Calls to action are a critical piece of any inbound marketing strategy.

Without calls to action telling your website visitors what to do next, all that traffic you are getting from creating great content is wasted.

You need the conversion points on your site to convert passive visitors into active prospects/leads. It’s a relatively simple concept.

Below are 5 quick tips of things you need to consider when setting your site up with calls to action. They are low hanging fruit and easy to do.

1. Always have a Call to Action above the fold

This one if a no brainer, but I STILL see this mistake all the time.

Imagine that every single website visitor has the worst case of attention deficit disorder on the planet, then stop imagining.

You have a split second to grab someone’s attention online, banking on the hope that they are going to scroll down on your page is not a smart bet.

2. For longer content have a followup call to action towards the bottom

If your writing a blog post, place a relevant call to action into the bottom of that post.

Don’t just reuse your sidebar calls to action and call it a day. Create a call to action that is the width of the post. You have tons more room (Typical blog posts are around 600 pixels wide) to convey the value proposition to the visitor and why they should click through.

3. Be clear and concise about the offer

If your call to action tells me “Download Free White Paper”, what kind of information is that portraying to the visitor?

The website visitor is asking themselves:

• Why would I want to download yet ANOTHER white paper?
• What’s in it for me?
• What is the white paper about?
• What will it help me do in my job or life?
• What problems will it solve for me?

If these questions are left unanswered on your vague call to action, you can bet on a lower click through rate.

4. Using contrasting colors that stand out

If you were buying an ad on a blimp, you wouldn’t choose the blimp that is painted blue with clouds on it.

What I mean by this is, if your call to action blends in with the rest of your site’s design, no one will notice it.

If no eyeballs are being drawn to the call to action, no one is going to read your clear and concise value proposition (explained in 3 above) and they aren’t going to head into that conversion page.

5. Most Important: Make it Contextually Relevant

Let’s imagine your business is in the insurance industry. You sell a bunch of different types of insurance like home, life, auto, commercial, and stuffed animal insurance (the last one is most likely not real, it should be though).

If you are creating a keyword-rich blog post titled ”4 little known facts about Florida Home Insurance”, it wouldn’t make much sense for you to have a call to action in your sidebar of that post that is promoting your latest webinar on ”10 Questions to ask yourself to choose the right life insurance policy”

The reader of that post came to your site via social media, an email, or search because they were interested in Home insurance. What should happen instead is having a call to action that is contextually relevant to the content on that page?

Contextually relevant ads work better than random calls to action.

Don’t believe me? Well, this is the exact philosophy Google uses to make billions of dollars a year with their money minting machine Adwords.

Adwords scans the content of the webpage, the keyword in the search query, or the content in your emails (big brother alert maybe?) and serves you a relevant ad.

This works over and over and over again.

What Call to Action Best Practices are we missing here? What have you seen that works well?

Let us know in the comments below!