What is the purpose of a call to action?

A call to action turns a reader from a content consumer to an active participant. This is something you have to train your audience to do! Unfortunately social media has made most of lazy when it comes to consuming. Even something like “swipe up” is too much effort! 

A call to action is an incentive (or reminder) for your readers to take action! 

Thinking about the reader’s journey

It’s so important to really think about a reader’s experience on your website. If you have a call to action too early, it doesn’t make sense in the context of their journey! 

Let’s talk about pop ups for a second. We have ALL been on a website that has a pop up in negative 5 seconds after being on the site. When this happens, your brain immediately says what is this? I wasn’t looking for this! And your reaction is to close the pop up OR hit the back button. 

Think about how your readers end up on your recipe. 

They may have clicked over from Pinterest or Google. They likely have very little recognition of your brand. Maybe they recognize your brand name or your pin style… but most of them do not know your brand very well. Immediately asking them to give you something before you have given them any reason to trust you simply won’t work! 

Your reader is looking for your recipe card. They’re either going to scroll right to it or use a jump to recipe button to get to it even more quickly. 

Understanding this behavior will help you to be more strategic about where you place your calls to action and which ones you use! 

Let’s talk about some call to action ideas! 

Internal call to action

These are call to action ideas that are sending people deeper into your website! These are often not thought of as calls to action, but they certainly are! 

Related Blog Posts

This can be two different things: the text in your blog posts linking to other blog posts OR related blog posts that you share in a section after the blog post, either visually with images or otherwise. 

Visually, this can be done a handful of ways including plugins like SlickStream, Content Views, and others. My favorite way to do this though is with Gutenberg blocks! If you haven’t heard of Gutenberg, it is the native WordPress editor that came out a few years ago and will completely replace the classic editor by 2022. 

If you aren’t using Gutenberg yet, I’m so excited to share my course that is launching March 1! Simplify with Gutenberg will be available and I’m so excited to get more people into the course. I did a small launch of it after the Food Blogger Summit last year and 40 students have gone through it and I have had so much awesome feedback from it! 

Sign up for the Simplify With Gutenberg course waitlist here! 

Linking to pages (categories, about page, recipe index)

So often people put a lot of time into strategically designing pages like their about page, categories and recipe index, but never talk about them or promote them! 

Create reusable blocks or add a call to action after your blog posts to highlight your recipe index, about page or highlight a category page within the text of your blog posts. 

Leave a comment or rating

This became really popular when certain recipe cards built this into the recipe cards, you may have seen a colored block at the bottom of a recipe card that highlights that the blogger wants the reader to comment.

This is a great way for you highlight that you want your readers to comment on your blog posts and rate your recipes! 

Purchase a digital product

If you have a digital product that you are selling on your website, it is a great idea to highlight this with in your blog post in different sections. Especially if it is something like a cookbook or something that would enhance the experience of someone making your recipe. 

I think this is probably most effective if you do it in a way that is kind of visual and that you repeat in most if not all of your blog post, simply because your reader is most likely going to need to see something multiple times before they will actually buy it from you. You want to make this a regular part of your blog post content and the black outline that you use every single time

External Call to Action Ideas

External calls to action are a bit easier to wrap our heads around because they are the ones we see a lot more often! 

These are: 

• Follow on social media
• Join email list
• Pin for later
• Share on social

Where should your calls to action go?

It’s important to note that you probably don’t want to use ALL 11 of these ideas on each blog post, but there are some that you may want to show up on every single blog post. After this episode, choose 2-3 that you can implement in your blog posts going forward or by putting them in spaces that will be seen in all blog posts. 

For example, the best places to put your CTAs are: 

• Sidebar
• After blog post
• Throughout the the blog posts
• Within the recipe card

How do you make them stand out?

With your call to action, you need to stop the reader’s scroll to get them to take action! The best way to do this is to stop the pattern they’re used to seeing of text, photo, text (with some ads sprinkled in). 

• Colored background
• Larger fonts
• Styled differently than regular text, to stop the scroll

This used to be SO much more difficult to do with the classic editor but Gutenberg has made this so much easier to do! This is one of the biggest reasons I wanted to make my Simplify With Gutenberg course because this is such a powerful tool to help you stop your readers scroll! 

Sign up for the Simplify With Gutenberg course waitlist here!