Do you generate leads with the help of gated content? Are you sure that it works to the max? See how you can optimize your content to generate more quality leads.
Research the Theme Relevance
You may have a bunch of ideas for your future content. Or you may struggle to find subjects to write about, especially if your field is narrow. Anyhow, to create engaging content, you have to choose a relevant theme. And there are many ways to do it—if you try them, you won't have doubts on what to write about anymore:
- Use Ahrefs, a toolset for SEO and marketing running on big data. With the help of the Content Explorer feature, you can find the most popular content on any theme and see its relevance, referring domains, search traffic, and number of shares. It will help you decide how to explore your theme and learn what interests people in your field.
- Research Medium's Top Stories: Browse popular article tags to see what people are passionate about right now.
- Use Pocket's Explore feature to see how many times a blog post has been saved. It shows whether a lot of people find a topic or headline worth reading about. Don't forget Pocket's "Recommended" tab, where you can find the most-saved articles from around the web.
- Subscribe to your theme-oriented weekly curated newsletters to see what news and trends your colleagues talked about.
- Read niche forums, communities, Slack groups, and Quora. What questions are people asking? What problems do they discuss? Can you share your unique experience concerning these topics?
Invest in Good Design
You've probably seen many PDFs around the web that are too hard to read and work with. That's because they are not tailored for the web: you can print them, but you have to prepare them for digital use. By the way, if you don't know how to create PDFs, you can read our article about The Best PDF Creating Tools for Non-Designers. So, here's what you can do to make your PDFs look great:
- Brand your gated content: Add your logo, company name, and links to your website. Thus, your content will look more substantial and trustworthy.
- Keep to the basic principles of typography in the digital age. There are many useful guides to learn from, for example, 26 digital typography tips for the beginners. We are not going to tell you all about it, just some basics:
- Web paragraph text should be at least 13 px. 14–18 px is the most common choice—it's not too big and is comfortable to read.
- Try to keep your paragraph lines length between 45 to 75 characters. It can be hard to follow this rule, just try not to make your lines too short or too long.
- Don't use too many typefaces and colors. A common recommendation is to use a maximum of three different typefaces in a maximum of three different sizes and colors.
- To achieve a balanced setting in a block of text, white space between the lines should be about 150% of the x-height. The easier rule to apply is to set the line-height of 125% of text size.
- Add quotes to enliven your narration and create compelling calls to action so that people know what they can do next if they are interested in your content.
Don't Forget about SEO
When you decide to gate your content, search bots aren't able to come and read it. Still, there are several approaches that allow your content to be indexed and ranked:
- If you're new to SEO or want to refresh your knowledge, read Moz's guide to SEO — it's simple and useful.
- SEMrush allows you to find out what your audience is looking for by exploring the most popular search queries in your niche. Its tools give you good advice on what words to use in headlines and text, formats to choose, content length and meta title/ description structure. Choosing the right catchy and descriptive headline alone can skyrocket your conversion rates from search results.
- Landing or preview pages with forms usually provide a summary of the gated content. This means that they also provide a good opportunity to share this text with search bots for it to be indexed and ranked. This drives organic traffic to the page, and more people learn about it, allowing you to balance SEO and lead-generation goals.
- Pop-over gates: Many websites use the Javascript pop-over for everything from paywalls to ads. And you can also use it for lead-generation forms, so search robots can find and rank it. But don't overuse this approach; some people may find it too pushy.
Tailor Your Content to any Device
Keep in mind that people may read your content on a variety of devices, whether they're in the office working on their desktops or traveling with their tablets and smartphones. Put effort into testing and tailoring it for all devices and browsers.
If people give you their email addresses, they want your content to be user-friendly, professional-looking, and easy to access from any device. If you use FlippingBook Online or just make PDFs for generating leads, you can try to gate them with FlippingBook's lead capture form. It can help you optimize gated content in the following ways:
- It makes your content look beautiful and professional with branding, customizable design, easy-to-use table of contents, links, and calls to action.
- To improve your SEO, publications are indexed quickly because of FlippingBook's high website ranking. Even when you gate them with a lead capture form, people can come to them from organic search, and they will get even higher rankings. Just try it!
- Your content is comfortable to read on any device, and you can access it whenever you want.
To sum up, email is a valuable currency, and people should receive the content of the same value. Making your content exceptional can be hard work, but it's totally worth it! Optimize your content, and see how it gathers leads while you are enjoying a cup of coffee :)
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