Episode 110 - Making Meaningful Connections through Powerful Language with Sharlene Anders
December 14, 2021
Creativity Coach Sharlene Anders discusses how writers can use tools like the free Advanced Marketing Institute Headline Analyzer to assess titles or subtitles for emails, events, and even books for Intellectual, Empathetic, and Spiritual potential. She discusses the importance of letting your first ideas rest for a bit before acting on them. And we talk about how Sharlene used that analysis to reverse engineer the topic of a summit in a way that she knew would be especially impactful to her desired audience.
As a Creativity Coach, Sharlene Anders helps artists unlock their potential with a hands-on philosophy based on the teachings of Julia Cameron in THE ARTIST'S WAY and Eric Maisel’s FEARLESS CREATING.
"I don't want to sell, I want to serve people and I want to, first of all, I want to figure out how I can do that. And then, how can I get them to understand that I am the right person for them? And I feel that by speaking their language, that is like a short cut." —Sharlene Anders
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[00:00:00] Matty: Hello and welcome to The Indy Author podcast today. My guest is Sharlene Anders. Hey Sharlene, how are you doing?
[00:00:06] Sharlene: Hi, Matty. I am so happy to be here. So I'm doing really great.
[00:00:10] Matty: Great. I am very happy to have you here. To give our listeners a little bit of background on you, as a creativity coach, Sharlene Anders helps artists unlock their potential with hands-on philosophy based on the teachings of Julia Cameron in THE ARTIST'S WAY and Eric Maisel in FEARLESS CREATING. And I actually met Sharlene when I appeared in her audio summit, Starving to Thriving: Artists Rocking Their Money Mindset to Create Healthy Finances.
[00:00:37] So I think you can tell from that title that Sharlene has a flair for titles. And in fact, when we were prepping for our recorded interaction for the summit, we got talking about that. We got talking about naming things: conferences, webinars, books, email subject lines. And I learned that Sharlene not only brings a sort of natural aptitude to this exercise, but she's also found some great tools to either further or confirm her title ideas. So I asked Sharlene to join us for the podcast, because I know listeners are always in need of naming one thing or the other.
[00:01:11] And so to start out, Sharlene, I think that you had said that you had discovered some of the tools and the techniques that you used in naming your products, naming your summit, your webinars, and so on, in a discussion with your business coach. So I'm wondering if you can just talk about what was the situation you found yourself in that triggered that conversation? Give us an entree to how you put that into effect?
[00:01:33] Sharlene: Yeah. So, if you do a little research, if you go on Google and search for "headline analyzer," you will come up with the AM Institute, the Advanced Marketing Institute, and it has a headline analyzer, which is completely free. There are other headline analyzers on the market where you actually have to make an account, or you have to pay for. Don't do that. Just go to AM Institute. And that business coach, it was in one of her list-building workshops where she talked about how to come up with titles, with headlines, for summits, workshops, et cetera.
[00:02:11] And this is a really amazing tool. And a word of warning, I think I told you already, this is so totally addictive. You start playing around with it and then say like it has only 35%. I can tweak that. And, yeah, so you have to be a little bit careful. Like with my first summit, I overdid it. And so I ended up with a monster of a title and tagline that was "The Power of Solitude: How Artists Can Use Their Loneliness to Creatively Heal Their Relationships." And so that's a mouthful. ...
[00:00:06] Sharlene: Hi, Matty. I am so happy to be here. So I'm doing really great.
[00:00:10] Matty: Great. I am very happy to have you here. To give our listeners a little bit of background on you, as a creativity coach, Sharlene Anders helps artists unlock their potential with hands-on philosophy based on the teachings of Julia Cameron in THE ARTIST'S WAY and Eric Maisel in FEARLESS CREATING. And I actually met Sharlene when I appeared in her audio summit, Starving to Thriving: Artists Rocking Their Money Mindset to Create Healthy Finances.
[00:00:37] So I think you can tell from that title that Sharlene has a flair for titles. And in fact, when we were prepping for our recorded interaction for the summit, we got talking about that. We got talking about naming things: conferences, webinars, books, email subject lines. And I learned that Sharlene not only brings a sort of natural aptitude to this exercise, but she's also found some great tools to either further or confirm her title ideas. So I asked Sharlene to join us for the podcast, because I know listeners are always in need of naming one thing or the other.
[00:01:11] And so to start out, Sharlene, I think that you had said that you had discovered some of the tools and the techniques that you used in naming your products, naming your summit, your webinars, and so on, in a discussion with your business coach. So I'm wondering if you can just talk about what was the situation you found yourself in that triggered that conversation? Give us an entree to how you put that into effect?
[00:01:33] Sharlene: Yeah. So, if you do a little research, if you go on Google and search for "headline analyzer," you will come up with the AM Institute, the Advanced Marketing Institute, and it has a headline analyzer, which is completely free. There are other headline analyzers on the market where you actually have to make an account, or you have to pay for. Don't do that. Just go to AM Institute. And that business coach, it was in one of her list-building workshops where she talked about how to come up with titles, with headlines, for summits, workshops, et cetera.
[00:02:11] And this is a really amazing tool. And a word of warning, I think I told you already, this is so totally addictive. You start playing around with it and then say like it has only 35%. I can tweak that. And, yeah, so you have to be a little bit careful. Like with my first summit, I overdid it. And so I ended up with a monster of a title and tagline that was "The Power of Solitude: How Artists Can Use Their Loneliness to Creatively Heal Their Relationships." And so that's a mouthful. ...
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[00:02:49] Matty: Yeah. It's a great title, but I see that like the subtitle, so to speak would be hard to remember.
[00:02:55] Sharlene: Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. So I went a little overboard with that. And so then the second summit, where you were a speaker, was a little bit better, I feel. So with that, I'm quite happy still. And with Power of Solitude, I'm always like, okay, I'm just calling it Power of Solitude and that's it.
[00:03:13] Matty: I plugged in some things into the AM Institute analyzer, and I want to talk about those in a moment as examples, but before you ever get to the tool, when you're just thinking of title ideas, are there certain philosophies that you're applying to come up with those initial ideas, like words that you want to be sure to use, words you want to be sure not to use?
[00:03:33] Sharlene: Yeah, so first of all, I think it's a great tool also to know more about yourself and your writing style. So I studied philosophy and I have a love for huge words, abstract terms. And so, this is 100%, whenever I write something, I type something into the AM Institute analyzer, it comes up with an intellectual score. So what that tool does, it analyzes whatever you type in there and, gives it a percentage of intellectual, empathetic, or spiritual words.
[00:04:09] And I noticed this, oh my God, everything I write has a tendency to be heavy on the intellectual, and spiritual is a really hard for me. And so I started, with everything that I do, with every copy that I write now, not just with headlines, but I realized this. And so when I go through an email that I write to my email list or something like that, I actually check whether I can change all the intellectual words at least to a certain percentage, just to mix them up so that there is something in there for everyone.
