You’ve got over the initial problems. Some were expected, others were almost unique, but you are now starting to trade. The number of unique visitors to your website increases steadily, having doubled over the last month. A veritable success story.
Or so it seems until you realise that sales are low and your email marketing list is not increasing at anything like the rate you need to make a profit. You wonder what you are doing wrong.
The answer is probably very little. Visitors will help with search engine optimisation (SEO) but that alone is not enough. You need leads, and you’d prefer them quickly. One option is to consider gated content.
Gated here means content that is not available to the casual browser. In return for their personal information customers gain access to premium content; a lead in the jargon. However, putting material behind a wall has a number of negatives. Firstly, you will not get so many links and they are one of the major factors in Google rankings.
The content needs to be something that is a reward for all the customers’ efforts and one way or another such copy costs. Further, you will limit the number of people who get to read your content and that will probably result in fewer customers returning.
On the positive side you will get information on potential customers. Yours sales person/team will have information that will give them an opening. On top of that there are assumptions you can make on that person. If they willingly gave their personal information for a download of an ebook on a specific subject, you already know something of their interests.
Email marketing is a series of balances. If you want more leads, and hopefully subscribers to your email marketing list, then gated content has distinct advantages over free access. If you want more visitors to your website then any restriction will result in fewer of them.
Whichever option you pick, it will be a compromise, or to put it another way, ask which will cost you less for each result. Test the response to one gated item and go from there.
