As we know that there are several WordPress plugins around that will insert a call to action on the top of your posts. There are some people who, even do this manually. A few days ago when I was visiting some blogs that use this strategy, therefore I felt and realized that perhaps it is not that effective. And sometime in most cases they might even hurt the user experience. As most of the bloggers are new in world blogging and some have got some idea about the HTML, therefore, they are making different changes to their blogs and websites. They have no idea and thinking that what will peoples say and think about their blogs and websites, and as a result some of the visitors get bad experience from it.
Before proceeding let me clarify what I am talking about. The What Would Seth Godin Do plugin is a very good example of it. Once you upload and activate it on your blog or website, whenever a new visitor visit and comes to your website, he will be presented with a message on top of your page that will say something like this. Welcome! to My Blog!, it seems that you are new to this site. If you want to get regular updates you can signup to get email alerts or subscribe to the RSS feed.
Similarly Sociable is another similar plugin. It will basically identify if the visitor is coming from a specific social networking site, and it will present a tailored message to him. So if someone comes to your page from Stumble Upon, it will show him a message like this as given. Hello fellow StumbleUpon, if you like this page, don’t forget to give it a thumbs up! You can also see my StumbleUpon profile here.
I hope you will get some of the idea from the above examples. So why do I think the strategy of using those plugins and calls to action on top of your pages and posts is not efficient, and perhaps even a bad idea? Because their positioning is completely wrong. Therefore I suggest that they should be placed at the bottom of your posts and not on top of them.
Let me illustrate my argument with an example. Suppose I am browsing on Digg when I suddenly come across a story that grabs my attention: 11 Ways to Send Emails in the Future. The title of the story sounds interesting and I decide to click and see what it is all about. Once I click there, however, I will be presented with the following page:
Right below the title there is an AdSense unit (1). I am not against having ads, because I also placed AdSense ads on my HOT TALKS, but you also need to consider that this large rectangle is already taking space and making it harder for me to find the actual content I was looking for.
Then after the AdSense unit you will see the message from the What Would Seth Godin Go plugin (2). Basically this message is inviting me to subscribe to the blog or to check out the about page. I arrived here from Digg, and my main purpose is all about to check the content I was looking for. I am not sure if I want to subscribe to the blog yet. After I move on, and then I find yet another message that distracts me from the content itself (3). This one was coming from the Sociable plugin, and it was encouraging me to Digg the story. But still I haven’t even had the opportunity to read it yet, therefore, how could I digg it without knowing what the story is about? Similarly what the post is consist of.
As I hope that you will also agree with me in this case that, those calls to action are ineffective and even counter-productive if positioned on top of the posts. Sure it is a good idea to encourage visitors to subscribe to your RSS feed and to vote for your stories on social bookmarking sites, but you must make sure that this call to action will appear to the user when he has the right mindset on, and that is after he is done reading your content. As a rule of thumb, I try to put as few content as possible between my headlines and my posts. In fact I don’t even put the author name or date there. Thr main reason for this is to ensure that there will be no distractions from the moment I grab the attention of my visitor with a headline until the moment he actually starts reading the content.
If you put too many things between those two stages, you might lose a fraction of the visitors right there. As I have clarified my opinions obviously to you people, and I would like to hear what you guys think about the issue. Therefore, I will wait for your comments in both cases either you agree with me or not.