Podcasters, speakers & entrepreneurs: If you’re tired of people listening but not buying — you’re not alone. Your Call To Action (CTA) might be the problem. In this powerful episode, Kev Michael breaks down why most CTAs don’t work — and how to fix yours fast. You’ll discover when to deliver your CTA, what type to use, and how to frame it so your audience actually wants to take action.
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👇 Scroll down for the full, timestamped transcript from Kev Michael — and get ready to finally see your audience click, buy, and join you on the path to podcast-powered profits.
CHAPTERS:
00:00 – The Frustration: Why Nobody's Buying
01:01 – The Real Reason: Weak CTAs
01:42 – The 3 CTA Timings: Pre, Mid, and Post-Roll
02:30 – Engagement vs Offer CTAs
05:22 – 3 CTAs: Engagement, Product, Lead Magnet
09:41 – What To Call To Action
13:05 – How Do You Make Your Calls to Action - Pain Vision Solution (PVS)
17:02 – Pain Vision Solution - EXAMPLE
19:25 – CTA – RECAP
19:42 – 6 Rapid Fire Pro Tips
23:31 – Homework
[00:00]
🎙️ The Frustration: Why Nobody’s Buying
Nobody's clicking your links. Nobody's downloading your lead magnet. Nobody's booking your calls. And despite your best efforts, your long form content is basically a passive experience because nobody's buying your stuff. Why?
Well, it's because your calls to action are not calling anybody to act. But imagine this, every time you drop a new episode of your podcast or to your YouTube channel, your audience not only knows exactly what to do next, they want to do it. They're booking calls. They're registering for the webinar. They're downloading your lead magnet in mass.
All because your CTA was crystal clear, perfectly timed, and impossible to resist. That's what I wanna teach you how to do. My name is Kevin Michael, and I'm your chief audience officer. My goal is to help you build an audience of buyers so that you can live that online business owner life you've been dreaming of. You know, the fun parts.
Now over the past five years, I've generated several million dollars from my own audience and I've helped more than 500 entrepreneurs grow their podcasts so that they can have audience driven businesses.
[01:01]
🔥 The Real Reason: Weak CTAs
And what I found is that the biggest gap between somebody who's publishing content and not making money and somebody who makes sales every time that they publish content is the CTAs.
First, I'm gonna be talking about when within your long form content, it's best to make calls to action. Then I'm gonna talk about the three different types of CTA you can make, and when you should make each type depending on what your goals are. And then finally, I'm gonna walk through how to make a call to action so that it is irresistible to the person who hears it.
They're gonna actually want to take the action right then and there. And then at the end, I'm gonna share six rapid fire pro tips to get the most out of your CTAs.
[01:42]
💡 The 3 CTA Timings: Pre-Roll, Mid-Roll & Post-Roll
Okay. So the first thing that we wanna talk about is when to CTA. Now I'm gonna use three terms that actually come from the podcast world because my background is in audio podcasting.
And in the podcast world, there's three types of call to action. There's pre roll, mid roll, and post roll. I don't really know if they use those in the YouTube world, but I think it's really useful. So I'm gonna use them here. A pre roll call to action is when you make a call to action before the content even starts.
So if you've ever turned on a podcast episode and immediately it said, “Hey, Kevin here. Before we get started, I want you to know that I'm throwing an event next week.” That's a pre roll call to action. The mid roll call to action is the one that we're most familiar with where it's like, “We'll be right back to the show. But first, let me tell you about x y z.”
And then post roll is when there's a call to action at the end of the episode, after the content has finished, when the credits roll, and it's like, “Hey, you should do this thing next.”
[02:30]
💡 Engagement vs Offer CTAs
Now if our goal is to build an audience of buyers, there's really two things that we want the people in our audience to do. We either want them to buy our stuff or we want them to engage with us further, consume more of our content, leave a comment, subscribe, share with a friend. I call all of those engagement CTAs. So there's two types of CTAs.
There's offer CTAs and there's engagement CTAs. An engagement CTA is when you're asking them to do something to engage with you, like follow or like or subscribe or comment or even rate and review if they're on Apple podcasts. The other kind of CTA, which is probably the one that you're not doing enough of, is the offer CTA. The offer CTA is when you make a CTA that's somehow related to your offer.
Now within an offer CTA, there's two different types of CTAs. And I'm gonna use classic marketing language here to describe the two types of offer CTAs. And then I'll also kind of translate them to a little bit more plain English. So there's two types of offers in marketing. There's a direct offer and there's an indirect offer. A direct offer is when there's no bones about it and you're just like, “Hey, I have this thing that you might wanna buy. You should consider buying it.”
