You’re reading this right now because the headline at the top did exactly what I wanted you to do, thanks to a free tool I discovered that helps me write punchier headlines.
It’s the Emotional Marketing Value Headline Analyzer and it tells me, within seconds, how well my headline or email subject line appeals to your emotions.
It also assigns a percentage grade to the headline. The one I used above got a grade of 62.5 percent which falls into the “Gifted Copywriter” category. 😛
You can use this tool for blog posts, articles, your website, sales pages, pitches to reporters, White Papers, and even the outside of envelopes on direct mail pieces.
Authors, use it when creating book titles. Speakers, use it when creating titles for your presentations.
But I have to be honest with you. I had to rewrite it about eight times before I finally scored that high!
How I Rewrote My Headlines
Here are earlier versions I wrote, and the lower scores:
Write more powerful headlines with this free tool (25 percent)
Write powerful headlines with this free tool: (28.57 percent)
Use this free tool to write powerful headlines (50 percent)
Use this free tool to write punchier headlines (50 percent)
Write punchy headlines with this free, easy tool (50 percent)
Write punchy headlines using this free, easy tool (62.5 percent. It loves the word free! So do readers just like you)
This is one of 61 free or dirt-cheap tools I’ll be telling you about during tomorrow’s webinar on “61 Publicity Tools in 61 Minutes” from 4 to 5 p.m. Eastern Time.
If the time is inconvenient, register anyway because I’ll send you the video replay and all the bonuses within 72 hours.
How Does Your Headline Writing Score?
Play with the headline analyzer and let me know what you think. Then join me tomorrow and learn about 60 other tools that can save you hours of time, tools that can spare you from weeks of frustration trying to figure out how to solve a problem, and tools that can save you thousands of dollars.
Register for the publicity ideas training here.
Let’s see how well you did. In the Comments below, give us the “before” and “after” versions of your headline, and the scores. Do you like the tool? How will you use it?
Just used this tool to create a title for a blog post. In five minutes of manipulating relatively the same words I created a range of EMV scores that ran from zero to 83.33%. Which one of the titles do you think I will use!!! Thanks, Joan, for the tip.
Wow! 83.3 percent? Spectacular.
Gary, promise me you’ll come back here and give us the link to the post so we can see the finished headline. In fact, we’d love to see several of the earlier, duller, lower-scoring versions.
Joan, this is inspired, thank you! You mentioned using it for blog posts, article titles, etc., but I suspect it’s also peg-on for taglines for businesses and websites. I moved my tagline from 33.3% to 78.3%. I’m going to keep working through it, but this tool takes the guesswork and worry about of writing the eye-catching titles we need. Thank you!
Taglines, sub-titles, chapter titles–yes, they’d all benefit from this tool. I’d love to see the before-and-after taglines you created.
Also, I should have mentioned that another very important consideration in creating headlines and titles is keywords. You can have a headline that makes them so emotional their blood pressure is off the charts. But if it’s online, and the search engines can’t find it because it doesn’t include your important keywords, how much have you really accomplished? Thanks for sharing this with us, McKenna.
Good article, just got to me via Future of Ink email (April 2014), so this is a bit tardy. Anyhow, here are my results from a quick test:
First try: Ten reasons why you should never vote – 25%
2nd: Top ten reasons you should never vote … ever – 33.33%
3rd: I forgot this’n.
4th: Top 10 reasons democracy fails – 80.00%
See how easy it is, Jake?
Yup, very cool. Gonna play with some of the other tools you listed, especially for my Twitterations, in the near future.
Great! Thanks for stopping by to comment, Jake.