How to Create and Add Gated Content to Your Wp Website
Why gated content?
There are many reasons why gating your posts is a great idea. Let’s take a look at some of these reason and you’ll see why gating your posts is a big plus:
Drives more signups
Gated content can boost registrations on your web site. This is possible if the content is of good quality and something that users are looking for. Furthermore, you need to ensure the process of accessing the gated content is straightforward and simple to follow. Otherwise, you will end up discouraging potential members. So, strive to eliminate any form of complexity that may exist. When you do that, gated content can turn out to be extremely valuable in helping to build your list and grow your business.
Generate leads
Such as, you can leverage gated content to capture info from visitors for lead generation, building relationships, and so on. Once you’ve that essential information from your lead, you can nurture them into paying clients. Basically, if everything is implemented accordingly, you are able to count on gated content to take your brand to the next level.
The downside of gating content
Some people feel that gating content is a bad thing. So why? Mainly it’s because by putting all your articles under a lock it’ll negatively affect your Search engine optimization. The robots used to crawl & index pages won’t be able to fill out the form needed to access the gated content. This automatically means that they’ll not index your pages correctly.
Additionally, you’re also likely to put off some visitors and especially new visitors by gating your articles. It is because new readers may feel insecure about sharing their information, yet they’ve little information about you and your business. The best approach to winning the trust of new visitors is by unlocking your posts. Unless you aim to have a private community, consider not locking all of your content.
Again, note that gating your articles behind long surveys and other gates that require a lot of commitment isn’t a good idea. For most visitors, if passing through all those gates is time-consuming, then accessing your posts isn’t worth it at all. That isn’t something you want to happen.
So, what’s the best approach?
Using gated content sparingly is the best approach. Quite simply, know what content to gate and what content to unlock. When you do that, and you use both content types wisely, there isn’t any doubt your efforts will soon pay off. Here’s HubSpot flow chart to help you decide if you should gate your content or not:
Gate content workflow
Image Source HubSpot
Adding gated content to your WordPress website
Have a Wp site? Great! Now let’s see how you can add gated articles and get the most return. We’ll go through this together, step-by-step.
1. Build your website following
Growing your audience to the right size isn’t a simple task. It’s a journey that requires perseverance from the beginning. However, there are tried and tested methods for growing your audience, such as:
Being active on social media
Focusing on SEO to increase organic traffic
Publishing new content often
Leveraging e-mail marketing to build a list of subscribers & staying in touch with them
2. Decide what your gated content will include
Once you’ve a sizeable audience, the next thing is to prepare the right content. And not simply any content, but content that will lure target visitors to cross the gates you’ve in place. So, what content works best? Gated content that works best for your site depends on what your focus is. Below are examples of gated content that get the job done:
Free e-books
Premium services
Access to free tools and resources
Exclusive posts and also tutorials
Note: Once you’ve decided which content is suitable for your site, then make sure you plan to publish often in its place. Otherwise, your efforts won’t pay off.
3. Use a plugin to restrict access to the gated content
When it comes to selecting plugins, you have a lot of options to consider.
Restrict User Access plugin
The Restrict User Access plugin enables you to grant access to specific pages, categories, or posts to different members. Once the plugin is active, your customers can use it to access different gated content.
Paid Member Subscription plugins come in handy when you want to implement a paid membership system that restricts access to part of your website.
Now, if you opt to grant unrestricted access, for example, when offering free e-books to your e-mail subscribers, then consider using an e-mail platform like MailChimp. Such an e-mail platform will help in generating signup forms that you can add to your website. Go even a step further and setup a welcome e-mail campaign for new subscribers. This way, it will be simpler to share your e-books with anybody who joins.
4. Hide your gated content from search engines like google
Your next task is to make sure gated content is entirely unknown to search engines. Otherwise, unauthorized visitors will have access to that content. The simplest way to do this is to edit your robots.txt file to avoid search engines from indexing specific files. You can use tools like Yoast to hide your gated content, or you can do it manually. Using Yoast simplifies the entire process.
