Have a call-to-action (CTA) in place at all times. It doesn’t need to be the same one; that’s not the point. The point is, you need one. It needs to be something that occurs to you when an article is wrapping up and you’re thinking about how to get people to engage. Something like “Tell me your story” or “What questions do you have about this topic?” or “Join our newsletter” or whatever.
The reason for this is because there are a lot of articles out there, and yours will probably compete with a lot of similar articles for people’s attention, and people don’t have a lot of time, so if your article is not different from other articles in some way, it will just get lost in the shuffle.
That means it needs a CTA. It needs to do something that will make someone notice it when they’re scanning through their feed or whatever.
If you are trying to sell something, you want to do it in the most straightforward way possible. You want to make it as easy as possible for people to buy what you are selling.
It sounds simple, but I see a lot of businesses mess it up. They have a website or Facebook page or Twitter account or whatever, and they publish all kinds of neat stuff on there. But there’s no way for anyone to order the stuff if they want it. The sales pitch isn’t tied into anything that happens after you click on it. The website has no clear point of action — no CTA (call-to-action).
And maybe this doesn’t matter much if you’re just publishing random stuff for your friends, but if you’re trying to sell something, it matters a lot.
I’m not talking about advertising here — where I’m talking about one specific product or service. I’m also not talking about making your whole website into an ad, which would be bad because buyers don’t trust advertising. I’m talking about having some kind of permanent link that says “Buy this” or “Get this free report.”