[00:04:42] Matty: That's a great entree. And the examples that I wanted to use are titles of podcast episodes. So it's a little bit tricky because all my podcast episodes are "<something> with <guest name>." And so being very aware of all the different places I'm going to use that title, I tend to keep it very short, and I tend to make it very obvious. I don't have a subtitle, so to speak, to elaborate on what I'm saying. So in a way I was expecting it to be heavy on the intellectual side. But I put two titles in and the results sort of surprised me.
[00:05:23] So, one was "Taking the Long View for Publishing Success." That was the title of an episode that I did with JK Ellem. And I thought, oh, "long view," that's good, "success," I guess that's good. But it came up with a rating of 14% on the emotional marketing value words scale that the Advanced Marketing Institute applies.
[00:05:45] So just to read what AM Institute says, "This score indicates that your headline has a total of 14% emotional marketing value. To put that in perspective, the English language contains approximately 20% EMV words and most professional copywriters’ headlines both typically have 30 to 40% EMV words in their headlines." So obviously I wasn't doing very well on EMV scale there.
[00:06:08] But then it rated that as spiritual. So, "Your headline contains words that have a predominantly spiritual appeal, and these impact words carry the strongest potential for influence and often appeal to people at a very deep, emotional level."
[00:06:22] So based on your much more extensive use of the AM Institute tool, what would you take from that? And would you have any advice for me for a podcast title that was "Taking the Long View for Publishing Success"?
[00:06:38] Sharlene: I agree with you. First of all, I think "long view" and "success," which are probably the trigger words that trigger the spiritual, for sure. There is, if you Google "180 powerful words,"
[00:06:53] Sharlene: If you click on that link, you see a list of words, when you scroll down. It's "a hundred and plus power words for writing emotional headlines." And, again, this is a completely free resource that I've found while playing around with the AMI headline analyzer. And so what I like to do is obviously a lot of these words are really attention grabbing, salesy, and we don't want to use them. That's another thing when you write for Facebook or for social media, you have to make sure that you don't use words that are on their banned list. I have a resource for that as well.
[00:07:33] But in your case, you could, for example, try something like, "the secrets of publishing success." That would be something that I would try. "Secret" is a word that has a lot of emotional impact. And then there are words like "strong," "instructive." So that is what I would, that is what I do when I spent hours and hours playing around with this analyzer, I just take different words and I just try them out.
[00:08:10] And as I said, you have to be careful because you might come up with a monster, like a monstrosity like the Power of Solitude tagline. And I was so excited because of that was, I don't remember, what it was. It was a very high, it was I think, 60, 70%, something like that. And that is actually also something that I noticed that this headline analyzer does not in all cases reflect the emotional state of your viewers.
[00:08:39] So I have a Facebook group that I called the Accountable Artists Community. And AMI tells me it is 75% and is triple impact, which is what you want. so to read what they say: "We've determined that your headline appeals equally to people's intellectual, empathetic and spiritual spheres. Perfect balance."
[00:09:05] Yes. Yet I got the feedback from more than one person that they are actually scared to join that community, the Accountable Artists Community, because it's like, oh my God, they make me do stuff. I have to do something. So now I was conflicted because I was thinking, okay, I have to change the name of that community. And then it was like, no, actually I don't, because I don't want to work with people who are afraid of the concept of accountability.
[00:09:43] But it was really interesting because I was like, I stumbled upon this. So I was playing around with this. Okay. I want something with of course "community." "Community" is a really strong word. I need to have "artists" in there because that's the people that I serve. And "accountability." I'm a huge fan of accountability. And so I put these words together and it was like on first try it was 75%. I was like, oh my God. That is totally amazing. And I really thought that everybody would be like, yeah, so that's a community I want to join. And instead people are like, I don't know.
[00:10:16] Matty: Well, I think what you're saying is absolutely true that it was serving a productive purpose in selecting out those people that were not going to be a good match for the community that you were looking to build.
[00:10:28] Sharlene: Yeah, who are not at the point where they actually could profit from having a creativity coach. Yes.
[00:10:34] Matty: And I think that the other caution is the one you already referenced, which is having it be salesy, too salesy. And of course there's the consideration of what is an email platform going to select out as spam and things like that. But then they're just, they're words that start sounding a little creepy. It sounds like too much like a used car salesman. Sorry, used car salesmen. The poor used car salesman always gets the short end of the stick. But hitting that balance where you're appealing, but not over appealing, maybe is a good way of putting it. How do you balance that aspect of not making it just sound like it was generated from some tool, but no sales terms?
[00:11:10] Sharlene: Well, I learned that I need to let it rest for a second because otherwise I get stuck with the aforementioned monstrosity. So I let it rest. I try not to send out copy immediately after I wrote it. And I also, this might also be interesting for your viewers and listeners, when I write an opt in video for a summit, I try to use really appealing language. And, for one of the opt-in videos, I actually went through the whole process. So you can use the headline analyzer for up to 20 words. And I went to 20 words by 20 words. I went through the whole script, and I eliminated every weak word that was in there. And the opt in rate was phenomenal. I was completely amazed. And afterwards I thought, okay, I understand the principle now. I don't have to do that anymore.
[00:12:03] And when I write something myself, or then I actually, I did opt-in videos where I thought that I followed everything. But then I realized that the opt-in rate was not so phenomenal. And so now I'm actually thinking, okay, you just have to do that. You have to go through the 20 words by 20 words. It might also be because English is not my mother tongue. And so I have a different connection to the language. So I need all the help that I can get.
[00:12:32] Matty: Well, I'll just say it's very clear that you have a very nuanced understanding of the language, based on our conversation now, but our conversation earlier as well. So, kudos to you for that. Because it's one thing to be able to understand the language to speak it conversationally. It's another to understand all these nuances that you're talking about and the detailed ways that words are going to appeal or not appeal. So I think that's very impressive.
[00:12:59] Another aspect I think people need to weigh is that there's that communication that you put out there to appeal to people to join a community or to join a summit or a conference or something like that. And then the other way I can imagine this tool could be used or this approach could be used would be for things like email newsletters. But I would think you'd want to take a little bit of a different approach because you don't want the email newsletter headline, I think, to be like a billboard. You want it to be more conversational. So you don't necessarily want to pack it with the super-strong words, but you still obviously want to be creating an emotional connection with the people you're trying to reach. Any tips on that front.
[00:13:42] Sharlene: There is one copywriting coach that I love deeply. Her name is Yara Golden, and I am on her newsletter. I will forever stay on her newsletter, regardless of what she puts out there. It's like, just reading the headlines, her subject lines are, is like going to a university at copywriting school.
[00:13:59] And what I learned from her is that sometimes it is really the simple thing. So when she's promoting a workshop, you might get an email from her that just says, "You coming?" And I love that. I love this very natural, just not salesy at all. Just this, "Are you coming?" Or just "You coming?" I love this and I noticed when I do the work of finding a subject line that has at least 50% on the headline analyzer, then my click rate, the opening rate is a lot better than when I don't do it, when I neglect it. And I think one of the best opening rates that I ever had was on an email with a subject line, "Are you still lonely?" And of course, this was in the whole context of the Power of Solitude. So this was in the context of the whole summit.
