Test Your Marketing Messages With This Tool

by. Mark Arnold

As marketers we write a lot. And a lot of crap. We use (or more like overuse) words such as
community, service, people, great, rates, free, etc. As I mentioned in a previous post, we need to cut the copy.

But how do you know if the copy you actually write is spot on or just a bunch of vague words sure to make consumers feel you are blowing smoke? You can test your copy with the “BlaBla Meter.”

You simply copy your text into a box on the BlaBlaMeter.com website and check your writing style. It works with text up to 15,000 characters. The site recommends a minimum length of five sentences.

When writing your website copy, newsletter articles, direct mail pieces, long mission statements or any marketing piece you can just plug in your text and receive your rating. The site will actually give you a BS Index score (the higher the score, the more BS).

Just for grins, I went to a few financial institution websites, copied some of their text and pasted it into the BlaBlaMeter. Here are a few of the scores and the BlaBlaMeter’s comments:

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