. Let's start off with understanding what exactly authentic marketing means to you and what why is it important today?
Cheryl Evans [00:01:50]:
Susan, I'd love to tell you a story about how I kind of first started with authentic marketing. I've been a business consultant since 2001, so I've been doing this for a long time. A couple years ago, I kept hearing about this authentic marketing and decided that I should give it a try. I wasn't fully bought in yet, so I didn't want to do away with all of my traditional marketing for my company. So I decided to open a personal brand to to experiment with authentic marketing. Before I kind of went all in, I was searching for a domain name. I was looking for something along the lines of Sheryl.com, but that wasn't available. One of the ideas that was suggested to me by the domain company was Charles wtf? And I had a great laugh.
Cheryl Evans [00:02:37]:
I didn't know that that was even a thing you could end a website with. But a few minutes later I found I was still chuckling about that and I hadn't found anything else that appealed to me. I really stopped and asked myself, can I actually use that in my marketing? But I'm like, well, I'm doing authentic and obviously this is making me giggle and I'm getting a kick out of it. So let's do it. I launched that website and that personal branding, and I kid you not, I went to a nationwide conference two and a half months after I launched this branding, and I was recognized from that social media not once, but twice within the first hour of being there. And that had never ever happened in over 20 years worth of traditional marketing. That absolutely sold me. And I've certainly been singing the praises of authentic marketing since that day.
Susan Friedmann [00:03:35]:
Well, it's interesting that you say that because so many book titles now have have those kind of expressions in them and it's acceptable. It's the way people talk these days, and why can't we let that come into our content? But still providing them information, practical tips, and I know you're full of how to help people be more effective. Why not? We're talking about that. Let's transition into AI and why it's important today, because I know that many authors, when I talk to them, they feel it's a threat or they feel fearful of it and they don't want to sound robotic. But how can AI maybe actually help you sound like yourself, that you sound more authentic?
Cheryl Evans [00:04:38]:
That is an excellent question because, yeah, I hear those kind of concerns myself all the time. And if you don't do it right, it absolutely can make you sound robotic and awful. Certainly that's not going to do anybody's marketing campaign any good. So it really is important to train your AI with your own writing so that it can learn to mimic your style. And that's what's going to take it from sounding generic and vague and robotic to actually being a reflection of your voice.
Susan Friedmann [00:05:15]:
That begs the question, how would you do that?
Cheryl Evans [00:05:18]:
Writing samples, that's an absolute must. It's also really important to make use of the same chat over and over again because it starts to learn as you provide it with more samples and you correct what it's done. Really, you want to treat it like you would an intern, because any intern you get, they're not going to be great the first day. You have to train them so that they understand what you want and what you like and what you need. And AI really is the same.
Susan Friedmann [00:05:49]:
Yeah, I'm fascinated when I use it that as you say, it remembers what, what instructions you've given it. And the other day I thought, well, let me check to make sure that I don't have to constantly put in this very long prompt with all the different descriptions of my style and my voice, et cetera. And it did. It came up with. I challenged it. I said, well, tell me what My style is tell me my voice. And it came up exactly. And I was like, whoa.
Cheryl Evans [00:06:25]:
Yeah, it's come a long way. And it really is important to get good at writing prompts because what you put in is absolutely going to determine what comes out.
Susan Friedmann [00:06:36]:
Yes, it's that good old garbage in, garbage out, but put something in that makes sense. You have to be very specific. And what I found too is, is that if I put a command in, you know, prompt in, I say, what other information do you need? Because I want to make sure that I've given enough information and often I haven't. Because then it comes up with these questions that I was like, wow, that's basic, but you've got to understand it. And I'd missed giving that information in the prompt.
Cheryl Evans [00:07:13]:
Yeah, absolutely. That's an excellent point. And that's a great practice. If you feel like the output it's giving you is vague or it's missing the mark, ask it, because it will tell you what information you can provide that's going to help it do better.
Susan Friedmann [00:07:29]:
Yes. What do you call your AI?
Cheryl Evans [00:07:32]:
I have so many of them, actually, so it really depends on what chat I'm using. I don't have just one name.
Susan Friedmann [00:07:38]:
Yeah, it's funny because most of the time I use ChatGPT and I was just called it Chatty and I wrote one day, I said, I've been calling you Chatty, but what name would you like if you were to choose a name for yourself? And so he told me, Kai.
Cheryl Evans [00:07:55]:
I was like, well, that's so cool.
Susan Friedmann [00:07:57]:
Yes.
Cheryl Evans [00:07:59]:
I was having fun with AI. The one day I had two different chats going and I was basically making them talk to each other, and that produced some really interesting results. So I kind of like named two characters and told them who they were, and then I'd put something into one and I'd take the output and I'd go to the second one and say, such and such chat said this and I'd get its response. And that was a really neat experiment to do too.
