Your WordPress site is equipped with the necessary tools to create an email list from new subscribers. You thought an email list would boost your marketing efforts and help turn casual visitors into paying customers. Yet it hasn’t produced the results you were expecting. Why is that?
Perhaps you are giving away the store. Maybe you are not providing enough of an incentive to get people to sign up. One way to fix the problem and simultaneously boost your email list is to engage in content locking. A well-developed content locking strategy can do wonders.
Two Ways to Lock Content
The simplest way to explain content locking is to say that it is a way of preventing people from gaining access to content without doing something first. That something might be paying for a subscription, buying a product, or even signing up for an email list.
Content can be locked in one of two ways:
- Full Locking – In WordPress, you can completely lock content by requiring users to sign in before they can see a particular page or post. Full locking is perceived by users to be a bit drastic, so we do not recommend it as the way to go in most cases.
- Partial Locking – The other option is to lock just certain portions of a piece of content. You might choose to allow the first two paragraphs but then lock everything thereafter. Alternatively, you might do something like lock the number one item of a top 10 list.
The easiest way to lock content in WordPress is to use a highly configurable plugin that lets you pick and choose. We suggest OptinMonster. It is one of the most utilized marketing plugins in the WordPress universe.
What OptinMonster Can Do
OptinMonster offers quite a few tools we will not discuss here. In terms of content locking, it makes controlling access to your content as simple as can be. Once you download and install the plugin, you will need to sign up for an account. Then you can start applying certain conditions to each piece of existing content.
You can lock just one or two portions of a piece of content. Alternatively, you can lock entire sections after a given point. You can even lock whole pages and posts. You can configure OptinMonster so that gaining access to locked content requires visitors to sign up for your email list.
Here’s the kicker: people willing to sign up do so because they are genuinely interested in the content they can’t see. This means you are generating qualified leads from website visitors making the active decision to do something in order to gain access. They are the best kinds of leads to have.
Content locking is a fantastic way to maximize your content to boost your email list. If you have a WordPress site with a languishing email list and a ton of free content, you might want to take a look at OptinMonster.