Welcome to podcast answers, the show where I help you start and grow your podcast answering
any podcasting questions along the way.
That's right, guys.
Today, we are going to be talking about calls to action or CTAs and how to use them, what
they are.
But first, I want to remind you if you've not had a chance to go back and listen to
the last episode where I was talking with Todd Cochran, the CEO of Blueberry, I would
recommend doing that because we talked about podcast mirror, what is podcast mirror and
how you can use it to grow your podcast, but then also put in a lot of the new name tag,
namespace tags that podcasting 2.0 is allowing you to do such as funding and live and things
like that because we do this show live here every Tuesday or Thursday, just depending
on what the day is.
But you can do that now with the podcast mirror, even if your host does not allow you to put
those in your own tags, so your own feed.
So I would suggest going back and listening to that episode.
It was a great episode.
Podcastanswers.com slash podcast mirror will get you to that specific episode.
But today we were talking about calls to action, what they are.
So a call to action is just that.
It's a call to action.
So normally in your podcast, you want somebody to do something, whether that's subscribe
to your podcast or subscribe to your newsletter or go out and become a Patreon or send a
boost in their new podcast app.
There's lots of different things that you want to do.
You want to call somebody to action and it's crucial for engaging your audience and driving
them to take specific actions.
So there are some ideas and some things that we need to be thinking about when we're doing
these calls to actions because you can't just willy-nilly put 15 calls of actions, right?
So you want to be clear and specific exactly what you want your listeners to do.
That could be visiting your website, subscribing to your podcast, leaving a rating review,
purchasing a product or something, but you want to be super, super specific.
So you can say, you want to say, I want you to do this.
I want you to go out and leave a review this week because, and you can give them a reason.
Now don't say because it helps people find our podcast because it does not do that.
You hear that in a lot of different podcasts, but it does not actually help you.
It does not help people find your podcast when you are, when you, when you're people
rating your review.
So that's just a my soapbox rant and I'll get off of that right now.
But you want to be super specific with that and don't just say, I want you to purchase
my product.
I want you to say something specific.
So you can say, I want you to go out and if you get any enjoyment from this podcast, go
out and go to our buy me a coffee link and consider donating $5, 10, $20 or becoming
a reoccurring member.
And you can give them the reasons that that's going to be good for them.
You can say it's going to get you extra stuff.
You can feel warm and fuzzy.
You could do whatever, but we need to be very specific on what you want them to do and why
that they should do it.
Now you can place your calls to actions at specific points in your podcast and I would
limit the amount that you are wanting people to do specifically limit them back to back.
So at the end of your podcast, don't say go out and subscribe to our podcast, join our
Patreon list or buy me a coffee, buy my product.
Like you don't want to do three or four things.
You want to do one specific thing at a time when you in your calls to action because too
many calls to actions, people are not going to do them too many calls to actions.
People are just going to forget and not actually do it.
So you can do calls to actions at the beginning.
You can even do them in the middle and at the end, but you don't want to place too many
calls to actions back to back to back.
Now for me in this podcast, I use calls to actions usually at the beginning and at the
end.
My beginning one is usually something like go back and listen to the last episode or
do something or reminding people of what they can do at the beginning because usually that's
my intro.
I'm usually not into my topic yet, but I want to remind people, hey, you can subscribe to
the podcast if you've not done that now.
Now is the perfect time to go subscribe to this podcast.
So I use calls to actions at the beginning and at the end of my episodes.
And so you can do that again.
You can put them at the beginning at the end, but you need to be super specific and you
need to provide clear instructions that are easy to follow because you have to remember
one of the things you have to remember about calls to action and is that people in podcasts
specifically is people are usually doing something else when they're listening to your podcast
or watching your podcast.
They're maybe out driving, they may be out mowing the lawn, they may be doing the dishes.
Some things that they can't do right away.
So you want to make it really easy for them to do.
And one of the ways that I do that is I have short links.