Susan Friedmann [00:08:24]:
So it is. It's really a good experiment that you can ask the same question of different platforms and look at the different responses that you get. And sometimes they are night and day.
Cheryl Evans [00:08:38]:
Oh, yeah, absolutely.
Susan Friedmann [00:08:40]:
Yeah. So what's your favorite platform?
Cheryl Evans [00:08:43]:
I use ChatGPT probably more than anything else. I just found that it's really versatile. The paid version is most definitely superior to the free version. They keep updating the models, and the newer models definitely are better than the older ones.
Susan Friedmann [00:09:00]:
Yeah, I would agree with you. What are some red flags that sort of give out a signal that a marketing message has lost its authenticity?
Cheryl Evans [00:09:11]:
I think things that sound generic, things that you could just find anywhere that you could find with a simple Google search, those are definitely the kind of things that have lost authenticity. First and foremost, you need to be a storyteller.
Susan Friedmann [00:09:27]:
You're a really great storyteller. That's one thing I'm learning. I'm constantly learning how to be a better storyteller because it doesn't come as naturally to me as it does to some people. Like yourself.
Cheryl Evans [00:09:39]:
Yes, well, believe it or not, it doesn't come naturally to me either.
Susan Friedmann [00:09:43]:
Oh, really? You could have fooled me.
Cheryl Evans [00:09:46]:
Yeah. It has actually been something that I've worked really hard at over the last year to get better at, because I have been a writer for decades, and largely in the world of nonfiction, even to the point of technical writing, which is so far from storytelling. But I wanted to bring an element of fiction and storytelling into the world of very dry business writing. And so I've had to hone that skill. And a trick that has really helped me both with authenticity and with storytelling is to create a character outside of myself to talk about me or to tell my story. It really just makes you think a little bit differently. And so that's something that our listeners can try if they're struggling. Because it can be hard to talk about yourself.
Cheryl Evans [00:10:39]:
It feels arrogant to talk about yourself. Or it feels embarrassing if the story you're telling is an experience that maybe didn't go according to plan. So to tell it from the mindset of a character can really shift how you think and how you talk about something.
Susan Friedmann [00:10:59]:
And you do this so brilliantly. You've got Ophelia. You want to introduce Ophelia to us?
Cheryl Evans [00:11:05]:
Oh, I would love to. When I kind of set out on this journey of writing business books, I was looking at a pile of books on my shelf, and they were business books that I had never finished. And I asked myself, why didn't I finish them? And there were two things that really stuck out. One is they were unbelievably boring, and two, they might have had good ideas, but they were confusing, and I didn't always understand how to implement those ideas. And so I decided if I'm going to write books on topics that already have books about them, I had to do something differently, and I had to solve those problems. I write my books about Ophelia, who is a dragon, learning to run a real business in our real world, and she's a Student at the Business Witch Academy. My books, my articles, my newsletter are these stories about Ophelia. And she's funny and quirky and misinterprets things or goes off on magical adventures, but it's also really actionable with very specific steps.
Cheryl Evans [00:12:09]:
And Ophelia is a piece of me. She is one of the ways that I can talk about the mistakes that I make in a way that feels a little bit less embarrassing to me, although now I've spilled the secret. But it does make it easier for me to tell some of those stories and kind of present things in a different light.
Susan Friedmann [00:12:29]:
I love that. I love the way that you use Ophelia. And listeners, you've got to meet Ophelia. She's a beautifully drawn dragon with big eyes that make you want to googly eyes that make you want to go, ooh. So, talking about mistakes, talk to us about some of the mistakes that you see people make. Especially now, we've been talking about AI when they use AI, especially for content creation and marketing, obviously, yes, I think.
Cheryl Evans [00:13:03]:
The number one mistake is that they don't use it. And there's so, so much resistance in the world of writers and artists because they're afraid that they're going to be replaced. And unfortunately, to an extent that is true. Our world changes, our world evolves, and technology is here to stay. Either you adapt or you get left behind. I think the first thing is accept the reality and figure out how to adapt and figure out how to use it to amplify what you're doing as opposed to replace what you're doing, because there ultimately is no replacement for that human element. I have created some amazing custom GPTs, trained on information and elaborate prompts and everything else. And I've gotten some really outstanding results from it.
Cheryl Evans [00:13:56]:
But it always requires some human touch to it. It's never quite right, no matter how good it is.
Susan Friedmann [00:14:03]:
You mentioned GPT. Can you explain to our listeners what that stands for?