[00:14:59] But I was actually afraid of using that because I thought that's too close. That's too personal. And yet it worked. I think it was like a 70 something, 72% opening rate. So I don't think that I can give like general advice and I'm still learning. I feel like I've just started with understanding how you can use language and how you can really reach somebody. Because that's all it is, we don't really want to, or I don't really, I don't want to sell, I want to serve people and I want to, first of all, I want to figure out how I can do that. And then, how can I get them to understand that I am the right person for them? And I feel that by speaking their language, that is like a short cut.
[00:15:50] Matty: One thing that I saw as a commonality among some of those examples is that rather than the words themselves having power, I think both of your examples were framed as questions. So, "You coming?" or "Are you lonely?" are both engaging in that sense that you're reaching out to someone and you're starting a conversation. I guess that's a good way of thinking about it. There's the billboard, like the Power of Solitude, and then there is the more interactive one that may work better for an author newsletter subject line, for example.
[00:16:25] Sharlene: Yeah. Now that you say that, questions seemed to be a good way to higher opening rates. Another example of Yara, which was so good that I actually had to steal it, the subject line was, "Hey, did you want this?" What did I want? And during the Power of Solitude, I made the offer for everybody who registered for the event that they would get one audio file of their favorite speaker. And so I offered it to them in one email. And then in the second one, I totally stole that subject line and just headed it, "Do you want that?" And a surprisingly high number of people then came back to me from that second email and said, yes, actually I do want an audio file. And could you please send it from that speaker?
[00:17:11] So it's fascinating. It is really fascinating. And as I said, I'm learning. I'm nowhere near mastery yet.
[00:17:20] Matty: Well, I think that's the kind of thing that one could spend an entire lifetime on because not only is it a topic with a huge depth, but also it would change over time. So what worked great pre COVID, let's say, might be different during COVID. I mean, you're going to get a different response if you ask the question "are you lonely?" during a pandemic quarantine than you are going to if it had been a couple of years ago. So keeping your finger on the pulse not only of the powerful words, they probably change over time, but I'm not sure that WritersWrite.co is going in there weekly to adjust their list. Maybe they are. I don't know. But you know, there are things that you as the creator of the verbiage is going to know about the context in which you're sending it out.
[00:18:05] And it also made me realize that things like "do you want this?" or whatever that title was works great if it's coming from somebody that the recipient is going to recognize, versus if I saw that in a headline and I didn't recognize the sender, I would just send it to my spam folder. If I knew and trusted the person who was sending it, then my reaction would be much different.
[00:18:28] Sharlene: Yeah, absolutely. There was also something that we were talking about, especially now that you said COVID and lockdown down and everything. So when I did Power of Solitude, it was right in the middle of lockdown, and I was super excited. I wanted to do a summit. I wanted to do a virtual event and I wasn't sure about the topic.
[00:18:45] So, to give a little bit of background regarding me and my creativity coaching, my plan was my niche was to work with touring musicians. That was my whole business plan. That was what I wanted to do. And that was like the beginning of 2019. Yeah. And so I had to completely reorganize everything. And for a couple of months, I was really just, I have absolutely no idea what I want to do now. What am I to do now?
[00:19:13] So, the same with the summit, it was like, yes, I want to do that. That sounds like fun, talking to people. And I'm like, okay, about what? I live alone. I work from home. So, that was like an easy thing. And I started to ask artists and communities, I started to ask my artist friends, what's going on with you? What are you suffering from? What are you struggling with? And that was what really struck me as important was whether they were in families, living with their loved ones or whether they were like me living on their own and having not much contact at all with humans, all of them said, I am lonely as hell.
[00:19:52] So it was like, okay, so we need to talk about this. And I started to play around with the headline analyzer. And I didn't have a clear vision of anything. And then as I said, I love big words and "loneliness" is a word that has a more of a negative connotation that I wanted to get people out of it. So I thought, okay, let's go for "solitude" because it's an amazing word and I love the concept behind it. And that's how I found actually the topic, the topic of the Power of Solitude. And then it was like, okay, what is solitude? And so it all started with me finding a really high percentage headline. And then from there building the content around it.
[00:20:35] Matty: That's a really brilliant idea, that idea of reverse engineering an offering based on what these tools are suggesting to you might be the emotional or intellectual or spiritual reaction to it. Are there other ideas like that that as you look through the words that appear for you often, or the headlines that for you rank high when you're doing this kind of experimentation, other ideas that are popping out at you as things you'd want to pursue?
[00:21:05] Sharlene: I mean, I am not somebody who suffers from not having enough ideas. So on the contrary. But if somebody, for example, has a YouTube channel and they struggle with coming up with topics, like find a buzzword is maybe the wrong, but find one topic that is of interest to your people. And then see, well, first of all, there's this amazing website called AnswerThePublic. Do you know it? AnswerThePublic is a place where you can go to see what people are actually asking Google. And you can basically type in any word you want, and it will tell you what people ask in connection to that. What are they a curious about? And when I typed in, loneliness, for example, there was, the question, "can you die of loneliness?" And I thought, oh, that's interesting. I mean, I would have not gone there without the suggestion that there are people who are actually searching for an answer to that question. I would not have gone there. But because I knew that I actually brought it up with a couple of my speakers for the summit.
[00:22:21] So when you're looking for content and you like this kind of reverse engineering process, then that's what I would do. I would pick a word, throw it into AnswerThePublic, and then find something that jumps out at me. And it's like, okay, I want to do something with this. And then go to the headline analyzer and come up with a title.
[00:23:16] Matty: I think that for listeners of the podcast, this is going to be especially interesting for people who are writing non-fiction and they're looking for reasonable subtitles to accommodate those things that are going to be strong keywords. So I did an episode with Dave Chesson of Kindlepreneur not long ago about keywords and he offered some ideas for how to find those. I'll provide a link to that in the show notes, but this is another great idea.
[00:23:43] I was struggling a little bit more with figuring out how one would apply it in a fiction scenario. Do you have any insight or thoughts about that?
[00:23:55] Sharlene: I have not thought about that because my fiction writing is in German. But what just came to me was like, this is very much the approach that I do when I'm trying to figure out what I'm going to eat. So I checked, I open the fridge and it's like, okay, there's tofu and there's some tomatoes and maybe some other kind of vegetable, so what am I going to do with that? And then I take all of these words and I don't take them to the headline analyzer, that would be too much, but I type them into Google, and I just see what kind of recipes come up, right? So yeah. I just had to think about that. That it's somewhat like that.
[00:24:35] But nevertheless, I do believe that he can use it for fiction as well. The headline analyzer has a hard time with fantasy words and concepts. And for example, a word like "angel" would not rank in a fantasy way, but more in the religious types.
[00:24:54] Matty: Well, now I'm curious. So I'm going to go into the headline analyzer and put in the title of one of my books. This is going back a bit to one of our earlier discussions. But the other example that I put in as of a podcast episode title was, "Redefining Indy Success through Short Fiction." That was the title of the conversation I had with Ran Walker. And that was actually a 50% on the emotional marketing value and I think not that surprisingly, ranked largely as an intellectual appeal. But it was just funny to me because those two titles, the "Redefining Indy Success through Short Fiction" and "Taking the Long View for Publishing Success," I would have guessed would have ranked very similarly, but they were really different.
