A content gate — also know as a content lock — is a way of revealing a piece of content only after a website visitor gives you something to “unlock” that content. Examples of content gates:
- Enter Your Email Address to Download This Life-Changing Video
- Tweet This Page To Get This Amazing Free E-Book
Most of the time, you see content gates used to get email addresses. They are great link building tools, especially if you have a piece of great content that you want to share with the world & that your customers would find valuable.
Use the content gate to offer something great for free. It’s an invaluable lead generation technique because you are qualifying your leads at the very first step. If someone is interested enough in your content to give you their email address, then they’re probably going to be interested in other things your doing as well.
And you’re giving them something of value for free. That’s a great way to start a relationship. Be sure to nurture it by creating a campaign of follow up emails with related content or service offerings that would appeal to them.
If you’re using WordPress, I recommend the following content gate plugins:
- Thrive Leads
- New WordPress Plugin Builds Your Mailing List Faster than Ever Before!
- Bloom by Elegant Themes
- Gain More Email Subscribers with BLOOM, an Email Opt-In Plugin for WordPress.
- Membership 2 Pro by WMPU Dev
- Easily create a popular and profitable membership site with this powerful and scalable membership plugin for WordPress.
We’ve use several others over the years as well with varying degrees of success. The most important thing is the content & the strategy. Don’t get too bogged down by which plugin to use. That should really be dictated by your strategy & goals.
