This is Day 23 of 31 Days to Build a Better Blog, a group project 60+ of us bloggers are doing together in an effort to help each other become better bloggers.
I’m frequently reminded of the statistic that the average person is bombarded by as many as 3,000 marketing messages a day. TV ads, radio ads, billboards, ads on websites, email messages, magazine ads, newspaper ads, direct mail, and more area all competing for our attention.
Most of these ads have been written by marketing professionals. The pros know they’re competing for our attention, so they don’t beat around the bush. They tell you exactly what they want you to do. They include a clear call to action.
Even if you’re not selling anything through your blog, you are competing with these 3,000 marketing messages to get your readers to take action, even if that action is as simple as posting a comment.
7 Tips for Calling Your Readers to Action
Today’s lesson in the 31DBBB ebook has lots of great advice. There’s also a link in it to a blog post titled 12 Tips To SNAP Readers Out of Passivity. If you haven’t read it, I highly recommend it. Here are my top seven suggestions for calling your blog readers to action.
- Make only one call to action. Asking readers to do more things will actually result in them doing less.
- Limit your big asks. Most of your calls to action should be small, requiring little time and effort and no money. Occasionally you can make a big request, but pick and choose those “big asks” carefully.
- Make your call to action at the end of the post. It’s OK to include the call to action earlier in the post, but then repeat it again at the end otherwise it’s likely by the end of the post many readers will have forgotten your request.
- Make your call to action clear and specific. Asking readers to “Spread the word about X” is vague. Asking readers to “Retweet this post and share it on Facebook” is clear and specific.
- Make most of your calls to action benefit someone other than you. If you’re always asking readers to do things for you, they will tire of it. In some posts, call readers to do things for others. Often the most effective calls to action are when you challenge readers to do something for their own benefit. For example, every day in this series one of the calls to action is to do that day’s assignment, which is a call to do something to improve your blog.
- Serve your readers first. If you want your readers to do things for you, show them that you’re blogging to serve them. Make your posts helpful, respond to comments, answer questions, promote their blogs, etc.
- Thank those who respond. Whenever possible, thank the people who respond by name, maybe even with a link to their blog or Twitter profile. When that’s not possible a general thanks shows you appreciate those who followed the call to action and don’t take them for granted.
For big asks, be strategic, focused, and varied
If you have something important you want to accomplish, consider doing a series of posts on that theme. End each post with a call to the same action but in a different way. For example, if you want to raise money for an orphanage in Kenya you might do a one week fund raising series. One post might feature a video and include a call to action to give money so the kids have a shot at a productive life. One post might feature an interview with the founders, and the call to action might be to donate to support their efforts to raise the children to know Christ. One post could focus on the various passages in the Bible that call God’s people to care for orphans, and the call to action could appeal to the readers desire to follow God.
The point is that your readers are all very different. Even for small calls to action, like asking readers to comment or subscribe, you should try to vary your approach.
Discussion
- Can you give an example of a time when you were successful at calling your readers to action? Why do you think it was successful?
- What other advice do you have for converting passive readers to active readers?
Take Action!
I’m going to break the “one call to action per post” rule, but I’m hoping to make up for it but varying my approach today. 🙂
- Post a comment responding to the discussion questions above.
- Write a call to action post and include a link to it in your comment.
- Share this post on Twitter and Facebook.
- Review Jon Reid’s blog, Blog One Another, and give him some feedback.
44 Comments
A challenge with a call to action:
I ask a question. Few if any answer.
I ask for a tweet . Few if any do.
I offer to give something away, few if any take me up on it.
I ask for an opinion. Few share.
What might that mean, even though my analytics show that people at least load the pages in their browers?
1. My non-techie readership doesn't know how. (What is a tweet?)
2. I ask the wrong questions.
3. My readership (via newsletter and via feeds) are not engaging the material (scary thought).
It could possibly mean lots of other things.
Paul and the series contributors are doing a great job here with the call to actions, but I'm also sure there is a lot of behind the scenes work with the various contributors to create that sense of community. I was part of the last series on Internet evangelism, and there were lots of off-blog community building call to actions to support the series.
Hey Chris, thanks for your comment. If I'm hearing you right, I sense a bit of frustration. If that's accurate, I can definitely relate. Check out this post I wrote almost exactly one year ago:
The honest truth about blog comments https://blog.ourchurch.com/2009/06/18/honest-truth…
Even as recently as March we were only averaging 5 comments a post here despite hundreds of RSS subscribers and thousands of email subscribers. So, maybe there are some lessons to be learned from these two series we've done. And maybe it's more productive to try to connect with new people who actively engage elsewhere than to try to activate passive readers. I don't know. It's something I'm going to give some more thought to.
Stay positive and keep experimenting.
BTW, I really like the sliding "Featured Post" thingy at the top of your blog. What are you using to do that?
The Featured post thingy is built into my theme. It's a little buggy as it loads it's own javascripts. I think that is one of the reasons I had to start using caches because the load time was getting to big. I just don't know enough to hack it and fix the code.
As to the comments, I'd love to see more. When I teach in person, I get lots of feedback, more ideas, and love the interaction. . it's not translating into buildling a community around a blog. Could be also that much of my audience only know how to browse, not interact.
Based on the customer service calls I get for my online book sales, about 10% strike me as entirely computer users that have learned how to move a mouse to click what they need and that's it. Just today, I had to show a person how to use the down arrow to scroll down a page.
I hope to make it back to FL some day and give conference over there. Would love to have another great sandwich.
Chris
I feel your pain regarding the low-tech audience. I think because we offer free websites at OurChurch.Com our members/clients are on average less tech-savvy as well. Only one or two of the participants in the last 2 series we did are clients of ours. We've essentially connected with a whole separate audience through Twitter and our blog, an audience that is more techy and more active online.
Maybe that approach could work for you too. If you were to write and tweet more about social media, web stuff, and Internet evangelism you would engage more high tech, active readers. Not that you abandon discussion of offline, low-tech ways to share the gospel, of course. But evangelism, particularly for churches, is becoming much more of an online/offline hybrid these days.
Yeah, let me know if you get to Florida. Would love to connect with you in person again.
Playcing catchup after a week away!
I sort of did this when I did my promote a reader post theother day – as the reader I promoted is also of on a misisons trip so mycall was to get folks to support him in prayer, etc …
But good stuff and whilst I've done nothing concrete about it yet I am taking it all in and trying to use the info where I can.
Its about identifying their needs and engaging rather than pushing a product. my calls to action at the end of my posts don't usually work, must be the wording.thanks
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