When the Pitch Overpowers the Point

We get it. That blog post or article was written for one purpose — to nudge us along the buyer’s journey. They want us to click the link, or call them, or sign up for their ebook. 

Of course they do. We’re not naive enough to believe that all that content was created without an agenda. 

The issue isn’t that there’s a pitch, but how heavy-handed CTAs often undermine the value of the content itself:

• Ads, forms, and autoplay videos that make it difficult to actually read the article.
• Text that constantly shifts up and down to accommodate the next pop-up in the sequence. 
• A general lack of empathy for the reader’s experience. “They’ll never be back, so we better get what we can from them while they’re here.”

Blunt force interruption tactics may increase clickthroughs, but they do so at the cost of the content’s real value and purpose. They diminish reader engagement to a metric — a click — rather than the beginning of a long-term relationship built on trust and generosity.