Do You Write Great Headlines?
Or, How Do You Know If You Write Great Headlines?
About a month ago I wrote a post titled “10 Secrets To Writing Great Headlines” and I have gotten some great feedback from readers. I also got a few inquiries asking “How do I know if I have a great headline?”.
I’m going to answer that question with two more questions: “What action did you want your reader to take?” and “Did they take that action?” If your answer to the second question is yes then your headline worked. If it’s no, chances are the reader didn’t read the post or article and therefore didn’t take the desired action.
The headline probably didn’t create enough curiosity or interest to read the post. I say probably because you will not get every reader to take action even though they read the entire post. Depending on the action desired you may get only 1 out of 100 people to act. You need to research your market’s conversion rates.
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by Hector Melo A.
by Hector Melo A.
Analyze Your Headline
You can check your headline for its Emotional Marketing Value with this cool tool: Headline Analyzer. The analyzer takes your headline and determines its emotional response value based on three criteria:
- Intellectual
- Emphathetic, and
- Spiritual
Take the results with a grain of salt. I recommend you write two, three or four headlines and run each through the analyzer. Then sprinkle with a little commonsense. I used the analyzer for this post. I ran both the post title “Do You Write Great Headlines” and the headline “How Do You Know If You Write Great Headlines”. The title drew a score of 40% and the headline a 30%. Both scores are considered to be in the range of a professionally written headline. Whew. I thought maybe I had lost it for a minute there.
The lower scoring headline, “How Do You…” I believe will pull more visitors and readers. I’m going to give them an A/B test and I’ll let you know the outcome. And, that brings us to…
Tracking The Action
You should track your visitors. There are several ways to accomplish this. The simplest may be provided by your website host. I’ll venture a guess that nearly all hosts provide site tracking capabilities, especially those that use cPanel. If your web host doesn’t offer this there are many external applications that will do it for you.
Get Plugged In
If you have a self-hosted WordPress blog you can get a plugin called WP Stats. This plugin gives you the most popular data requested by site owners. Installation and setup are straight forward. You do need a WordPress API key. If your using Akismet for spam you already have the key. If you don’t, you can get the key for free and WP Stats has the link in its setup menu.
Google Analytics
Google provides an excellent web tracking application and it’s free. You need to register with Google of course, our they can’t track your site. Sign up here for Google Analytics. This is a sophisticated analytics program with dozens of choices and will take a little time to get it sorted out.
Statcounter
Statcounter is a free tracking service. They do have paid subscriptions with greater capabilities. However, the free version is sufficient for most blogs and websites to start off. The only drawback to the free version is that it tracks the latest 500 visitors. That means that when vistor # 501 is logged, visitor # 1 is dropped. No data is available for the dropped records. They have a WordPress plugin, also.
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Comments
4 Comments on Do You Write Great Headlines?
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Martin (riverScrap) on
Tue, 3rd Feb 2009 8:28 am
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Hal on
Tue, 3rd Feb 2009 9:33 am
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brian from comment on
Wed, 2nd Sep 2009 4:09 am
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Sarah Alvarez on
Thu, 11th Feb 2010 7:59 am
When I’m writing a news headline I treat it like a hook. It needs to ensnare readers and immediately plant itself in there curiosity.
Thankfully there’s a million ways of doing that. You can appease / pander to your readership; deliberately antagonise them; shock them with the absurd; or simply make them laugh!
Hi Martin,
You are 100% on. Take a look at my post Writing Great Headlines and you’ll see how I talk about the need to use emotional hooks.
Thanks for the insightful comment.
Hal
However, the free version is sufficient for most blogs and websites to start off. The only drawback to the free version is that it tracks the latest 500 visitors.
When writing headline, we should use the popular keywords more. Thinking is the key.
Tell me what you're thinking...
and oh, if you want a pic to show with your comment, go get a gravatar!
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