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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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