Call to Action

You’ve noticed those annoying popups on many websites. You know, where you have time to read just about one sentence and then blam, in your face? Subscribe to our list. Install our app. Get our free report.

I hate those. But they are effective. You tend not to get what you don’t ask for. These calls to action are your suggestions to your website visitors of what you’d like them to do.

Or the little sly ones that peek in from the corner. Those are less obnoxious. They, too, are effective.

I personally prefer to insert an ad at some appropriate point in a page, where it’ll turn up as you scroll. It seems more polite. I don’t know whether it gets as much response.

There are many books about online marketing, if you feel so inclined. I’m not a marketer. I’ll just tell you what tool to use, and leave it to others to tell you what to do with it.

There are two popular tools for “calls to action” in WordPress:

• Sumo, by SumoMe, which is free.
• Thrive Leads, which costs $67 from thrivethemes.com.

Thrive Leads is the more versatile tool, and it has a particularly valuable feature, which is the ability to detect when the visitor is about to leave the page, based on their scrolling and mouse movement behavior. It will wait until then to prod them to do whatever it is you wanted.

I think this is better because if you bug people immediately, you’re asking them for something when you haven’t yet done anything for them. But if someone reads all the way to the end of your article, they’ve gotten what they wanted out of it and are almost ready to leave, that’s when they’re ripe for plucking. They’re feeling good because they’ve received value, and are more amenable to your requests.

Try SumoMe first, to learn about how this stuff works without paying money, then decide whether you need more.

To configure SumoMe (once you’ve installed and activated it), use the little blue badge that appears in your dashboard. It also appears on all your site pages, which you probably don’t want, but the SumoMe settings have a way to hide those.

Marketing is an entire discipline on its own, and not what this book is about. But if you want to start down that road, this is the turnoff.