Cheryl Evans [00:14:08]:
Yeah, everybody kind of is familiar with the term chatgpt, but a GPT is that large language model learning artificial intelligence. And so a custom GPT is one that has been trained on particular information as opposed to just the large language model that ChatGPT and these other AI tools have access to. It's the kind of thing that, you know, you sometimes hear people talking about. It has been trained on all of their writing, or it has been trained on their business knowledge base or their brand information. That is a custom GPT.
Susan Friedmann [00:14:51]:
Okay. And just like I said, I got my voice in there. So that's my custom GPT, which is quite lengthy. I love the fact that Chatty, or Kai or whatever he wants to be called, remembered that there's a mindset shift. I believe that you need, and you talked about the fact that people are concerned that it's a threat. And I know we mentioned that a little earlier, but talk to us a little bit about working with that mindset shift.
Cheryl Evans [00:15:25]:
Absolutely. I do a lot of mindset work and that can be kind of unusual for a business consultant to do mindset work, but I firmly believe, and is played out with my clients for a very long time, that all change starts inside our minds. If we want to create any kind of effective change in our lives, in our business, to our reality, it has to start with what you think about. Because the universe, despite what song lyrics want to tell us, it doesn't give you what you want. It doesn't even give you what you need. The universe gives you what you believe.
Susan Friedmann [00:16:06]:
It's poignant. Yes. It's what's in your mind. That's why we're going off track here. You know, I know that affirmations often have a bad rap because you say something over and over again, but unless you believe it, it's not going to happen.
Cheryl Evans [00:16:25]:
Yeah, yeah, that's going to apply to any kind of change you want to make. Including adopting AI is you really kind of have to look at, well, what is it you believe? Why do believe it? And does that belief serve you?
Susan Friedmann [00:16:38]:
If somebody wants to try AI but feels overwhelmed or let's say scared of even using it, where should they begin?
Cheryl Evans [00:16:48]:
Start small. Start with having it help you brainstorm ideas for a title for something that you're writing, or subtitles, even headers. Those are really great places. Or even at the very beginning of your process, you know you want to write something around a certain topic, have it help you brainstorm angles for that topic. It's miles away from ever approaching your actual writing. It's not cheating, it's not doing it for you. But having it do different angles for a topic can be really eye opening because it can make you start thinking about a topic in a different way that might be more appealing to your target market.
Susan Friedmann [00:17:33]:
And that is so true. I love looking for titles that way and ask for suggestions. Let's say start off with five suggestions for a subtitle. I did that the other day and then I said, well, give me more. So I got some more. And then I would maybe do a mix and match. I like this from this subtitle And I like that from another one. And then I put it together.
Susan Friedmann [00:18:02]:
So then AI has helped me. But I created something that it didn't give me necessarily. It just gave me the clues.
Cheryl Evans [00:18:13]:
Yeah, I do that myself all the time. Definitely. One of the things that I like about having it brainstorm ideas, because I rarely, rarely ever just flat out take one of the ideas that it gives me. But it's usually a matter of mixing and matching or it inspires me to kind of go in a different direction. Yeah. Be really helpful. And if you're sitting there with writer's block AI, brainstorming ideas is definitely a good way to overcome that.
Susan Friedmann [00:18:40]:
Yes. I mean, it comes up with things that I don't know if I would have ever thought about if I'd spent hours brainstorming or thinking. I just love it for that. So if nothing else, you're right. That's a good place to start. Just ask for suggestions for titles or ideas. For product ideas.
Cheryl Evans [00:19:02]:
Yeah, absolutely.
Susan Friedmann [00:19:05]:
How can AI help an author, let's say, stay consistent in their marketing efforts?
Cheryl Evans [00:19:13]:
There's a few ways that you can utilize AI to help you stay consistent. Helping you repurpose your content is probably one of my favorites. You can put an article or even a chapter of something that you've written into the AI and ask it to create 10 different social media posts based on that content. You can even get really specific about three social media posts for LinkedIn and two carousel style posts for Instagram and two video scripts for TikTok or wherever you happen to be doing your marketing. Repurposing content, I think is probably one of my favorites.
Susan Friedmann [00:19:51]:
Yes. Cut, dice and slice. I would say your book is full of so many different articles, tips, checklists. All of these are byproducts. And sometimes, I mean, I know from my first book that I created checklists and tip sheets that I sold for more like three times the amount that my actual book sold for.
Cheryl Evans [00:20:17]:
Yeah, yeah. And that's a great way, you know, upsells and AI can help you think of upsells too. If you're stuck on how can you leverage what you've already created to make it go further and do more?
Susan Friedmann [00:20:31]:
Yeah, you don't have to come up with something new all the time, which is something that I've had to learn over the years. But now you can, as you say, repurpose what you've got. Maybe even take an old article that you wrote a few years ago, people don't remember, just put it into chat, ask for a different version of that Article.
