Tweet

Should Your Blog Posts Have a Call to Action?

Guest post by: Bonnie Harris

Article Overview: A call to action is an essential component to be included with any marketing material to encourage people to contact your business immediately rather than putting you on the backburner and forgetting about you entirely.

Should Your Blog Posts Have a Call to Action?

Most businesses use blogging as a marketing tool, and that’s the way it should be; but people are uncertain exactly what that means. Do you use traditional rules of marketing when you’re writing your blog posts? Write for a target audience? Try to sell a product? Include a call to action? Well, those are more questions than I can answer here, and I’ve answered many of them before. But to summarize, yes to be an effective marketing tool you do have to think as you would when writing marketing copy (identify your target audience, make statements that are appealing and capture interest, and she some light on your business). But the similarities end there.

You can use your blog to market, but you don’t really want to market on your blog because you can get your message and your brand identity across to your readers. You can read more about finding the right balance and avoiding overselling on your blog, but I want to talk a bit about using a call to action on your blog here. A call to action is an essential component to be included with any marketing material to encourage people to contact your business immediately rather than putting you on the backburner and forgetting about you entirely. If you’re using your blog to market, does that mean that you should use a call to action on your blog, then? This is actually a highly debated topic. I have clients who just won’t have it any other way; they want that traditional marketing incentive to appear. Typically that involves relating the business’ services to the blog topic and encouraging people to visit the main website or services page to learn more about XYZ services. My personal stance on the use of a call to action in a blog is that 99% of the time, it’s appropriate to do without it, and here are some of the reasons why:

1. I’m a big believer that you don’t want your blog to feel like just another sales pitch. Even if you weren’t over-selling throughout the bulk of your blog post, a simple irrelevant name drop of your services can suddenly make people feel like you wrote the post to be self-serving.

2. If you’ve got your blog built into your website (and even if you don’t and include links back to information on your main website) it’s really unnecessary to tell people where to find information, because people can get to it themselves.

3. Many people argue that a call to action creates a great opportunity to drop in some essential keywords with a link that will help the SEO strategy of the website. I say that you’ve got a whole blog post worth of text to work with and you’re better off including those query keywords with links in there.

While I haven’t performed a formal study, I do feel as though in general, blogs that don’t include the call to action (and don’t oversell in general) do better than those that do. But what it truly comes down to is personal preference.

A blogging call to action: to include or not include; that is the question. Seriously, what do you do?

Related Articles
  Defining “call to action” in new media
  Blogging, Articles and Twitter - A Powerful Marketing Combination
  WordPress Blog Tip - Make Your Blog Work For You
  Blog Statistics Can Help You Improve Your Traffic
  Your 10-Step Year-End Blog Review
  How to Guest Blog
  Blogging The Easy Way Is More Than A Trend
  Legal Marketing: How To Get Your Blog Read
  WordPress Blogging Tip - Get Known in a Huge Way Using Social Networks
  WARNING: If You Have A Blog, Beware Of The Comment Spammers
  What to Put in Your Blog
  10 Ways to Increase Your Blog’s Pageviews
  Blogging - One of the Best Internet Marketing Strategies
  7 Steps to Guest Blogging Your Way to More Traffic and Greater Online Visibility
  Analyzing your blog statistics
  Three Tips To Get You Started Blogging for Business
  Five Ways to Get More Attention to Your Blog Posts
  Blog Design Tips For Maximum Blog Benefits!
  Web Site Traffic – Driving Visitors to your Blog
  Add structure to your blog posts with lists

Article Tags: blog topics, blogging small business, business blogging, promoting small business with a blog, small business marketing, small business promotion, starting a blog, writing a blog



Related Forum Posts
Re: Best Internet Marketing Strategy - Hi David, I agree about the Blogosphere. You have a smaller group that Blog, but do so on the premise that they think they should, but have never really considered the purpose of their Blog. Then I think there are a few SEO or Internet Marketing types that see Blogging as just another link building strategy. But the largest group of Bloggers, tend to be people who enjoy writing and discussing their topics of interest. Blogging is good for link building, but the true Blogger is a breed apart from the rest. They want to dialog, to debate, to have feedback and they are very willing to link to other worthwhile conversations that are relevant to their topic. I agree with you. These group of Bloggers obviously are passionate about their writing and together, they create huge conversation trails interactive and travel from Blog to Blog. But the evidence is clear with this group that loves what they write about. With comments enabled on a Blog and having a Blog tuned to a specific purpose you already have the evidence of original Social Media.
Re: Alexa Ranking Goals - That's great GT! What method did you use to put up the Entrepreneur Blog Network in your Wordpress Blog? We're always looking for the easiest methods to help bloggers who are not techies get involved.
EvanCarmichael.com suggestion - Maybe I missed it but I would like to suggest that a Blog be created to support the Forum. The idea is that in the blog you put in snippets of some of the biggest conversations with a 'read more' link to the forum itself. Setting up the Blog and clipping some conversations onto it wouldn't take very long.
Jen's Blog - Spam protection - Jen, I like the Blog and just posted a comment to one of your articles. From my experience you need to implement some sort of SPAM capture tools. i use them on my Blog and it's been a life saver as I'm getting hit by spam atleast 5 times a day. I use Wordpress and they have plugins like Captcha and SPAM Karma installed.
Blog Marketing Anyone? - Hi Kevin I suppose you could use the same SEO principles on a Blog as you can for a website but the more content you have within your Blog, the better rankings/traffic you would receive. Would you have time to write a full length article with tips in it every day or second day to get the article count rolling over every week? I would also like to know if anyone has had any experiences with marketing blogs and the traffic they received.


Share this article with your friends. Fund someone's dream.

Leave a comment below or share on the left and you'll help support entrepreneurs in Africa through our partnership with Kiva. Over $50,000 raised and counting - Please keep sharing! Learn more.

Newsletter

Get advice & tips from famous business
owners, new articles by entrepreneur
experts, my latest website updates, &
special sneak peaks at what's to come!

Name:
Email:

Popular Articles

Life is a Balancing Act!

African Technology Development

Suggestions

Email us your ideas on how to make our
website more valuable! Thank you Sharon
from Toronto Salsa Lessons / Classes for
your suggestions to make the newsletter
look like the website and profile younger
entrepreneurs like Jennifer Lopez.