[00:25:41] And so I can imagine spending some time digging through that and trying to figure out what was the difference between those two that made one much more effective from that marketing point of view than the other.
[00:25:52] Sharlene: Well, first of all, the one with the higher percentage is shorter. And that is something that I really notice that the more words you have, the more the percentage drops. Then "redefining" is a really strong word. So "redefining" for sure. Can you repeat it please?
[00:26:13] Matty: So the one that ranked 50 was, "Redefining Indy Success through Short Fiction."
[00:26:19] Sharlene: Yeah. So you have "redefining," you have "success," and I guess that "short" and "fiction" also rank. So "indy" probably, you have to test that. If you just erase "indy" from it, because I'm not sure whether it actually recognizes that, but probably it does. And probably it has a spiritual appeal.
[00:26:46] Matty: I also realize I might be confusing it because of the way I spell indy. So indy was spelled with a Y and I think it's more commonly spelled with "ie."
[00:26:55] Sharlene: And this is where you can spend hours. And I have not met one writing person, somebody who was working with the words, who did not fall in love with this tool.
[00:27:09] Matty: Well, interestingly, when I remove "indy" so "Redefining Success through Short Fiction," now my emotional marketing value drops from 50 to 40, but now the appeal is both intellectual and spiritual. So I guess "indy" tipped it over into a more spiritual focus.
[00:27:30] Sharlene: But so for sure, keep the "indy." Yeah. It's like 10% up. Yep. For sure.
[00:27:37] Matty: But that's interesting too, because then we get back to the, who are you trying to appeal to? Because many of my episodes are addressing topics that would be of interest to indy authors, but some of them also address topics that would be of interest to traditionally published authors. So when those come along, I try to emphasize that there's stuff in it for any author. And so the more I would add "indy" to the titles of my episodes, then the more I'm skewing the audience I'm going for to specifically indy authors and maybe excluding some traditionally published authors. So yeah, just weighing that, what are you giving up by choosing words that it gives you that higher emotional marketing value percentage?
[00:28:18] Sharlene: Yeah. I would be curious to see what happens when you change "indy" for "independent," just to see what the algorithm does.
[00:28:28] Matty: If I just say, "Redefining Independent Success through Short Fiction, “interestingly, now the percentage is 33%.
[00:28:37] Sharlene: That is really interesting.
[00:28:38] Matty: Yeah. But it is a good illustration of what you were saying that you don't want to just plug it in and then see what score you getting step back. You want to play with it, but not maybe to the exclusion of eating and sleeping.
[00:28:51] Sharlene: Yes, absolutely. But, so, when we talk about Power of Solitude and how I came up with that, then actually now we can also speak about the evolution of this event, because I'm doing another solitude and loneliness centered event in December. And knowing that the Power of Solitude and then the tagline that it has, spoke to a more intellectual oriented head. And in German, we have the beautiful word, kopflastig. So kopf is head and last is like a burden. So people that are in their heads all the time, we call them kopflastig.
[00:29:31] So they primarily think and don't feel. And so the headline that I gave for a Power of Solitude was very heady. And now I actually do an event that is called "Magical Me Time: How to Boost your Creativity and to Beat the Holiday Blues."
[00:29:51] Matty: I was just thinking that because when you said December, I thought now you have a whole other layer of potential loneliness triggers.
[00:29:57] Sharlene: Yeah. And me, Sharlene, I would have not ever thought about doing an event called Magical Me Time because it's not the way that I speak. But I was looking for something for a specific audience and "Magical Me Time: How to Boost Your Creativity and Beat the Holiday Blues" has a 53.85% intellectual and spiritual.
[00:30:26] And again, a little bit like with Power of Solitude now that we talk about it, it's like, okay, now I have the title. Now I have the envelope. What am I going to put in there? So, yes, it's going to be interviews, but it has to be more. And again, yeah, I'm just realizing that now that I've actually done the exact same thing that I'm reverse engineering this. So I'm actually thinking of more playful things of workshops, of really doing something creative and not just talking about it.
[00:30:56] Matty: It would be interesting to pair all this with a thesaurus and be able to think of "playful," for example, and then look up words that are associated with playful and plug those into the analyzer.
[00:31:10] The other thing I'd suggest is, and I don't know if this comes through in a translation, but in the Harry Potter books, the character Gilderoy Lockhart has a biography called "Magical Me." So, it's going to give a giggle to a certain portion of the people who read it, which could be a good thing. Just important to realize that Gilderoy Lockhart is going to pop into some people's heads where they hear that.
[00:31:34] Sharlene: I have absolutely no problem with that because Gilderoy Lockhart is absolutely my favorite character and I so love him. And then when Kenneth Branagh actually played him in the movies, it was like, oh my God, this is perfect.
[00:31:49] Matty: He did do a great job.
[00:31:50] Sharlene: Yeah. "Can everybody see me?" I love him. Yeah. So Gilderoy Lockhart ... thank you. I wasn't aware of it now that you say it, now of course it's there.
[00:32:00] Matty: I had to Google it because I thought, "Magical Me," where have I just read that? And then I realized what it was.
[00:32:07] Sharlene: Well, the summits title is "Magical Me Time," so I hope it's not 100%, but it's interesting. Maybe I can make something with that. Now I have another angle to follow.
[00:32:20] Matty: As my final experiment, I plugged in the title of one of my books, which is A FURNACE FOR YOUR FOE. All my Ann Kinnear Suspense Novels and Suspense Shorts are based on Shakespeare quotes. And this has a score of zero, so I'm not sure if this has got to be quite as productive. Maybe it's telling me something I should pay attention to, but I think that maybe this is more of a non-fiction related tool than a fiction related tool.
[00:32:49] Sharlene: I was playing around with something, and I got constantly 0%. And this is really interesting because that, again, it was a phrase. What was it? That's actually something that I wish the headline analyzer, the website would do, that you don't have a search history. And I would really love that. So if anybody is listening from the Advanced Marketing Institute, please give us a search history. It would make my life easier.
[00:33:19] So I typed in a phrase and the phrase itself had an emotional value and the analysis of the tool did not pick up on it. It just looks at the words. So it doesn't take the whole phrase into consideration. It really just looks at the words.
[00:33:36] Matty: Yeah. I was intentionally picking ones I thought would have a big emotional impact. I also entered THE SENSE OF DEATH. I thought, okay, "death," I'm going to get something on that. Nope. Also zero. I'm like, seriously, the emotional marketing value of THE SENSE OF DEATH is zero. I'm skeptical.
[00:33:56] Sharlene: Well, it might be overused, like death, we're too used to seeing the word death so that it does not really ring any bells anymore. That would make sense. I think it was "hide and seek." I think I was playing around with "hide and seek" and I didn't get anything.
[00:34:15] Sometimes you have to trick it a little bit, because it only starts working from four words on. So with "hide and seek," I was like, "hide and seek and." So I typed that out or "the hide and seek" or something like that, just to put something in there. And I think it was that that just got 0% percentage.