Cheryl Evans [00:20:55]:
Absolutely. That's another powerful one. Another thing you can use AI to help keep you consistent in your marketing is it can help you with a content calendar. And a content calendar is really powerful for helping you stay focused and be consistent. Because you're not sitting there in front of a blank page. You have a plan. And when you sit down to write, you know, okay, this week I am writing about this topic. These are the kind of finished products I'm looking to have by the time I'm done.
Cheryl Evans [00:21:25]:
And AI can help you get all of that organized and help you brainstorm ideas to create that content calendar.
Susan Friedmann [00:21:31]:
One thing AI doesn't suffer from, and that is writer's block.
Cheryl Evans [00:21:37]:
Yes. But it does have bad days. It does. I have had chats that are very well trained, been using them for a long time, even custom ones with knowledge bases behind them. It's going strong, it's going strong, and then one day it is just dumb and the next day it's going to be smart again. But it does have bad days.
Susan Friedmann [00:21:59]:
Okay. I've got to be aware of that. I know that sometimes you're right. I've gotten results that I'm like, that's not really what I was looking for.
Cheryl Evans [00:22:11]:
Yeah. And if it's a prompt that you have used before, successfully, if you were having one of those days, you're like, this particular chat, I've worked with it before, it gave me good results. It's a prompt that I'm using. If you've kind of like done all the troubleshooting tick boxes and you're still just getting terrible results, sometimes it's better to just call it a day and come back tomorrow.
Susan Friedmann [00:22:30]:
I've done that a few times, especially with when I asked chat to create an image and it just does not want to give me what I want. So I was like, okay, I get so frustrated. I'm like, let's leave this. Walk away and as you say, come back another day and it does a good job the next time around.
Cheryl Evans [00:22:53]:
Yeah. And sometimes they're updating their models too. Like, I just had a notice pop up yesterday that ChatGPT is working on some new image models. So I'm curious to see what those are going to be. And kind of the art of prompting for images is very different than prompting for text. For anyone who hasn't really gotten into that yet, it is a learning process. And you're definitely going to talk to your AI differently than you do when you want a written output.
Susan Friedmann [00:23:21]:
Yeah. In fact, sometimes when I'm not sure what I want it to. I know the article title, but I don't know what image might go well. So I asked Chad. I was like, what images would you suggest or prompts for images? And it comes up with all sorts of things. I was like, oh, okay, let's give those a try.
Cheryl Evans [00:23:45]:
Yeah, yeah, I use that too.
Susan Friedmann [00:23:47]:
Yeah. This is a great way, Cheryl, for you now to share your information about how our listeners can get hold of you and learn more about your brilliance.
Cheryl Evans [00:24:01]:
Well, absolutely. They can find me at BusinessWitchAcademy.com that's also where they'll find Ophelia. They can shop my store, they can subscribe to my newsletter, or they can even work with me one on one in some instances. All that information is available at BusinessWitchAcademy.com that's where they'll also be able to find my new guide that's coming out on how to train your AI employee.
Susan Friedmann [00:24:30]:
AI as an employee. Is that or is that somebody that you want to train to use AI.
Cheryl Evans [00:24:37]:
Training, AI to be your employee?
Susan Friedmann [00:24:40]:
Ah, yeah.
Cheryl Evans [00:24:42]:
So that you are getting those good results, I kind of broken it down step by step. And Ophelia joins me. In fact, she's given the title to the guide and it's called Help My AI Employee is Dumber than a Rock But More Confident than a Tech Bro. And now it might be running a cult.
Susan Friedmann [00:25:01]:
That is too funny. And listeners, you just have to go onto Cheryl's site. It's just filled with so much fun and exciting ways and Cheryl's so creative that just go and have a look for yourself. There's a lot of stuff there, sometimes a little overwhelming, but it's fun just the same. And of course, you get to meet Ophelia, which she's adorable. Cheryl, as you know, I always like our guests to leave our listeners with a golden nugget. What's yours?
Cheryl Evans [00:25:37]:
My golden nugget for you is twofold. It's people buy from people, which is why you need to be authentic in your marketing, because they are actually buying you, not a book. And AI doesn't replace you. It amplifies you. Figure out how to use it as leverage so that you can get more done in less time and less effort to have more success.
Susan Friedmann [00:26:06]:
Beautiful. And listeners, you can go and have a session with Cheryl and just learn how to do that more effectively. Thank you so much for sharing your wisdom. And listeners, if your book isn't selling the way you wanted or expected to, let's jump on a quick call to brainstorm ways to ramp up those sales because you've invested a whole lot of time, money and energy, and it's time you got the return you were hoping for. Go to bookmarketingbrainstorm.com to schedule your free call. And in the meantime, I hope this powerful interview sparks some ideas you can use to sell more books. Until next week, here's wishing you much book and author marketing success.
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