What Is a Call To Action

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What Is a Call To Action?

Cameron Barke

Do I Need to Use These ‘Call To Action’ Things?

With the influx of numerous businesses tapping into the vast world of blogging, e-mail marketing, and PPC, (great article on PPC vs SEO right here by the way), one thing that differentiates the winners from the losers is having effective Calls to Action within their marketing strategy.

Here we will go through, what exactly a Call To Action is, a few examples, and a couple key-pointers in getting started with creating your own CTA’s.

Lets go!

What Exactly is a Call To Action It is as simple as it sounds, a Call to Action (CTA), is an image or line of text that prompts your visitor to take some form of action. That action could be anything from: a link to download a product. join a live webinar, to comment on a post. to share your content. to sign up to an email list, or to download an e-book.

They can be placed at various places in and around your content. Every CTA is different depending on your website

and target audience. The best way to figure out what works, and what does not work is to test! test! test!

What Do They Look Like Here is a working example. I am going to place a CTA right now, by telling you to click this button right under here for a free training I did on affiliate marketing.

Send Me The Training Cam

Checklist For Effective CTA’s To save time and effort on your part when creating a CTA, I found an awesome 4 point checklist here that I will repost for your benefit.

1. Break Attention Concepts that break a users attention away from their focus, is a great starting point. Colors and ad copy that POP, is a sure fire way of doing this. Contrast your CTAs against the rest of your content – so when the users eyes glance over the page, they can explicitialy see “this is important,” and therefore click on it.

2. Actionable Ad Copy Have you ever been to a website and the buttons they use are the boring standard “Submit” or “Enter” – you CTA ad copy that sticks out from that. Be a little creative, it goes a long way.

3. A Clear Value Proposition People should know what will happen once they click the CTA. Let us say you are wanting the user to head over to a webinar, they click your CTA, and it takes them to an e-book – they will be confused, and probably opt out. Just be honest with what they are getting in exhange for the click.

4. A Specific Page Aligned with 1 Stage in the Sales Cycle This may be the most important checkpoint.

Your CTA will be most effective if the people are taken to a dedicated landing page. This is what drives traffic, and creates LEADS! If you send them over to a place that does not capture their info, ie an email address, you are letting that lead slip away…

Also, the CTA has to be congruent with the sales cycle. You would not send a first time user of your blog, to a sign up form/order form without them first seeing a sales video.

Conclusion Effective CTA’s are what will drive more traffic, create more leads, and boost your businesses bottom line.

If you use the 4 point checklist in creating your CTA’s you will be on the right path of driving the traffic!

There you have it, the basics of CTAs. Take it and run with it….