[00:34:33] Matty: The way I plan to start using this more actively, and I think other people will too, would be for titling podcast episodes and thinking of subject lines for my email newsletters. Because I do like that some of the email platforms will tell you, you'd do better if you entered fewer words, or stop putting emojis in your subject line. They're probably using some version of that because it's not just the number of words or emojis. There is some reflection, similar to what the Advanced Marketing Institute is doing, of saying, yes, you have strong words but there's only so much they can do in that built in tool. And so playing around with that I think is good.
[00:35:10] And then I suppose the people can also, depending on their email platform, send out two versions of an identical email and the only difference being the subject line and play around with it and see if you can take the version you thought of, send that out to a subset, and then take the version that you come up with after you play with that on the tool and send that out and see if it makes a difference. I think that would be an interesting exercise.
[00:35:32] Sharlene: Yeah, absolutely. I was just also thinking about, you can also try predominantly intellectual and predominantly spiritual or predominantly empathetic headlines or subject lines and see whether they appeal to various audiences. Like what works best for them. But then on the other hand, it's like, okay, are we overthinking? Like if you go too far down that rabbit hole, you probably won't do anything else but analyze your subject lines.
[00:36:06] Matty: Yeah. I can imagine getting sucked into it. And I also think that there are aspects that a tool is never going to know. They're never going to know how familiar these people you're trying to reach are already with you and your work. Is this net new? Are you a horror writer, so you can get away with putting different kinds of words in your email subject line than if you're a cozy romance writer? All the things that they would need to rely on you as the creator to bring the human touch to that.
[00:36:32] Sharlene: Just give it a little bit of context, just for fun, I typed in "fifty shades of gray." It's a 25% intellectual. I think we can all agree that this book does not really appeal to an intellectually inclined audience.
[00:36:51] Matty: I think that's the best example that we should end on. That you can't just take the tool's word for it. You have to apply some smarts and some heart to it yourself.
[00:37:02] Sharlene, thank you so much. This has been such a fun conversation. Please let the listeners know where they can go to find out more about you and all your work online.
[00:37:10] Sharlene: Yeah, the easiest way is to go to my website, which is IAmShallalla.com It's a work in progress. So my website really looks different every week because I'm working on it and playing around with it. But you can find links to my YouTube channel, which is where I do most of my work. And also that is the place where you can sign up for my newsletter and also for my events and look at past events.
[00:37:37] Matty: Great! Sharlene, thank you so much.
[00:37:40] Sharlene: My pleasure.
[00:02:55] Sharlene: Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. So I went a little overboard with that. And so then the second summit, where you were a speaker, was a little bit better, I feel. So with that, I'm quite happy still. And with Power of Solitude, I'm always like, okay, I'm just calling it Power of Solitude and that's it.
[00:03:13] Matty: I plugged in some things into the AM Institute analyzer, and I want to talk about those in a moment as examples, but before you ever get to the tool, when you're just thinking of title ideas, are there certain philosophies that you're applying to come up with those initial ideas, like words that you want to be sure to use, words you want to be sure not to use?
[00:03:33] Sharlene: Yeah, so first of all, I think it's a great tool also to know more about yourself and your writing style. So I studied philosophy and I have a love for huge words, abstract terms. And so, this is 100%, whenever I write something, I type something into the AM Institute analyzer, it comes up with an intellectual score. So what that tool does, it analyzes whatever you type in there and, gives it a percentage of intellectual, empathetic, or spiritual words.
[00:04:09] And I noticed this, oh my God, everything I write has a tendency to be heavy on the intellectual, and spiritual is a really hard for me. And so I started, with everything that I do, with every copy that I write now, not just with headlines, but I realized this. And so when I go through an email that I write to my email list or something like that, I actually check whether I can change all the intellectual words at least to a certain percentage, just to mix them up so that there is something in there for everyone.
[00:04:42] Matty: That's a great entree. And the examples that I wanted to use are titles of podcast episodes. So it's a little bit tricky because all my podcast episodes are "<something> with <guest name>." And so being very aware of all the different places I'm going to use that title, I tend to keep it very short, and I tend to make it very obvious. I don't have a subtitle, so to speak, to elaborate on what I'm saying. So in a way I was expecting it to be heavy on the intellectual side. But I put two titles in and the results sort of surprised me.
[00:05:23] So, one was "Taking the Long View for Publishing Success." That was the title of an episode that I did with JK Ellem. And I thought, oh, "long view," that's good, "success," I guess that's good. But it came up with a rating of 14% on the emotional marketing value words scale that the Advanced Marketing Institute applies.
[00:05:45] So just to read what AM Institute says, "This score indicates that your headline has a total of 14% emotional marketing value. To put that in perspective, the English language contains approximately 20% EMV words and most professional copywriters’ headlines both typically have 30 to 40% EMV words in their headlines." So obviously I wasn't doing very well on EMV scale there.
[00:06:08] But then it rated that as spiritual. So, "Your headline contains words that have a predominantly spiritual appeal, and these impact words carry the strongest potential for influence and often appeal to people at a very deep, emotional level."
[00:06:22] So based on your much more extensive use of the AM Institute tool, what would you take from that? And would you have any advice for me for a podcast title that was "Taking the Long View for Publishing Success"?
[00:06:38] Sharlene: I agree with you. First of all, I think "long view" and "success," which are probably the trigger words that trigger the spiritual, for sure. There is, if you Google "180 powerful words,"
[00:06:53] Sharlene: If you click on that link, you see a list of words, when you scroll down. It's "a hundred and plus power words for writing emotional headlines." And, again, this is a completely free resource that I've found while playing around with the AMI headline analyzer. And so what I like to do is obviously a lot of these words are really attention grabbing, salesy, and we don't want to use them. That's another thing when you write for Facebook or for social media, you have to make sure that you don't use words that are on their banned list. I have a resource for that as well.
[00:07:33] But in your case, you could, for example, try something like, "the secrets of publishing success." That would be something that I would try. "Secret" is a word that has a lot of emotional impact. And then there are words like "strong," "instructive." So that is what I would, that is what I do when I spent hours and hours playing around with this analyzer, I just take different words and I just try them out.
[00:08:10] And as I said, you have to be careful because you might come up with a monster, like a monstrosity like the Power of Solitude tagline. And I was so excited because of that was, I don't remember, what it was. It was a very high, it was I think, 60, 70%, something like that. And that is actually also something that I noticed that this headline analyzer does not in all cases reflect the emotional state of your viewers.
[00:08:39] So I have a Facebook group that I called the Accountable Artists Community. And AMI tells me it is 75% and is triple impact, which is what you want. so to read what they say: "We've determined that your headline appeals equally to people's intellectual, empathetic and spiritual spheres. Perfect balance."
[00:09:05] Yes. Yet I got the feedback from more than one person that they are actually scared to join that community, the Accountable Artists Community, because it's like, oh my God, they make me do stuff. I have to do something. So now I was conflicted because I was thinking, okay, I have to change the name of that community. And then it was like, no, actually I don't, because I don't want to work with people who are afraid of the concept of accountability.