So if you've noticed, I've said things like if you want to get help with your podcast,
go to podcast dancers.com slash contact or podcast dancers.com slash help out.
If I want someone to go to buy me a coffee and help me buy the new thing that I want
to buy or you're going to support the podcast or whatever, like I make it really super easy
or you know, go to podcast dancers.com slash boost and that will take you to the place.
It's super easy because people are going to remember your URL usually.
So they're going to remember podcast dancers.com slash and then whatever I want them to do,
like support or buy me a coffee or boost or whatever.
It makes it really easy because they can, it's really clear instructions on how they
can do it.
So if I want them to leave a review, I say go to podcast dancers.com slash review or
whatever because they can get to it really easily and remember it later.
The other thing you could do is you could put a QR code in your chapter art for a specific
chapter where you're making the call to action.
You can use chapters and during that call to action, bring up a QR code and then also
chapters also allow you to do links to things.
And so you could have a link to that specific place.
But if someone's not using that, an app that has a chapter link in it, the great thing is
you could use chapter art, then people can easily take a screenshot of that, save that
to their device and then go back later and easily get down to, you know, get to the URL
that you want them to go.
So another thing that I would say is you need to rotate your calls to actions, keep them
fresh and varied.
You don't want to have the same thing over and over and over and over and over again.
Now it is good.
Repetition is good.
It is okay to have repeated ones because it takes several times for people to actually
listen in here and get that into their system and go, Oh yeah, I do want to actually support
podcast dancers by going to podcast dancers.com slash buy me a coffee, which is my buy me a
coffee if you guys want to support the show.
If you get any value out of this, you know, I would suggest going to do that.
So but I would, I would, I would vary them up a little bit because if it's the same thing
every time, you know, for the whole series of your podcast, you know, the whole season,
the whole, whatever it is, a hundred episodes, whatever you're doing, however many episodes
you're in, people are going to forget that they're going to tune out because they're
going to hear the same thing.
Just like in your favorite podcast, a lot of times if they have banter at the very beginning,
you're going to hit that 30 second, 30 second, 30 second until you get to the, to the actual
meat of the content or on the, on the flip side at the end of an episode, when you start
to hear that, that music come in, what do you do?
You know that it's going to end the same.
You know that they're going to say, this is the way you can contact me.
And so you tune out, you forward to the end, you finish your episode, you just don't do
that.
So call us to action.
You want to vary them where they're at in your episode.
And you also want to vary the calls to action that you're doing.
So it's not the same thing every time and people are, don't just get used to it and
tune it out.
And the last thing that you can do is you can provide incentives for taking a specific
desired action.
And this could, you know, be exclusive content like for buy me a coffee or discounts or access
to special events or incentives that can motivate your audience to ask to act.
And that's good for some things.
I mean, you know, that's what it works.
That's why people do contests because when you incentivize people to do something, they're
more likely to do it.
So I know for me, when I get survey things in my email saying fill out the survey, if
the survey is just a survey, I'm 99.9% of the time I'm not going to do that survey.
But if that survey says, Hey, fill out the survey and I'll give you $25 Amazon gift card
or $50 or $100 Amazon gift card, you better believe it.
I'm opening that survey link right now.
I'm going out there right now and I'm going to take that survey and be looking in my email
box for that, for that reward.
So you can definitely incentivize people to do that.
Do you have a call to action on your podcast?
If not, why not?
Because your episode is there.
Yes, it's there to get people get the information out there, but it's also there and you can
use your platform to invite people to do things, to take action.
So for instance, I'm going to invite you now to go out to podcastanswers.com slash buy
me a coffee.
And if you get any value out of this show, I would recommend you go out and go out and
support us by becoming a monthly buy me a coffee supporter or a one-off supporter, whatever
you find value in this show.
I ask that you go out and give that value back to me as a way to thank me.
But it also allows me to make this show even better for you.
So guys, thanks for subscribing.
Thanks for being a part of this show.
Thanks for watching and just thanks for being an awesome member of this community, guys.
For that, have a great week.
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