Set Your Content Free

Your content is in jail. It had great potential, but something went wrong. Now, it is stuck behind a window with 6 to 10 horizontal gray steel bars. Your registration form.

This is the content you slaved over and chased your subject matter experts for weeks, even months, for. It clearly positions your solution as the leader in your quickly changing industry.

Now, it is stuck in jail. It is nearly impossible to discover through search. It is not tweeted or liked by anyone but you. It is missing its opportunity to reinforce your leadership message. And the days tick by, until one day your content is out of date, its jail term turned into a forgotten life sentence.

Your content was developed to support your position. Get it out of jail. Allow it to do what it was designed to do. When you do, here are just a few of the benefits you can expect to see:

• Your content will start to work for you, supporting your message rather than draining your marketing piggybank to get modest distribution.
• Your content will be sharable. No one wants to share content that’s stuck in jail. Even this blog, one of millions written by someone with no recognition, has more than 40 shares and likes in its first two weeks. With bars over the window, it would have five (from the author only).
• More people will see your content. In search, through peers, or simply because you stop losing 80% to 99% of traffic that does not get past the jail bars.
• You will be liberated to promote it in more ways. Use it as a source for blog posts. Post the key findings on your Facebook page. Use the information for what it was intended for, to support your message.

So free your content, let it start working for you. What about all of those lost leads? As a client once told me:

If you must have a registration form at all, keep it short. People aren’t willing to make up that much information for your content.

Will you set your content free?