[00:09:43] But it was really interesting because I was like, I stumbled upon this. So I was playing around with this. Okay. I want something with of course "community." "Community" is a really strong word. I need to have "artists" in there because that's the people that I serve. And "accountability." I'm a huge fan of accountability. And so I put these words together and it was like on first try it was 75%. I was like, oh my God. That is totally amazing. And I really thought that everybody would be like, yeah, so that's a community I want to join. And instead people are like, I don't know.
[00:10:16] Matty: Well, I think what you're saying is absolutely true that it was serving a productive purpose in selecting out those people that were not going to be a good match for the community that you were looking to build.
[00:10:28] Sharlene: Yeah, who are not at the point where they actually could profit from having a creativity coach. Yes.
[00:10:34] Matty: And I think that the other caution is the one you already referenced, which is having it be salesy, too salesy. And of course there's the consideration of what is an email platform going to select out as spam and things like that. But then they're just, they're words that start sounding a little creepy. It sounds like too much like a used car salesman. Sorry, used car salesmen. The poor used car salesman always gets the short end of the stick. But hitting that balance where you're appealing, but not over appealing, maybe is a good way of putting it. How do you balance that aspect of not making it just sound like it was generated from some tool, but no sales terms?
[00:11:10] Sharlene: Well, I learned that I need to let it rest for a second because otherwise I get stuck with the aforementioned monstrosity. So I let it rest. I try not to send out copy immediately after I wrote it. And I also, this might also be interesting for your viewers and listeners, when I write an opt in video for a summit, I try to use really appealing language. And, for one of the opt-in videos, I actually went through the whole process. So you can use the headline analyzer for up to 20 words. And I went to 20 words by 20 words. I went through the whole script, and I eliminated every weak word that was in there. And the opt in rate was phenomenal. I was completely amazed. And afterwards I thought, okay, I understand the principle now. I don't have to do that anymore.
[00:12:03] And when I write something myself, or then I actually, I did opt-in videos where I thought that I followed everything. But then I realized that the opt-in rate was not so phenomenal. And so now I'm actually thinking, okay, you just have to do that. You have to go through the 20 words by 20 words. It might also be because English is not my mother tongue. And so I have a different connection to the language. So I need all the help that I can get.
[00:12:32] Matty: Well, I'll just say it's very clear that you have a very nuanced understanding of the language, based on our conversation now, but our conversation earlier as well. So, kudos to you for that. Because it's one thing to be able to understand the language to speak it conversationally. It's another to understand all these nuances that you're talking about and the detailed ways that words are going to appeal or not appeal. So I think that's very impressive.
[00:12:59] Another aspect I think people need to weigh is that there's that communication that you put out there to appeal to people to join a community or to join a summit or a conference or something like that. And then the other way I can imagine this tool could be used or this approach could be used would be for things like email newsletters. But I would think you'd want to take a little bit of a different approach because you don't want the email newsletter headline, I think, to be like a billboard. You want it to be more conversational. So you don't necessarily want to pack it with the super-strong words, but you still obviously want to be creating an emotional connection with the people you're trying to reach. Any tips on that front.
[00:13:42] Sharlene: There is one copywriting coach that I love deeply. Her name is Yara Golden, and I am on her newsletter. I will forever stay on her newsletter, regardless of what she puts out there. It's like, just reading the headlines, her subject lines are, is like going to a university at copywriting school.
[00:13:59] And what I learned from her is that sometimes it is really the simple thing. So when she's promoting a workshop, you might get an email from her that just says, "You coming?" And I love that. I love this very natural, just not salesy at all. Just this, "Are you coming?" Or just "You coming?" I love this and I noticed when I do the work of finding a subject line that has at least 50% on the headline analyzer, then my click rate, the opening rate is a lot better than when I don't do it, when I neglect it. And I think one of the best opening rates that I ever had was on an email with a subject line, "Are you still lonely?" And of course, this was in the whole context of the Power of Solitude. So this was in the context of the whole summit.
[00:14:59] But I was actually afraid of using that because I thought that's too close. That's too personal. And yet it worked. I think it was like a 70 something, 72% opening rate. So I don't think that I can give like general advice and I'm still learning. I feel like I've just started with understanding how you can use language and how you can really reach somebody. Because that's all it is, we don't really want to, or I don't really, I don't want to sell, I want to serve people and I want to, first of all, I want to figure out how I can do that. And then, how can I get them to understand that I am the right person for them? And I feel that by speaking their language, that is like a short cut.
[00:15:50] Matty: One thing that I saw as a commonality among some of those examples is that rather than the words themselves having power, I think both of your examples were framed as questions. So, "You coming?" or "Are you lonely?" are both engaging in that sense that you're reaching out to someone and you're starting a conversation. I guess that's a good way of thinking about it. There's the billboard, like the Power of Solitude, and then there is the more interactive one that may work better for an author newsletter subject line, for example.
[00:16:25] Sharlene: Yeah. Now that you say that, questions seemed to be a good way to higher opening rates. Another example of Yara, which was so good that I actually had to steal it, the subject line was, "Hey, did you want this?" What did I want? And during the Power of Solitude, I made the offer for everybody who registered for the event that they would get one audio file of their favorite speaker. And so I offered it to them in one email. And then in the second one, I totally stole that subject line and just headed it, "Do you want that?" And a surprisingly high number of people then came back to me from that second email and said, yes, actually I do want an audio file. And could you please send it from that speaker?
[00:17:11] So it's fascinating. It is really fascinating. And as I said, I'm learning. I'm nowhere near mastery yet.
[00:17:20] Matty: Well, I think that's the kind of thing that one could spend an entire lifetime on because not only is it a topic with a huge depth, but also it would change over time. So what worked great pre COVID, let's say, might be different during COVID. I mean, you're going to get a different response if you ask the question "are you lonely?" during a pandemic quarantine than you are going to if it had been a couple of years ago. So keeping your finger on the pulse not only of the powerful words, they probably change over time, but I'm not sure that WritersWrite.co is going in there weekly to adjust their list. Maybe they are. I don't know. But you know, there are things that you as the creator of the verbiage is going to know about the context in which you're sending it out.
[00:18:05] And it also made me realize that things like "do you want this?" or whatever that title was works great if it's coming from somebody that the recipient is going to recognize, versus if I saw that in a headline and I didn't recognize the sender, I would just send it to my spam folder. If I knew and trusted the person who was sending it, then my reaction would be much different.
[00:18:28] Sharlene: Yeah, absolutely. There was also something that we were talking about, especially now that you said COVID and lockdown down and everything. So when I did Power of Solitude, it was right in the middle of lockdown, and I was super excited. I wanted to do a summit. I wanted to do a virtual event and I wasn't sure about the topic.
[00:18:45] So, to give a little bit of background regarding me and my creativity coaching, my plan was my niche was to work with touring musicians. That was my whole business plan. That was what I wanted to do. And that was like the beginning of 2019. Yeah. And so I had to completely reorganize everything. And for a couple of months, I was really just, I have absolutely no idea what I want to do now. What am I to do now?
