Making it obvious

One piece of advice I'll give is not to be too creative when designing a CTA because it remains a button, and people are used to it. As users have become accustomed to the online experience, they know that CTAs come in the forms of buttons. They see a button; they know what to do. Simple. Make it big, obvious, and stand out from everything around it, and it's in the bag.

Here's an example of a bad CTA:

The area pointed by the arrows are buttons, yes I'm serious, you can click on it. That's why you should keep the CTA as buttons and not as other forms and especially not similar to the content or title.