You’ve spent hours crafting the perfect post. You’ve found the ideal image and formatted it with text. You’ve researched keywords and written a great meta description to improve the SEO. You finally hit publish, promote on social media, and wait for the engagement to begin.

But nothing happens.

And you begin to wonder if maybe the whole internet is broken.

It happens to all of us sometimes. A post we believe in and work hard on ends up falling flat. Unfortunately, in the clamor of the online world, sometimes it is hard to be heard. But what if there is another reason your post isn’t getting a good response? What if you forgot a key component?

Far too often, we fail to invest the same effort in the call to action as we do in crafting the post. And when that happens, we miss the opportunity to engage our readers and connect with others.

Last week, we looked at what makes a post shareable. Today, we’re going to discuss how to create a solid and effective call to action.

First, identify what you want the reader to do. Perhaps you are selling a book. Maybe you want to gain information from your audience. Or you could be working to grow your email list. As you develop your call to action, it begins with knowing for yourself what you want the action to be.

Second, share the benefit to the reader of participating. For example, if you are looking to gain information you might ask a question at the end of the post. But you want to make it obvious how answering the question and joining the conversation will help your readers. If you wrote a post about developing a cleaning routine, this could be your call to action:

I know my readers have all sorts of great insight to share. Let’s help each other by sharing in the comments. What is your best cleaning tip or trick?

Third, create a clear ask. Yes, there is a fine line between asking and pushing. But you do need to be clear. For example, if you want to grow your email list, simply saying, “Sign up for my email list,” may not get anyone to fill out the form. But what if you shared this:

“Over 600 people have already signed up for weekly encouragement about living well. Join them and receive a free guide for developing your ideal day.”

Crafting an effective call to action can be one of the most time consuming parts of writing a blog post. Far too often I am guilty of not spending adequate time on mine. One of my goals for this year is to improve my calls to action on my blog posts and on social media. As writers, we must make the call to action clear and strong on every post.

What was the call to action in your last blog post? How could you tweak it to improve the response rate?