“Gated content” on websites has historically been a great way to build an email list. I’m sure you’ve done it — there’s a great PDF that interests you like “10 ways to prepare your lawn for the fall”, and it’s free if you just give over your email address. Generally speaking, it’s a win-win situation; you get great free content, the company offering it grows their email list a bit.
While it can still be an effective approach, the time is fading.
Sarah Threet at Heinz Marketing summed it up very well when she said:
“The supply of content is so high that there is significantly less of a need to download gated content when there is likely ungated content of equal value.”
While gating your content may get some subscribers, there’s a good chance that it’ll turn people away. You need to decide if you want to grow your list or if you want more people to read your content, because you can’t have it both ways. It’s similar to the challenge of going after pageviews or readers, which is an equally tough call to make.
It reminds me of our story of how we came to be a client of Blumer CPAs. As far as I can remember, they never offered any gated content — just free resources so that we could see what kinds of problems they can solve.
Perhaps if they had gated some content they could have gotten our info earlier and pushed harder, but there’s also a chance that the gate would have turned us away, and we’d have never grown to appreciate what they had to offer. Instead, we kept consuming all of their free content (which really was quite valuable in and of itself) and our trust for their company grew even without direct communication.
Gated content isn’t dead yet, and can work well in some circumstances, but more and more I encourage you to just give it away, show your skills, and be a leader, as that approach is likely to produce the best outcomes for you.