An indirect offer is when you start making a call to action and you're not really offering them to buy at that moment. It might offer some information or it might entertain people before it makes the offer or it might tell a story or something like that. And the best example of this is like a master class or a webinar. So if you've ever attended a master class or a webinar where it's like, “Hey, come and learn the four steps on how to grow a podcast. And you go and you learn the four steps, and at the end it's like, oh, if you want more, you should buy my thing on how to grow a podcast.”
That's indirect marketing, where you get people in the door not because they wanna buy your thing, because they want something else. You give them the something else, and then you offer them to buy your thing. A direct offer is just, “Hey, do you wanna buy my thing?” And then they buy the thing.
So within the two types of CTAs, there's direct CTAs and there's indirect CTAs. I'm gonna use different words to describe these. And so for the direct CTA, I'm gonna call that a product CTA. So a product CTA in the middle of your long form content is when you are making a CTA to a product. The next step is usually going to be to book a sales call or attend a webinar, go to a sales page, or maybe apply to speak with you, something like that.
But you're really, you're basically asking them to enter your sales process. I'm gonna call an indirect CTA, a lead magnet CTA because in almost all cases on your long form content, an indirect CTA is going to be to a lead magnet. So that's when you offer a PDF, it's when you ask them to get on your newsletter, you might offer them a free master class, a free trial, a discount, whatever it is that you are offering this person for free in exchange for their contact information, that is a lead magnet, that is an indirect CTA. And so those are the two types of CTA's you can make in your long form content in order to get people to eventually enter your sales process and become buyers.
[05:22]
💡 3 CTAs: Engagement, Product, Lead Magnet
So we've got three types of CTAs that you can make in your long form.
There's engagement CTAs, product CTAs, and there's lead magnet CTAs. So when do you want to make your CTAs within your content? Well, first of all, I almost never recommend making a pre roll CTA. And this is what a lot of beginners do. Especially if you tune into their podcast, they're like, “Hello and welcome to the fitness podcast. Be sure to go to our website and check out what we can.”
Oh, God. No. Please don't do that. People are just gonna turn off your show so freaking fast. The only situation where I generally recommend making a pre roll CTA is if you're doing something that's time contained, like maybe a big launch, or maybe there's an event coming up, or something that's deadline focused, where you are okay with the fact that making this CTA is going to damage the performance of this content.
Because that's why I recommend almost never doing it. Because when you make a CTA at the very beginning, it destroys your retention rates. People turn it off immediately. Because remember, if your audience is growing every week, that means that every single piece of content that you put out is somebody's first content of yours that they consume. So that means that for some people, if you have a pre roll CTA, they're gonna press play and immediately it's gonna be you saying, “Hey, do you want this other thing? Give me your email. Book a call with me.”
And they're like, I don't even know this person. Get out of here. They don't trust you enough yet. So you want to use pre roll CTAs very sparingly.
Next up is mid roll CTAs. Mid roll CTAs, I generally recommend almost always. Sometimes I don't have a mid roll CTA, quite frankly. Sometimes because I don't have my stuff together and we didn't add one in because I needed to get the episode out quickly.
But really, ideally, there is a mid roll CTA in every piece of long form content that I put out because what I have found for myself and for the 500 plus other entrepreneurs that I've worked with over the years is that the number one way to get the people who consume your long form content to take action is in the middle of that content to tell them to take action. Full stop. If you take away the mid roll CTAs, you take away the action. But why mid roll? Why not wait till the end?
Well, if you do what I recommend earlier and you look at your completion rates on Apple Podcasts or Spotify or your retention rates on YouTube, you'll see that the end of the episode is the part that the least amount of people will see or hear. And if you've never looked at your completion rates or your retention rates, we're gonna talk about that sometime soon because that is, in my opinion, the vital sign of long form content of a podcast or a YouTube channel. But just to illustrate the fact that we don't expect people to stick around for the whole episode on audio, the KPI for completion rate is 65%. Meaning, if on average, your podcast listeners listen to only 65% of your podcast episodes, that means you're killing it. That means that you're doing really well.
If it's only 75%, you're kinda killing it. It's even more pronounced on YouTube, where if you have like a 30% retention rate on your videos, that's really good. So because of that, if we want the people to consume our content to actually hear our calls to action, we need to put them earlier within the content. So the rule of thumb that we use in the podcast world is the middle third. You wanna have your CTAs within the middle third of the content, not quite in the first third because that's a little too early.
