Your blogs can be a content marketing workhorse for your business. They build trust, improve your SEO and organic discoverability, lead your audience towards a purchasing decision, and so much more. But there’s one thing most blog posts are missing that’s essential to driving conversions and sales.
If you want your blogs to convert to email subscribers, leads, and passive income, you need to include a call to action in your blog.
What is a call to action?
A call to action (CTA) is exactly what it sounds like. It’s any sort of phrase, word, or even visual cue that calls your audience to act. In plain English, it’s a way of telling your audience what to do next.
You’re likely familiar with calls to action in a social media setting. On Instagram, you might include calls to action to get people to comment, save, share, or click the link in your bio. And if you’ve ever written website copy or a sales page, you’ve probably added some calls to action to get people to hit that “checkout” button.
But have you ever applied the same strategy to your blog posts?
A call to action helps your blog post convert
Most people often land on blogs as a result of a quick Google or Pinterest search. They’ll skim the info and then exit the tab once they’ve found what they need.
Wouldn’t you rather your blog visitors stick around for a while? Pin the post, check out a few others, and maybe even download a freebie or sign up for your email list?
They’re not going to do it unless you tell them to.
Just like any good piece of copy or social media caption, you need to include calls to action in your blog posts!
There are many benefits to blogging for your business, even without adding a call to action:
- Sharing educational content establishes your expertise in your industry and gives your audience a chance to see more of your personality.
- Every blog post is another chance to show up in your target audience’s search results.
- And writing blogs consistently gives you plenty of content to repurpose in the rest of your marketing strategy!
But if you’re going to put all the time and effort into writing value-packed, SEO-friendly blog posts, I’m guessing you’re hoping for a more tangible ROI. A call to action turns your blog from just another piece of content to the hardest-working salesperson on your one-person marketing team.
A powerful call to action — or even better, multiple — can help you continuously grow your email list, make sales on your digital products, and connect with dream clients all from a blog post that you’ve already written and published. Here are some ideas to get you started!
Blog Post Call to Action Examples You Can Use
When you blog consistently, it might feel like you’re saying the same thing over and over again. Trust me, no one’s paying that close of attention, and repetition is the key to marketing success.
Buuut if you still feel like you’re tired of the same old, same old, here are a few different calls to action examples for your next blog post:
Link to related posts
This one’s a classic for a good reason! Linking to other blog posts or pages on your website increases the internal links on your page, which improves your search engine optimization by making the relationship between the pages more clear.
Plus, by including links to other posts, you have the chance of keeping readers on your site for longer, which — you guessed it — is also beneficial to your SEO. Keeping your audience on your website and engaged with your content will also continue to grow their trust in you, turning them from a random reader to a raving fan.
Example: At the end of a post about how to improve client experience, you can direct your reader to other blogs about Dubsado vs. Honeybook, how to get started with Dubsado, and 5 CRM automations to set up for your business.
Bonus Tip: Including internal links naturally throughout your post is a great practice, but specifically suggesting that your reader clicks through and reads more will increase the likelihood that they actually do it!
Save it for later on Pinterest
Blogging and Pinterest go together like chocolate and peanut butter, and encouraging your audience to save images from your website to Pinterest will expand your reach. Make sure to include a Pinterest-friendly image that would be worth saving in your blog post and that your website settings allow pinning images from the page.
Join the email list
Growing and consistently nurturing an email list is one of the best ways to market your business in my opinion. Your email list is essentially a short list of your brand’s superfans — warm leads who have already “bought in” to your brand and are more likely to buy from you in the future.
If your main call to action is just to join your list (instead of offering a freebie of sorts), make sure you’re saying more than just “Subscribe!” or “Stay in touch!”. You want to give users a good reason to hand over their email addresses. Tell them what to expect and why they should want to be on your list.
Between the Lines Copywriting has a great blog all about how to write better opt-in copy for your email list if you need a helping hand!
Grab your free checklist/guide
Of course, if you do have a relevant lead magnet to promote, your blogs are the perfect place to promote it! Offer site visitors an incentive to join the list with a valuable lead magnet. There are lots of different forms your opt-in could take:
- Checklist
- PDF guide
- Private podcast
- Templates
- Email challenge
- Webinar / mini-training
- Quiz
This is one of the first things I recommend any of my Pinterest clients do to see more email list growth from our Pinterest marketing efforts. Blogs tend to be a bigger traffic driver from Pinterest, but we don’t want to miss any opportunity to gain a subscriber. Including a call to action to the opt-in makes the blog posts work double for my clients!
Follow along on Instagram
If your main community is on Instagram, encourage your blog readers to follow you there! This call to action is an especially great idea if you’re blogging about a long-term project that you’re also documenting on Instagram.
Keep in mind, however, that once you direct someone off of your website, they’re likely going to keep scrolling on IG instead of returning to your site, so this isn’t always the best option.
Purchase the guide / course now
Blogs can work just as hard for you as a good sales page. While consuming blog content is free, there’s no reason why you can’t promote your paid products or services! In fact, you absolutely should promote any relevant offers you have available!
Your blog posts are likely going to attract readers at every stage of the purchase journey and who have a variety of different needs. While one reader might only be interested in your free content, another might be willing to purchase a template to support their DIY efforts, and someone else might decide they need someone to do the work for them and reach out to hire you. Including calls to action that cater to all of these different stages will give plenty of opportunities to convert.
Share your results + tag me on Instagram
Are you sharing actionable tips in your blog post? See if it’s really connecting and ask readers to tag you in their results on Instagram. This builds a sense of community and camaraderie with your audience and gives you user-generated content to share on your own page. Make sure to actually respond and engage with anyone who does this so it’s not an empty promise. That kind of social proof is invaluable and can help to encourage more of your Instagram followers to visit your blog!
Join my community
If you have a Facebook group or membership or other kind of community that’s relevant to the topic of your blog post, include the link with a call to action to join for more tips, community, or whatever else you’re offering inside the group. Make it enticing!
Best Practices for Blog CTAs
While the conclusion of your posts are important, keep in mind that a lot of people won’t scroll all the way to the end! Consider including links to other blog posts or a banner about your freebie in the middle of your post.
Bonus: it’s a great way to break up a wall of text and make your blog post more skimmable!
Many website templates also have a sidebar that displays alongside your blog post. You can include some of your most relevant links here as a mini-navigation and an on-screen reminder of who you are and what your whole deal is.
You should also make sure you’re always giving readers a reason to take the desired action. Yes, you’re checking one box by telling them what to do, but you also need to tell them why. The people want to be enticed!
Above all, make sure that whatever calls to action you add to your blog post is relevant to the topic of the blog post itself. Your audience is reading the blog because they’re interested in it, not because they want to be thrown an offer out of left field.
Or to take it out of the baseball metaphor world, don’t start promoting your favorite contract shop in the middle of a blog post about writing the best Instagram captions. Make it make sense.
If you take anything away from this post, remember that if you don’t ask, the answer is always no.
Now I hope you know what’s coming next…
That’s right! I wouldn’t leave a whole blog about calls to action without giving you a few of my own!
>> If you just luuuurved this post and want to share it with the world, you can pin that cutie little infographic.
>> If you want to learn more about how to pair Pinterest marketing and blogging to drive more traffic, sales, and leads to your business on autopilot, register for the Pinterest Blogging Workshop!
>> And if you want to know how you could improve your blog posts to drive more traffic from Pinterest, grab the free Pinterest Funnel Audit guide!
