7 tips for effective calls to action

If you want to use your blog for lead generation, you must have a relevant call to action. A call to action is something that causes the reader to act.

I recently had the pleasure of hearing David Wells speak at WordCamp Boston 2012. David is a Marketing, Web Development and Social Media consultant. His session was “Everything you need to know about turning WordPress into a lead generation machine.”

Here are David’s tips for creating effective calls to action:

1. Put the call to action (CTA) above the fold.

2. In a blog post, put the CTA at the bottom of the blog post and make sure it’s the same width as the blog post.

3. Be very clear about the offer and what benefit it has to the reader.

4.  Be explicit on what you want to the reader to do, eg. register here.

5. Have the CTA stand out in contrasting colors.

6. Make CTA contextually relevant to the content on the page.

7. Test the CTA.

Here’s an example of a good call to action.  It’s from GoDaddy, a web-hosting company.

 

If you’d like to learn more about calls-to-action, Hubspot has some awesome resources:

1. Free ebook: How to Create Effective Calls-to-Action.

2. Blog post: 5 Real Life Examples of Fantastic Calls-to-Action.

How have your calls to action worked for you? Do you have any other tips to share?

Call-to-action photo is courtesy of Digisignage’s Flickr photo stream, under Creative Commons licensing.