I’ve been experimenting with a cool free tool that’s helped me write more powerful headlines. It’s important to pay attention to your headlines, as they are the first critical element of your copy. Fail here and nothing else you write matters.
Your headline needs to capture the viewers attention, and get them to begin to read the rest of your copy. To do so effectively, you can appeal to their intellectual, spiritual or empathetic side. Most words are fairly neutral emotionally. But some words evoke one or more emotions.
The Advanced Marketing Institute offers a free headline tool that measures the level of emotion in your headline, and classifies the dominant emotions as being, intellectual, spiritual or empathetic.
When I experimented with the tool, I used the text of an ad I was running on Leads Leap. The then current ad scored somewhere around 20%.
For comparison, most professional copywriters’ headlines will have 30%-40% EMV Words in their headlines, while the most gifted copywriters will have 50%-75% EMV words in headlines.
In about 15 minutes I reworked the wording and emphasis of the phrase about 20-30 times, each time getting it re-scored instantly.
I allowed myself some trial and error, and some enjoyable wordplay. Eventually, I was able to craft some high scoring headlines. The final result looked and sounded far more powerful than my initial efforts. In the end, you pick the variation that most appeals to you. (See the Final Result Below)
Now I would like to say this tool has flooded my house to the rafters with gold, but alas I cannot. Yet.
A little practice with this will strengthen all of my copy writing.
As such I recommend it to you.
I warn that I did distort one headline I toyed with to the point where it scored high, but was just missing something. Use this as a tool to develop ideas and flesh out their relative value to you.
Some words I added to headlines reduced its score, others increased it. Quite a few words I thought would be good, weren’t and a few the reverse.
[Here’s the link, but stick around to the end of the article, okay?]
http://www.aminstitute.com/headline/index.htm
So far, I’ve been able to transforms many headlines that started around 20% improved as high as the 80 percent range. It may not always be necessary to force your way to such high levels. Merely using it to raise your score 10-15 points will noticeably improve the power of your text.
For example my original headline for this blog post was
“Writing Headlines? New Headline Tool Measures the Emotional Umph! of your Headlines”
now its: “Writing Headlines? New Tool Calibrates their Emotional Power”
The first was 25% the final 37.5%. Maybe it could be better, but it is better than my first try. As such I take it as a victory and move on. If it were a sales letter, I’d rework it until it was at least 60 if not a lot better.
I’ve also used it on a variety of places beyond headlines. I’ve been working on some of my squeeze pages from top to bottom with it.
Below is the final result of my Leads Leap experiment. What do you think? Is this going in the right direction, or is it a blind alley? Let me know your comments on this tool and the use of emotional words in headlines, copy and etc.
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This ranked 50%. When I substituted “Grab” for “Steal” it dropped to 43.75%. Plausible don’t you think?
Got the lead on this tool from a blog post by Steve Lorenzo a few weeks ago. Been playing with it off and on since. Thought I would share. Enjoy.
[tags]advanced marketing institute, headline tool, headline, leads leap, Steve Lorenzo, [/tags]