[00:19:13] So, the same with the summit, it was like, yes, I want to do that. That sounds like fun, talking to people. And I'm like, okay, about what? I live alone. I work from home. So, that was like an easy thing. And I started to ask artists and communities, I started to ask my artist friends, what's going on with you? What are you suffering from? What are you struggling with? And that was what really struck me as important was whether they were in families, living with their loved ones or whether they were like me living on their own and having not much contact at all with humans, all of them said, I am lonely as hell.
[00:19:52] So it was like, okay, so we need to talk about this. And I started to play around with the headline analyzer. And I didn't have a clear vision of anything. And then as I said, I love big words and "loneliness" is a word that has a more of a negative connotation that I wanted to get people out of it. So I thought, okay, let's go for "solitude" because it's an amazing word and I love the concept behind it. And that's how I found actually the topic, the topic of the Power of Solitude. And then it was like, okay, what is solitude? And so it all started with me finding a really high percentage headline. And then from there building the content around it.
[00:20:35] Matty: That's a really brilliant idea, that idea of reverse engineering an offering based on what these tools are suggesting to you might be the emotional or intellectual or spiritual reaction to it. Are there other ideas like that that as you look through the words that appear for you often, or the headlines that for you rank high when you're doing this kind of experimentation, other ideas that are popping out at you as things you'd want to pursue?
[00:21:05] Sharlene: I mean, I am not somebody who suffers from not having enough ideas. So on the contrary. But if somebody, for example, has a YouTube channel and they struggle with coming up with topics, like find a buzzword is maybe the wrong, but find one topic that is of interest to your people. And then see, well, first of all, there's this amazing website called AnswerThePublic. Do you know it? AnswerThePublic is a place where you can go to see what people are actually asking Google. And you can basically type in any word you want, and it will tell you what people ask in connection to that. What are they a curious about? And when I typed in, loneliness, for example, there was, the question, "can you die of loneliness?" And I thought, oh, that's interesting. I mean, I would have not gone there without the suggestion that there are people who are actually searching for an answer to that question. I would not have gone there. But because I knew that I actually brought it up with a couple of my speakers for the summit.
[00:22:21] So when you're looking for content and you like this kind of reverse engineering process, then that's what I would do. I would pick a word, throw it into AnswerThePublic, and then find something that jumps out at me. And it's like, okay, I want to do something with this. And then go to the headline analyzer and come up with a title.
[00:23:16] Matty: I think that for listeners of the podcast, this is going to be especially interesting for people who are writing non-fiction and they're looking for reasonable subtitles to accommodate those things that are going to be strong keywords. So I did an episode with Dave Chesson of Kindlepreneur not long ago about keywords and he offered some ideas for how to find those. I'll provide a link to that in the show notes, but this is another great idea.
[00:23:43] I was struggling a little bit more with figuring out how one would apply it in a fiction scenario. Do you have any insight or thoughts about that?
[00:23:55] Sharlene: I have not thought about that because my fiction writing is in German. But what just came to me was like, this is very much the approach that I do when I'm trying to figure out what I'm going to eat. So I checked, I open the fridge and it's like, okay, there's tofu and there's some tomatoes and maybe some other kind of vegetable, so what am I going to do with that? And then I take all of these words and I don't take them to the headline analyzer, that would be too much, but I type them into Google, and I just see what kind of recipes come up, right? So yeah. I just had to think about that. That it's somewhat like that.
[00:24:35] But nevertheless, I do believe that he can use it for fiction as well. The headline analyzer has a hard time with fantasy words and concepts. And for example, a word like "angel" would not rank in a fantasy way, but more in the religious types.
[00:24:54] Matty: Well, now I'm curious. So I'm going to go into the headline analyzer and put in the title of one of my books. This is going back a bit to one of our earlier discussions. But the other example that I put in as of a podcast episode title was, "Redefining Indy Success through Short Fiction." That was the title of the conversation I had with Ran Walker. And that was actually a 50% on the emotional marketing value and I think not that surprisingly, ranked largely as an intellectual appeal. But it was just funny to me because those two titles, the "Redefining Indy Success through Short Fiction" and "Taking the Long View for Publishing Success," I would have guessed would have ranked very similarly, but they were really different.
[00:25:41] And so I can imagine spending some time digging through that and trying to figure out what was the difference between those two that made one much more effective from that marketing point of view than the other.
[00:25:52] Sharlene: Well, first of all, the one with the higher percentage is shorter. And that is something that I really notice that the more words you have, the more the percentage drops. Then "redefining" is a really strong word. So "redefining" for sure. Can you repeat it please?
[00:26:13] Matty: So the one that ranked 50 was, "Redefining Indy Success through Short Fiction."
[00:26:19] Sharlene: Yeah. So you have "redefining," you have "success," and I guess that "short" and "fiction" also rank. So "indy" probably, you have to test that. If you just erase "indy" from it, because I'm not sure whether it actually recognizes that, but probably it does. And probably it has a spiritual appeal.
[00:26:46] Matty: I also realize I might be confusing it because of the way I spell indy. So indy was spelled with a Y and I think it's more commonly spelled with "ie."
[00:26:55] Sharlene: And this is where you can spend hours. And I have not met one writing person, somebody who was working with the words, who did not fall in love with this tool.
[00:27:09] Matty: Well, interestingly, when I remove "indy" so "Redefining Success through Short Fiction," now my emotional marketing value drops from 50 to 40, but now the appeal is both intellectual and spiritual. So I guess "indy" tipped it over into a more spiritual focus.
[00:27:30] Sharlene: But so for sure, keep the "indy." Yeah. It's like 10% up. Yep. For sure.
[00:27:37] Matty: But that's interesting too, because then we get back to the, who are you trying to appeal to? Because many of my episodes are addressing topics that would be of interest to indy authors, but some of them also address topics that would be of interest to traditionally published authors. So when those come along, I try to emphasize that there's stuff in it for any author. And so the more I would add "indy" to the titles of my episodes, then the more I'm skewing the audience I'm going for to specifically indy authors and maybe excluding some traditionally published authors. So yeah, just weighing that, what are you giving up by choosing words that it gives you that higher emotional marketing value percentage?
[00:28:18] Sharlene: Yeah. I would be curious to see what happens when you change "indy" for "independent," just to see what the algorithm does.
[00:28:28] Matty: If I just say, "Redefining Independent Success through Short Fiction, “interestingly, now the percentage is 33%.
[00:28:37] Sharlene: That is really interesting.
[00:28:38] Matty: Yeah. But it is a good illustration of what you were saying that you don't want to just plug it in and then see what score you getting step back. You want to play with it, but not maybe to the exclusion of eating and sleeping.
[00:28:51] Sharlene: Yes, absolutely. But, so, when we talk about Power of Solitude and how I came up with that, then actually now we can also speak about the evolution of this event, because I'm doing another solitude and loneliness centered event in December. And knowing that the Power of Solitude and then the tagline that it has, spoke to a more intellectual oriented head. And in German, we have the beautiful word, kopflastig. So kopf is head and last is like a burden. So people that are in their heads all the time, we call them kopflastig.
