Frustrated Baby Is Pioneering Internet God

By Posted on 3 min read 1146 views

I opened my email this morning and at the top of my inbox was an email from Philip Lord, who I’m proud to say reads this newsletter. He’s got a pretty awesome book if you’re an affiliate marketer, can you can get a copy on this page.

At the bottom of his email was a link to Co-Schedule’s Headline Analyzer.

You can see it here.

It’s a website I haven’t been to in a long time, but I thought it would be interested to talk about it today.

The reason being, is that I believe you can over-think things.

This site will analyze your headlines (or subject lines) and score them to tell you how well you’re doing.

The subject line that I used in today’s email (and yes I used it just for the purposes of analysing it here!) got these results:


According to Co-Schedule’s headline analyzer, this subject line has no sentiment and gets a score of 75/100.

The first problem I find with this tool is that nowhere, I can find, does it tell you what a good score is.

Yup… we know 100 is the best, but we assume it’s very difficult to get that score. So what level indicates a good “enough” score?

Doing some Google searching it seems to be that people recommend a score of 75 or higher, although I doubt this is based on any true data or testing, more of a… “75 out of 100 must be pretty good” feeling!

The next problem, and this is a biggie, is how the scores and “Headline Type” are created.

The score is made by combining the amounts scored in the four categories Common, Uncommon, Emotional and Power.

This means that the tool must have a database of words, with scores next to them, in each of these categories and that’s how it creates the score.

It uses this information to tell you what type of headline you have. In my example:

Generic

Problem here is… it forgets that humans are reading it!

There’s absolutely no way that the headline I used is generic.

I can also be pretty confident, based on experience, that this headline will get a lot of opens of emails and decent amount of views and shares on the blog.

So why use the headline analyser?

Personally, I wouldn’t.

But if you’re at the beginning of your writing career and want some help it could certainly be very handy in pointing you in the right direction to improve your headline.

However, make sure that you don’t swear by it.

Use it as a tool, because the single best way to learn how to write headlines is to send at least one email every day.

That means you’ve got to write a subject line every day, and at the end of every day you will see a percentage of people who opened that email.

Do this for a month and you’ll start to get an idea of which subject lines your audience are interested in.

Do it for a year and you’ll be able to knock them out of the park every single time in a matter of moments (no software tool required!).

Michael

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