Creating a Call to Action in Blog Posts
The best blog posts entice visitors to do something with your post. Your goal is ensure that they’re doing the right thing once they have read the post.
This is your call to action.
Few bloggers get the opportunity to direct their visitors to the next action based on the words in their blog post. But the trick is that every blogger has the key to create action points if you’re formatting your posts correctly.
Not everyone is going to take action. But you need to appeal to people who will by making your post worth doing something with.
So, what exactly do you want them to do? The answer lies within the content of your post. Here are some common action points and how you can get your visitors to take action.
Affiliate Marketing
Your links for affiliate sites should be both hidden and obvious. Visitors should trust that you’re going to lead them to places that are trustworthy and worthy of their time. Taking up your visitor’s time with useless links will harm your reputation.
Make your affiliate links obvious by the anchor text that you use and hidden by using an affiliate link plug-in that makes links appear to go to a different place.
Remember, your visitors are at your blog because they enjoy your writing style, you provide useful information, and they trust your words are on target. Ensuring that your links follow those same rules will produce more clicks and help you gain more trust from your visitors.
Deep Linking
Every niche blogger can write a post today and reference at least one previous post within their blog. This is the act of deep linking. If more bloggers would take the time to research their own blog and remember their posts, fewer people would need the “related posts” plug-in to keep visitors on their blog.
The added benefit to deep linking is that you’re supplying anchor text for search engines to associate your blog posts with. This is a major help with search engine traffic and again, like affiliate marking, helps your visitors to know where they’re going to land once they have clicked.
Social Bookmarking
Vital for a lot of bloggers for good traffic, bookmarking posts should be easy for your visitors and be part of every single post you write. For bloggers this is super easy to do. From the Add Me widget to the various plug-ins for WordPress users.
Ensure that you’re ending all of your posts with links to bookmark the post to networking site of your visitor’s choice. While I’d be more than happy to have all my readers bookmark my posts to StumbleUpon, not all of them will because it’s not their preference. By creating the ability to bookmark to several social networking websites, you’re expanding your reach by just one single visitor.
Ask Questions
Nothing will prompt your visitors to comment on your post faster than asking a question. Pertain to the various interests and styles of your readers in a single blog post. Haven’t you ever found that asking questions will capture attention?
So your comments may become a new topic on their own because you asked a question. Isn’t this a great thing?
Creating a comment community and visitors that actually speak to each other and not just you, the blogger, is interesting and draws in a lot of attention. Ensure that you’re holding that attention by being part of the comments that are taking place on your posts. Even if your visitors love to talk to each other, it is you that they come to the blog for. Make sure you remain present, even in your comments.
Final Thoughts
With the next post you format for your blog, think of different ways that you can create a call to action with your visitor. Whether it be to visit another area of your site, click on an affiliate link, bookmark your post, or just comment. You can have the blog visitors, traffic, and income revenue that you want if every single post internally focuses on your goals.
Have you tried a call to action on your blog posts? What was the outcome from your visitors?
Katy Castro blogs at I’m Blogging That with topics that include social networking, blog rankings, search engine news, and becoming a better blogger.
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Including a call to action is very effective indeed in posts (and ezines, and newsletters, and ….)
I generally will close my posts with a PS if I want individuals to follow affiliate links, or a strong recommendation to explore further if I’m writing a series of ‘how to’ lessons on the spot. It does certainly seem to help.
Enjoy,
Barbara
Barbara Ling (aka Owlbert)’s last blog post..Make money by stop leaving money on the table
I have a “share this” at the bottom of my posts but I didn’t realise how important deep linking within your own blog. I have to start doing this. Excellent post!
Tina’s last blog post..The pirates are coming!
Barbara: Excellent point about duplicating this for ezines and newsletters. I also like your idea for a PS at the bottom of your posts, the concept also sounds very personable.
Tina: Deep linking is one of the best things you can do for yourself. Aside from what I mentioned, it’s also giving you control of how search engines recognize your posts based on the anchor text that you use. Great for some keyword boosting.
Also, with the share this widget, I don’t tend to like that one. If I remember correctly, share this requires registration to submit content. The extra step doesn’t make it worth while to be a time saver.
Katy Castro’s last blog post..Make Out Dated Content Timeless
Isn’t the related post plugin automatically deep linking several posts at the end of every post?
Wow, did that make sense? lol
Dennis Edell’s last blog post..We Are Officially A FULL FEED RSS! But The Blogs Look Will Change :-)
Dennis: Those are indeed deep links at the bottom of the post. Lori is using the related posts plugin.
My point with the lack of need for that plugin is that by deep linking within your posts, you’ll help with SEO optimization by defining your own anchor text to be related to the posts you’re linking to. Very helpful when your site is crawled by search engines.
Additionally, by using specific anchor text within your post, you’re providing your reader with more information to where they will be directed once they click. This is also good because you can use different words within your anchor text to make the post seem more exciting, unique, or simply capture attention to create your call to action.
If the practice of deep link was used more often, the related post plugin (in my opinion) wouldn’t be needed.
Katy Castro’s last blog post..Make Out Dated Content Timeless
Personally I’d still do both. Seeing how the related post plugins don’t always work quite right (I’ve seen some pretty strange “related” posts lol), it might be just some *extra* deep link and also quite possibly of interest to the reader.
Whatcha think?
Dennis Edell’s last blog post..We Are Officially A FULL FEED RSS! But The Blogs Look Will Change :-)
Dennis: It couldn’t hurt to do both but if one or the other would be chosen, I’d pick the deep linking to monitor my anchor text.
Katy Castro’s last blog post..Blog Love #2 Alexa Rankings
This is one of the best articles I have come across in my reader to date. Definitely a cool thing to see a call to action, and these are some great tips on how to do it effectively! Thanks.
Jim’s last blog post..Marl The Stock Trading Robot Scam – Doubling Stocks? Yeah Right!
Jim: Thank you, I’m sure that’s got to be one of the nicest things someone has said about my post.
Katy Castro’s last blog post..Building Your Reputation
This is the first time I have heard of that affiliate plug-in – it is quite enticing :)
I have read a lot of these “money blogging sites” – yours is done very well and it is so refreshing to learn something new instead of seeing the same exact post as everyone else reworded.
Chelle’s last blog post..Happy Earth Day!!
Pretty good article. I like it, keep it up.
[...] the link will take them to some new product, tool or site that will help them. As Katy explains, affiliate links should be obvious in the sense that people know a link is leading to a product, and not simply someone else’s [...]