[00:29:31] So they primarily think and don't feel. And so the headline that I gave for a Power of Solitude was very heady. And now I actually do an event that is called "Magical Me Time: How to Boost your Creativity and to Beat the Holiday Blues."
[00:29:51] Matty: I was just thinking that because when you said December, I thought now you have a whole other layer of potential loneliness triggers.
[00:29:57] Sharlene: Yeah. And me, Sharlene, I would have not ever thought about doing an event called Magical Me Time because it's not the way that I speak. But I was looking for something for a specific audience and "Magical Me Time: How to Boost Your Creativity and Beat the Holiday Blues" has a 53.85% intellectual and spiritual.
[00:30:26] And again, a little bit like with Power of Solitude now that we talk about it, it's like, okay, now I have the title. Now I have the envelope. What am I going to put in there? So, yes, it's going to be interviews, but it has to be more. And again, yeah, I'm just realizing that now that I've actually done the exact same thing that I'm reverse engineering this. So I'm actually thinking of more playful things of workshops, of really doing something creative and not just talking about it.
[00:30:56] Matty: It would be interesting to pair all this with a thesaurus and be able to think of "playful," for example, and then look up words that are associated with playful and plug those into the analyzer.
[00:31:10] The other thing I'd suggest is, and I don't know if this comes through in a translation, but in the Harry Potter books, the character Gilderoy Lockhart has a biography called "Magical Me." So, it's going to give a giggle to a certain portion of the people who read it, which could be a good thing. Just important to realize that Gilderoy Lockhart is going to pop into some people's heads where they hear that.
[00:31:34] Sharlene: I have absolutely no problem with that because Gilderoy Lockhart is absolutely my favorite character and I so love him. And then when Kenneth Branagh actually played him in the movies, it was like, oh my God, this is perfect.
[00:31:49] Matty: He did do a great job.
[00:31:50] Sharlene: Yeah. "Can everybody see me?" I love him. Yeah. So Gilderoy Lockhart ... thank you. I wasn't aware of it now that you say it, now of course it's there.
[00:32:00] Matty: I had to Google it because I thought, "Magical Me," where have I just read that? And then I realized what it was.
[00:32:07] Sharlene: Well, the summits title is "Magical Me Time," so I hope it's not 100%, but it's interesting. Maybe I can make something with that. Now I have another angle to follow.
[00:32:20] Matty: As my final experiment, I plugged in the title of one of my books, which is A FURNACE FOR YOUR FOE. All my Ann Kinnear Suspense Novels and Suspense Shorts are based on Shakespeare quotes. And this has a score of zero, so I'm not sure if this has got to be quite as productive. Maybe it's telling me something I should pay attention to, but I think that maybe this is more of a non-fiction related tool than a fiction related tool.
[00:32:49] Sharlene: I was playing around with something, and I got constantly 0%. And this is really interesting because that, again, it was a phrase. What was it? That's actually something that I wish the headline analyzer, the website would do, that you don't have a search history. And I would really love that. So if anybody is listening from the Advanced Marketing Institute, please give us a search history. It would make my life easier.
[00:33:19] So I typed in a phrase and the phrase itself had an emotional value and the analysis of the tool did not pick up on it. It just looks at the words. So it doesn't take the whole phrase into consideration. It really just looks at the words.
[00:33:36] Matty: Yeah. I was intentionally picking ones I thought would have a big emotional impact. I also entered THE SENSE OF DEATH. I thought, okay, "death," I'm going to get something on that. Nope. Also zero. I'm like, seriously, the emotional marketing value of THE SENSE OF DEATH is zero. I'm skeptical.
[00:33:56] Sharlene: Well, it might be overused, like death, we're too used to seeing the word death so that it does not really ring any bells anymore. That would make sense. I think it was "hide and seek." I think I was playing around with "hide and seek" and I didn't get anything.
[00:34:15] Sometimes you have to trick it a little bit, because it only starts working from four words on. So with "hide and seek," I was like, "hide and seek and." So I typed that out or "the hide and seek" or something like that, just to put something in there. And I think it was that that just got 0% percentage.
[00:34:33] Matty: The way I plan to start using this more actively, and I think other people will too, would be for titling podcast episodes and thinking of subject lines for my email newsletters. Because I do like that some of the email platforms will tell you, you'd do better if you entered fewer words, or stop putting emojis in your subject line. They're probably using some version of that because it's not just the number of words or emojis. There is some reflection, similar to what the Advanced Marketing Institute is doing, of saying, yes, you have strong words but there's only so much they can do in that built in tool. And so playing around with that I think is good.
[00:35:10] And then I suppose the people can also, depending on their email platform, send out two versions of an identical email and the only difference being the subject line and play around with it and see if you can take the version you thought of, send that out to a subset, and then take the version that you come up with after you play with that on the tool and send that out and see if it makes a difference. I think that would be an interesting exercise.
[00:35:32] Sharlene: Yeah, absolutely. I was just also thinking about, you can also try predominantly intellectual and predominantly spiritual or predominantly empathetic headlines or subject lines and see whether they appeal to various audiences. Like what works best for them. But then on the other hand, it's like, okay, are we overthinking? Like if you go too far down that rabbit hole, you probably won't do anything else but analyze your subject lines.
[00:36:06] Matty: Yeah. I can imagine getting sucked into it. And I also think that there are aspects that a tool is never going to know. They're never going to know how familiar these people you're trying to reach are already with you and your work. Is this net new? Are you a horror writer, so you can get away with putting different kinds of words in your email subject line than if you're a cozy romance writer? All the things that they would need to rely on you as the creator to bring the human touch to that.
[00:36:32] Sharlene: Just give it a little bit of context, just for fun, I typed in "fifty shades of gray." It's a 25% intellectual. I think we can all agree that this book does not really appeal to an intellectually inclined audience.
[00:36:51] Matty: I think that's the best example that we should end on. That you can't just take the tool's word for it. You have to apply some smarts and some heart to it yourself.
[00:37:02] Sharlene, thank you so much. This has been such a fun conversation. Please let the listeners know where they can go to find out more about you and all your work online.
[00:37:10] Sharlene: Yeah, the easiest way is to go to my website, which is IAmShallalla.com It's a work in progress. So my website really looks different every week because I'm working on it and playing around with it. But you can find links to my YouTube channel, which is where I do most of my work. And also that is the place where you can sign up for my newsletter and also for my events and look at past events.
[00:37:37] Matty: Great! Sharlene, thank you so much.
[00:37:40] Sharlene: My pleasure.
Links
https://www.youtube.com/c/Shallalla
https://www.facebook.com/sharlene.anders
https://www.instagram.com/iamshallalla
https://twitter.com/iamshallalla
[email protected]
https://aminstitute.com/headline/
Episode 085 - Optimizing Your Keywords with Dave Chesson
https://www.facebook.com/sharlene.anders
https://www.instagram.com/iamshallalla
https://twitter.com/iamshallalla
[email protected]
https://aminstitute.com/headline/
Episode 085 - Optimizing Your Keywords with Dave Chesson
For links to Matty's upcoming and recent events, click here.
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