Improve your Readership…

by Measuring Your Headlines!

My friend Deborah Brown at Websites People Read let me know about a clever measurement tool at Advanced Marketing Institute for headlines that helps you to get the most out of your headline.  It assigns scores to your headline based on its emotional, intellectual and spiritual appeal. I tried one of my recent headlines and found that it was a miserable 23% on the scale of possibly 100%,  so I made some changes. Check this out: 

“What is the Impact of this Key Element on your Branding and Marketing”

Your Headline’s EMV Score:

23.08%

 “What is the Impact of this Key Element on your Marketing”

Your Headline’s EMV Score:

27.27%

“Improve this Key Element of your Marketing”

Your Headline’s EMV Score:

42.86%

“Improve this Key Element”

Your Headline’s EMV Score:

50.00%

“Improve your marketing”

Your Headline’s EMV Score:

66.67%

 

• Shorter is better.
• Promises are better.
• Don’t add a negative.
• Questions might not work.
• Two emotional words raise your score.

Try it with your latest headline. 

PS. I’m not sure I totally understand this.  One headline for this post came in at a big fat zero: “Measure your Headlines.”  “Improve your Headlines” comes in at 33%, but “Improve your Readership” is a whopping 67%. Adding more words to “Improve your Readership by Measuring your Headlines” is only 28%.  Hence the broken headline.

I really think I need to fulfill the promise of the headline, not just write a strong emotional/intellectual/spiritual appeal, right? I believe that fulfilling promises (even just a headline!) is a cornerstone of branding.  Just tossing out a strong headline will backfire if the rest of the article doesn’t pay off.

So, I’m going to measure the readership of this article and I’ll let you know how it faired!  Should be much stronger than the color article posted on March 6. 

Let me know how improving your headlines has increased your readership!