And in the third third, that's gonna have the least amount of people who hear it. So you've kind of waited too long to make the ask. The middle third is the best place to do it. On audio, I like to put it right in the middle. On video, it's actually a little bit earlier in the middle third because like we said before, most people only watch like 25 to 35% on average of videos anyway.
So if your goal is to get people to buy, you wanna have your product CTAs or your lead magnet CTAs in the middle third. And I'll talk in a minute about what that should sound like.
The third type of CTA is the post roll CTA. That's the CTA that happens at the end. That's where I have found it's best to put engagement CTA's.
So on YouTube, that's like an end screen that says, “Watch this video next, like and subscribe,” those types of things. And in your podcast, it can be an offer CTA or it could be an engagement CTA. If it's an engagement CTA, I recommend asking them to rate or review. “Hey, if you got any value from this podcast, be sure to leave a rating.”
Ratings help with the credibility of your show, particularly on Apple Podcasts. Okay. So we just talked about when to make your calls to action. And I also kinda already talked about what the calls to action are. There's engagement, there's product, and there's lead magnet.
[09:41]
💡 What To Call To Action
But let's talk a little bit more about what to call to action before we talk about how to make those call to actions in a way that's irresistible. And please stop what you're doing, pay close attention, and listen to me now. If you take away anything from this episode about how to make great calls to action, it is this, select one action.
It is call to action, not calls to actions. The biggest mistake that I see is people make multiple calls to action at the same time, and they don't call an action.
What do I mean by that? Well, when the time comes for you to construct your call to action, for you to select, what is the action that I want my audience to take at this moment in time?
Select your action, and that action must be a verb. What is the verb that you want this audience to do? If you are making a product call to action, the action that you want them to take is not buy.
Because think about it. When someone's consuming your long form content and they're driving, right, and they have your they have your podcast episode on in the car, or maybe they're out for a run, or maybe they're doing chores around their house, and they're twenty five minutes into your episode about whatever it is that you make content about. Are you asking them right then and there to pull out their credit card and buy your thing? No. They have to do other stuff first.
They can't do that even if they wanted to. So the biggest mistake that I hear is people make their calls to action and it winds up being like a little mini sales pitch for their product or their service, and they sell the product or the service.
There's two problems with that. Number one, you don't wanna sell the product or the service in your call to action. You wanna do that in the sales call or in the webinar or whatever your sales process is.
That's when you sell the product or the service. In the call to action, you must sell the action. And the action needs to be one singular verb, and it should be the next step in the sales process. So if you want people to attend a webinar and buy your course, you're selling them to register. Register is the verb.
If you have an application funnel, you want them to apply. If you have a consultation or a call funnel, you want them to schedule. You want them to book a call. If you have an event, you're not even asking them to attend the event because they're in the squat rack. They can't attend your event right now.
But what they can do is put the barbell down and register for the challenge. The same thing is true for a lead magnet CTA. If you are trying to get them to read a book in the middle of your episode, they can't read the book. They don't have the book yet. They're watching your video.
They can't read your book. What they can do is purchase the book. They can order the book. They can download the PDF. Do you see what I'm getting at here?
So the number one thing you can do to get more out of your calls to action is to pick one action. And again, just to emphasize the point, you only want to CTA one thing at a time. So if you're one of those people that says, “Alright, thanks for listening to the show. Be sure to go to our website and see what we have available and follow us on Instagram and Twitter and find us on YouTube and write into us” like you're giving them 800 different actions and they're not gonna take any of them.
Okay. So we've established when to make your calls to action. We've established what to make your calls to action for.
[13:05]
💡 How Do You Make Your Calls to Action - Pain Vision Solution (PVS)
Now the big question is, how do you make your calls to action? Well, for this, I'm going to dip into a copywriting framework that you might have heard before.
And if you've heard of it already, awesome. That means you have experience with it. Use it. If you haven't heard of this framework, I'm excited for you because this might change the way that you market your business. The framework is called Pain Vision Solution or PVS for short.
Another version of this is Pain Agitate Solution. What that basically means is whenever you want people to do something, you first articulate the pain that they are in right now. Then you craft the vision of what their life is like for when they're not in that pain, and then you present them the solution to that pain. And ideally, the solution is the thing that you're selling. I guarantee you've seen this before.
If you ever watch television in the eighties, nineties, 2000’s, heck, even today, you're not gonna be able to unsee this. Think about all the commercials that we saw growing up, like Life Alert. Right? The commercial starts black and white and there's an old person, “Help. I've fallen and I can't get up.”
Pain. And then in that case, it's usually an agitate where it's like, “Do you want your grandma to be lying on the floor writhing in pain?” Agitate. Right? You twist the knife.
