Content Lockers
To use a content locker
Or
Not to use a content locker
That is the question.
What is a Content Locker
A content locker is a method of locking your content either behind a paywall, an email wall or password protection. It’s a common practice to grow an email list, “submit your email list to check out cheat sheet”.
Why us a Content Locker
The main reason is that you may consider that your content is too high value to be given away for free, and this is a valid reason to content lock on your website.
Should I content lock?
Before you decide to do this, there are a few things that you need to consider first.
SEO Effects
Ok first up Google and other search engines can not crawl your content-locked or password protected articles. So the more content that you have locked the less likely it will be to get your content / website ranked in search results. You have to ask yourself is the offer/copy strong enough to prompt the visitor to type in their email.
I think if you lock some of it, but leave other strong articles unlocked, and if there is real perceived value you can pull it off, especially if the info address serious day-to-day issues workers/managers experience. They want solutions fast. If you can convince them that you have those solutions hidden in your “vault” they’ll ask for the key… but that’s easier said then done.
Psychology
Psychology is always, always a big deal for me, right up there with the strategy element.
Putting good content behind a paywall or a registration adds an extra ‘leap of faith’ that the content behind that gate is as good as you say, when naturally you have every reason and likelihood of saying it is great even if it isn’t. It 100% *will* reduce the number of people that ever take the leap and see that content by some margin, and usually a much higher margin than we’d like. To get an email address that they may blacklist you on if you send them anything *they* decide is unwanted or spammy.
Not only are you giving up views of the content to get that questionable email address, you’re giving up the ability for people to link to the content (people are somewhat less likely to read an article that requires signing up for spam, but they are MASSIVELY less likely to link to content that is behind a wall).
Plus, psychologically it says that you having good content is a scarce thing you have to apply a value to.
The extra friction this step creates will turn many people away.
“What does the marketing and SEO community say?
I ran a poll recently to ask the question:
Here are the results:
So it’s clear that the SEO / Marketing community agree to a very high extent that locking content could have negative effects on your marketing and SEO efforts, how ever locking content that is very high value is a good idea.
What if you don’t use Content locks?
There are still ways to build your email list. Putting a sign-up to our mail list section in between paragraphs will help in growing and nurturing your list. Putting this same prompt on other pages will also help.
You want to lock your content anyways?
The plug-in I would use is Bloom and this is only because I have tested this out, and plus when it comes to WordPress page builders I use Divi. Bloom is a plugin made by Divi, it’s standalone and also comes as standard when you buy a license of Divi.
