Announced: The End of Blogging As We Know It

Why did you click on this post? My guess is the headline. Maybe it intrigued you; maybe you thought…yea, right. Whatever your thoughts about it, you clicked it. The headline is the single most important factor in getting your posts read…period.

Blog Headlines

Now some of you may disagree with that argument. But I say to you, how will anyone read your amazing content if you do not pull them into it? And how do we draw in the reader? By giving them a great headline to capture their attention. Maybe a headline that will ask a question or invite mystery.

Seems a simple concept, yet a very difficult task to accomplish. Not that you are not creative or thought provoking, but there are a gazillion blogs headlines out there at the very moment you push publish. So what makes your headline different? How does your stand out in the crowd?

Blog Headline Tools

There are two rules of thumb when it comes to blog headlines. One, capture their attention with a creative title. Two, it needs to relate to the content at hand; unless of course you are pulling a fast one like I did with this post! 🙂

If you think you can’t come up with a salivating blog headline on your own, there are tools to help you along the way. Oh wait…I forgot a key factor in your headline selection; use your keywords! So, using your keywords, you have already related it to the topic at hand. Now, you just need some attention grabbing support words.

I think Brain Gosur said it best:

Weather you’re just surfing some of your favorite blogs, going through the internet, or even just a magazine in the doctor’s office, have you ever just stopped at a headline that caught your attention? Than the doctor calls you in and you don’t want to put down the magazine. Like a deer caught in the headlights is what your headline needs to do to your reader.

Now that we have all the hoopla out of the way, let’s get to the tool I like to employ for my blog headline needs. It’s called Headline Analyzer, from Advanced Market Institutes. The key benefit of this tool, beside it being free; it utilizes emotional marketing. Playing on people’s emotions to grab their attention.

This tool will analyze your headline and then spit back an analysis of your title based on emotional metrics. For example, I input the title of this post into the box and here are the results:

“Announced The End of Blogging As We Know It”

Your Headline’s EMV Score:

11.11%

This score indicates that your headline has a total of 11.11% Emotional Marketing Value (EMV) Words. To put that in perspective, the English language contains approximately 20% EMV words.

And 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.

A perfect score would be 100%, but that is rare unless your headline is less than five words.

While the overall EMV score for your headline is 11.11%, your headline also has the following predominant emotion classification:

 

Intellectual

Your headline carries words that predominantly appeal to most people’s intellectual sphere. Intellectual impact words are especially effective when your goal is to arouse curiosity, and when offering products and services that require reasoning or careful evaluation. The majority of words with emotional impact in the English language fall in this Intellectual category. Intellectual impact words are the most-used of all three categories, and have the broadest appeal to people in general.Intellectual impact words are best used to attune copy and sales messages aimed at people and businesses involved in the fields of education, law, medicine, research, politics, and similar fields. While not restricted to these groups, by giving presentations which are weighted with Intellectual impact words, your clients and customers will be more positively influenced and you are more likely to attain a more favorable response.

Obvioulsy, you are shooting for 100%, but that is a rare feat. But I ask you to try it out and see how your blog headlines measure up on the emotional marketing scale. See if tweaking them for a higher score gets you more clicks. Especially for Twitter, an attention getting blog headline is key!