You're like, “No. I don't want that.” Well, what if instead they had something to get the help that they need immediately and then the black and white turns to color and there's grandma all happy, not in pain? Introducing life alert solution - Pain Agitate Vision Solution. Next time you watch cable TV, I guarantee you you're gonna see some Pain Vision Solution commercials.
It is tried and true. And by the way, I use Pain Vision Solution for the intro of almost every episode of my podcasts that I put out. Here's how this relates to calls to action though. The action, that singular verb that you picked earlier is the solution. So what I'm gonna do now is I'm gonna walk you through Pain Vision Solution for a lead magnet of mine.
I have a lead magnet that's called the twelve days of podcast growth. It is an email course. It is my best performing lead magnet of all time. Basically, it's a twelve day email course where every day, it's one email lesson that teaches you what needs to happen in order for you to grow and monetize your podcast. And that is a lead magnet CTA.
It is an indirect CTA. So when you take the email course, there will be little CTAs throughout the email course to book a call with me if you want my help with this. But the email course itself is educational, and you will opt in to that email course because you want what the email course has to offer. And if you wanna book a call with me, you can. And if you don't, you can ignore those little CTAs.
But here's how I would Pain Vision Solution my way into CTAing you to download my email course. Have you been publishing podcast episodes for months, maybe even years, and your audience hasn't grown at all? Are you fighting the urge to give up on your podcast, but you just haven't given up yet because you don't wanna be one of those countless other people who gave up on their dreams? Agitate. Well, what if instead you knew exactly why your podcast wasn't growing and you knew exactly what to do to get it growing again?
Vision. Well, that's exactly why I created the twelve days of podcast growth solution. It is a lightweight twelve day email course that is gonna walk you through the basics of making, growing, and monetizing an amazing podcast. If that sounds interesting to you, sign up to get the course in your inbox by going to 12daysofpodcastgrowth.com. That's one two days of podcastgrowth.com.
The first lesson will be in your inbox instantly so that you can finally start to see your podcast audience grow. That was Pain Vision Solution. The action was sign up for the email course, not read, not buy my stuff, sign up. So that's how I would use Pain Vision Solution for a lead magnet CTA. If I were doing a direct CTA, a product CTA, I would be CTAing a consultation call with me.
So my program is called the Grow the Show Accelerator. So watch how I call out the pain, I paint a vision, and then I share the solution, which is booking a call with me.
[17:02]
💡 Pain Vision Solution - EXAMPLE
Are you a business owner who's publishing a podcast to try to grow your audience in your business, but you're kind of embarrassed by how little people are listening to your show? Pain. And all this time you've been plowing your time, your team's time, and company resources into a show.
And all the while, you're starting to doubt whether you'll ever get any ROI. Agitate. Let me ask you this. What if you could finally get clarity on why the heck nobody's listening to your podcast and what you and your team need to do in order to finally get the audience growth and conversions that you are looking for from your audience? Vision.
My name is Kevin Michael. Over the past five years, I've directly helped more than 500 entrepreneurs to grow their podcast and get their podcast listeners to buy their stuff. And I can tell you that I have identified the patterns that lead to podcast stagnation. And after having more than 1,000 consultation calls with different business owners, I will be able to tell you within ten minutes why your show isn't growing and what exactly you need to do to fix it and get it growing quickly. And so if that sounds good to you, go ahead and click the link in the description and book a Grow the Show call with me.
I'll ask you some questions about your podcast and your goals, and I'm gonna tell you exactly what I see. You're gonna leave the call with clarity on what you're doing wrong, why your audience isn't growing, and what you have to do to finally see the results that you've been starting to wonder will never come. Solution. All you have to do is go to growtheshow.com/call or click the link in the description, select a time. And if you qualify, you and I will get together and I will provide the clarity that you need. Once again, that's growtheshow.com/call. The link is in the description.
Okay. So I'm not gonna drop in CTAs because I just gave you my CTAs. And if those things sound good, the links are actually in the description.
But hopefully, it was valuable for you to hear me go through Pain Vision Solution. Note again that I gave you an action for the email course. It was access the course. Sign up for it. For the call, it was book.
It was not buy my program. I didn't sell you on what you get in the program, like a full podcast and marketing audit from me or weekly feedback on everything that you publish or any of those amazing things. I didn't say that in the CTA. I CTA'd the call, and I sold the call. You want to sell the next step in the process, not the final step.
[19:25]
💡 CTA - RECAP
So remember, what is the one verb that you want your audience to do? Get clear on that. Sell that one verb, and then put that in the middle of your content. And don't skip it. Don't be scared.
