Ivygirl Media & Design

Link Baiting: Can A Free Headline Tool Increase Your Success?

A client of mine pointed me to a nifty little tool and what a tool it is. Plug in your headline and this free service will analyze your text and give you an Emotional Marketing Value (EMV) rating.

What can an EMV tell you?

Well, the EMV is supposed to gauge the amount of emotional value that your headline will convey. The higher the score, the more likely your headline will be successful and for those of you interested in link baiting, EMV would obviously be key. So, for example – the headline “You Deserve All The Riches That Life Has To Offer” has a 20% EMV rating out of 100, not bad but certainly nothing to write home about.

Theoretically, an EMV of 30 to 40% is considered average for a proficient copywriter while a truly gifted and talented writer might score somewhere between 50 to 75%. A perfect score is supposed to be 100% but according to the tool, that’s hard to do unless your headline is 5 words or less.

So, that got me to thinking: just what makes a good “emotional value” headline? And more importantly, does that really jive with what people are likely to read? So, I decided to test the process.

Before racking my brain, I went to my trusty email client where despite my spam filters, sits tons of spam emails begging me to open them. First, I tried ” baby eraser pebble adult meat”. Yes, that’s actually the subject line on a spam email I received yesterday. And surprise… it scored a whopping 60% EMV!

Next, I tried “software festival spice vacuum toilet”. This ranked much lower, only coming in at 20% but the fact that it rated at all makes me wonder what people are actually reading out there. Interestingly, “Discover Unlimited Success” has an EMV of 0. Yep, zero. Funny isn’t it, since you would imagine that “unlimited success” would catch a little attention.

Here’s some other spammy-headlines:

• Become more manly and sexually attractive – 50%
• Next big market winner – 25%
• Your order approved – 33.33%
• Quality medications at lowest prices – 40%
• Milk library fork god pepper – 40%

Okay, so obviously, we’re either reading some real crap or this tool doesn’t take human common sense into account. After all, I don’t know about you but I’m not likely to read anything entitled “Milk library fork god pepper”, although now that I think about it… I am a little curious to know what those things have in common

To test my theory, I then tried some common legit headlines often used by copywriters and webmasters alike:

• Just in time for the holidays – 16.67%
• Last chance for savings – 0%
• The secrets to online success – 40%
• Get the wealth that you deserve – 16.67%

Hmm…with the exception of that third one, these didn’t even rank with an average copywriter’s skill. So, let’s look at some popular EMV word combinations:

• Free – 100%
• Abundance -0%
• Success – 0%
• Take charge – 50%
• New secrets prove success – 75%
• Unlimited success instantly – 33.33%

Okay, so we knew “free” would rank up there but the rest is a little intriguing isn’t it? Because while some words will certainly catch our eye, the truth is I’m only going to read the stories with headlines that sound legit. I want something interesting, useful and certainly with more meat to it than “software festival spice vacuum toilet” could possibly produce.

Which brings me (in a round about way) back to the original point of this post: when you’re writing headlines, you need to be aware of the emotional value that they will convey. Regardless of how much weight you decide this little tool carries, it still makes a good point – some words attract readers better than others and if you want to master link baiting, you have to make the most of those words.

Incidentally, the headline for this post ranks in at 30%… do you suppose its because I included the word “free”?

Now, you tell me – what kind of headlines makes you want to click?