Shock and Awe Marketing Tutorials in Plain English

A real estate blog or website without well crafted and placed calls to action will simply fail. A call to action is simply that single offer on your page that gets your visitors to convert from a casual reader into a contact by clicking on and filling out one of your lead generation forms.

BONUS: RSS Pieces and 1ParkPlace have teamed up to provide you with complete sets of high quality, graphically relevant and SEOed call to action buttons you can use for free on your real estate blog or website. Each button is already SEOed with high quality, universal, real estate related "alt" and "title" descriptive text- all you do is copy and paste these buttons to your site and add the link to your lead gens!

See our real estate button sets here.

Sample:

What makes a good real estate call to action?

1. Invaluable Offer. The call to action HAS to offer some value to the visitor. That means that you must have lead generators connected to tools that truly have some function that is critical to the user experience. So what types of tools are critical to your real estate visitors?

Read also: How to generate leads from your real estate blog: we have proof

2. Compelling Copy. Just like in a headline, be explicit in your offer not implicit. This means you need to explicitly spell out what the benefit will be and answer the question "WIFM" (What's In It For Me?).  Below are compelling ways to improve your call to action copy to more explicitly state the purpose of clicking the button.

Read also: How to write compelling copy for your real estate blog

3. Image association. One of the most overlooked web design rules for consumer conversion is that graphical links are 10 times more likely to be clicked than textual links, so your calls to action MUST use images and preferably look like clickable buttons with some related imagery on them.

Read also: Generate 100+ more quality leads from your real estate blog next month

4. Location. You need to make sure that the call to action is obvious and easy to find on every single page of your site. Typically, your call to actions ought to be placed towards the top of your site and visible on EVERY single page on your site. Try to avoid placing them in the sidebar.

Sample: See how Kaye Thomas of the Manhattan Beach Real Estate Blog has all her lead generators placed visibly at the top of her blog?

5. Order: Your calls to action should not only be grouped together but also placed in order of importance so you can pull through the most clicks and people's eyes are immediately directed to your most valuable tool. Act as a guide to your visitors by designing your site in the more intuitive and easy way.  Making a site "Google" simple is the key to creating a comfortable and effortless user experience.  And when the experinece is good for the user, it ill be good for you in terms of leads and business.

Example:

If you get 100 leads this month and

• 50 are through your search form - 50% of all contacts use the search conversion form
• 25 are through your CMA form - 25% of all contacts use the CMA form
• 10 are through your contact form - 10% of all contacts use the contact form
• 10 are through your market report form - 10% of all contacts use the market report form
• 5 are through a special offer form - 5% of all contacts use the special offer form

This should tell you that your call to action buttons should be placed in the following order: search, CMA, contact, market report, special offer.

TIP: You can track this metric by using VisiStat's Touch Mapping heat map tool which will show you what area of your site get clicked the most. VisiStat's Touch Mapping overlay report is one of the fastest, most accurate ways to see exactly what links, products and information your visitors are interested in.