You made all this effort to create this content. The people who want what you have to offer will be glad that you invited them to take you up on it. Okay.
[19:42]
💡 6 Rapid Fire Pro Tips
Pro tip number one, make your CTA something that they actually want to do. And if I'm being honest, I don't know how many more consultation calls people want to get on. So I've been thinking for myself, what's something else that I can offer people that they actually want that can get them through my sales process. So stay tuned on that. People don't want to take a course. You gotta make your call to action either something that they want to do, or you have to make it really clear that they're gonna get something that they want if they do that thing.
This is where people slip up on the direct product CTAs, where they're just like, “Go to our website and see what we have to offer. Buy our stuff, buy our stuff.” Nobody wants to buy your stuff. They actually really don't want to buy your stuff. What they want is what'll happen after they buy your stuff.
Same thing. Nobody wants to read a PDF. Nobody wants to read a book. What they do wanna do is learn how to get a six pack. See what I'm saying?
So that's number one. It's gotta be something that they want to do or at least want the benefit of.
Number two, don't assume that people know how to do what you're asking them to do. I see this a lot when people are like, “Go to our website and book a call.” And you go to their website and I'm like, - how the heck do I book a call? I'm like, oh, you gotta go to contact and then click on my name and then scroll down and my calendar comes up. I'm like, how do you expect anybody to know that?
That leads us to our next one, make it really easy for them to do the thing. So if you go back and listen to my CTAs, you'll hear I made easy to remember URLs. I put the link at the top of the descriptions.
So if you are listening on audio, it's gonna be right at the top of the show notes. If you're on YouTube, it's gonna be above the fold, above the more button. There's gonna be a big old link that says, “Book a call with Kevin here.” What you don't wanna do is make it really difficult and confusing for them to take that action. Action.
It's gotta be easy. Very simple. Click the link in the show notes. Go to this easy URL. The harder you make it, the less likely it is they're gonna do it.
The next pro tip I accidentally already spoiled, which is if you're afraid, look at your completion rates and see that nobody cares if you make a call to action. They might skip it, and that's fine.
The next bonus is frame it as an invitation. I gave this one away too. Alright.
I'll add a seventh uber super extra pro tip bonus that you're really gonna love. This is the little hack that I wasn't gonna share, but I'll share it. Frame it as an invitation rather than a command or a demand. If you're simply inviting them to book a call,
Hey, if that sounds interesting to you, here's all you have to do.” It just comes across better.
Number six, make it clear what immediate benefit they will get for doing the thing. This is kind of the dark horse pro tip here. If you can make it clear how taking the action will help them today, you will get more actions. So that's probably something that I didn't do as well with booking a call.
But if I was CTA my master class, which is, you know, it's a ninety minute master class on how to grow and monetize a podcast, I would say, “Click the link in the show notes, get access to the master class, and you'll have a a full proof plan to grow your podcast in the next ninety minutes.” Oh. Sounds good. Right? So ask yourself, what benefit can they get today from taking this action?
And then finally, the super extra bonus pro tip. People often skip CTAs. All of the skip buttons are either fifteen seconds, ten seconds, or thirty seconds. So what I like to do if I'm feeling frisky is make my CTA one minute and seven seconds so that they skip, skip, skip, skip, skip, and then on the one minute mark, it lands on the call to action or it lands on something really interesting. Now, I don't always do this because I can sometimes feel like an idiot trying to, like, time my CTA to be exactly, like, one minute and seven seconds.
But there you go. A little pro tip. It's worked before, and I've noticed the difference that people skip, skip, skip, skip, skip, and then they hit the action. And it just says, “Hit the link in the show notes, and you'll get access to the best course ever.” And they're like, oh, wait.
Wait. Wait. And then they go back. So there you go. Your little dark course bonus because I kinda gave away some of the bonus pro tips earlier in the episode.
[23:31]
💡 Homework
Alright. That's gonna do it for this episode of Chief Audience Officer. Here's what I want you to do next. I want you to think about the last call to action that you made in your long form. Number one, did you make one?
Was it mid roll? If not, fix that. But was it clean? Was it concise? Did you use the Pain Vision Solution framework?
And did you call one singular action? If you didn't, you know what to do to convert your audience into buyers, which is the whole reason that you're here.
“My name is Kevin Michael. If you enjoyed this episode and you got value from it, please leave a comment if you're on YouTube or Spotify. Or if you're on Apple, click the link in the show notes to submit feedback and let me know that you found this valuable.”
And yes, I did make a couple of different calls to action there, but they were four different segments of the audience. So it's okay. These aren't rules. These are guidelines. Alright.
I'm Kev. I'll see you in the next one.
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