When we publish a new best practice guide (as we did yesterday), we typically put it up on Slideshare and make it available for free to anyone who finds it there, or finds it on our blog. We also take that guide, put it behind a registration page, and promote it to all of our blog readers via a sidebar.
Same content, available for free, in one place with just a click and another with your name and email address required.
But it gets better. Our Productivity Manifesto is available for free with just a click, for free with registration, AND for $2.99 as a Kindle single.
Are we crazy? Maybe, but there’s a method to this madness too.
If someone is following us on Slideshare or reading our blog posts regularly, I don’t think I need to ask them for registration. They’re already a follower, probably getting our newsletter, so I don’t want to increase the number of gates between them and our content.
For new blog readers (folks who find us via a Google search for a topic we’ve written about, or a retweet, or similar), they’re probably new to Heinz Marketing and our content. In that case, I think it’s fine to ask for light information in exchange for access to the content.
And on Amazon.com, our strategy adjusts again to the environment. Kindle Singles aren’t expensive to begin with, but we’ve had far more traction by charging $2.99 than when it was just a free download to the Kindle. Put a price tag on it, and there’s perceived value.
And of course, most of our best practice guides are aggregations of recent blog posts on a particular topic. So, if you use the search function and have a few minutes, you can get all of that content for free. Or you can get it in 15 seconds with a quick, free registration.
There are differences in value exchange that drive some of this, but also careful consideration of the context of the user, the relationship that likely already exists, and the benefit of adding or reducing barriers to access.
Lots of grey area here, of course, but it’s working (at least for us).
