Why All My Content Is Ungated

David has seven reasons for removing all barriers on his website for readers and prospects to access what he writes - but admits that it may not be for everyone.

Transcript

Blair Enns: David, I like to feel like we do a pretty good public service here in this podcast, giving people advice on their business. This one is all about you, isn't it?

David C. Baker: [laughs] Yes.

Blair: This one is shit advice.

David: [chuckles]

Blair: This is your therapy. The title is why all my content is now ungated. Something's happened in your business, you've learned something you feel it makes sense to share with the listener. I'm sure it's really a big revelation. I'm sure it's super valuable, and we're all going to be--

David: Oh, man. [laughs] Oh, you're such a great introducer. I feel so respected and cherished at the moment.

Blair: Can we start by defining ungated? We all know what content is. What do you mean by ungated?

David: I just mean the content is fully indexable by Google, it's not behind a form. They don't index stuff behind a form. If I go to my website, and I want to read something, I just pop on the website and read it. I don't have to get permission to read the rest of it. There's no teasers. The whole thing is there.

Blair: Okay, so you're giving it all away for free, and you're not doing this trade that often happens, where it's like, give me your email address, so I can spam you for life, and then I'll let you read this piece of content or so I could call you and talk you into hiring me. Obviously, you would never do that. Clearly, you've come from this place where you used to gate content. Is that right? Do you want to talk a bit about the history?

David: Yes. There's going to be a lot of people probably not pissed off, but they're going to think, "Who is this Yahoo giving advice?" A lot of digital firms, their whole business model is built around gating content and then doing something with the information they collect. There's going to be some people, a little unsettled by this. I just think it's one of those crazy things that you just don't know why you do it. It's just instinctive. It's like in a sales process, your prospect will say, '" Wow, this looks great. Could it be some references we speak with?" Then you dive into that and say, "Oh, why do you all need references again?" You realize I'm going to give you all of my very best prepped with a script references.

It's not going to teach you anything. I think the same thing is true of gated content. We just assume that oh, yes, it's not a best practice to put everything up there. You need gating. Then that matches our experience too. Every day when we're on somebody's website, it's very seldom can you read something unless it's gated? I'm not saying I'm completely right. In fact, I know, this isn't good advice for a lot of firms, but I think it's something we ought to think about. My own experience with this was way too precious about my content. I thought the content was amazing.

I was like, "Well, this seems like a fair trade. I've just put half my life into writing this article, and you're telling me that you object to giving me your email address and something?" In fact, my website did have progressive profiling for a long time, where, okay, the first time I'm going to get your email address and your first name. Second time, I'm going to get the name of your city and how big your firm is. Then I'm going to get your title.

Blair: And the name of your dog.

David: Right. At the beginning, though, it just felt like okay, this is a fair trade. Then I also wanted to build all sorts of automated programs, or what HubSpot would call workflows to move people through the funnel. They've been here, okay, the next logical place is for them to go here. Then eventually, that will end in a sale of something. That was the second reason I was doing it. Then third was just a silly, I don't know, I just figured that, okay, this will keep my competitors from reading all this stuff, as if they couldn't create a Gmail address or something to read it anyway. Besides, I doubt there's any competitors who care what I think all that much anyway, so it was just a silly thing. About five years ago, I decided I didn't want to go back and ungate everything. I just thought, "Okay, moving forward, I'm just going to not gate new things.

This wasn't just on the website. It was also in the email. I write an article, and I send the article out in an email to all the people that are on the list, and it's the whole article. In other words, they can read it online, if that's easier for them, but I don't make them click that read it online in order to get the rest of it. The whole thing is in the email. If there's an organic search result, and they go to the website directly without getting an email, they could read the whole thing. Well, just recently, I said, "Okay, why don't I just go back and change all the old stuff? Let's just ungate everything."

That's a very radical approach that I feel like maybe people are interested in hearing about, and they at least ought to consider it whether they do it or not, I don't know.

Blair: I remember when the technology was nascent, and we all got excited about it. Imagine all the things that we can do. It's like any other bright, shiny new technology and you either said this directly or you alluded to it. It's like, "Oh, we could do all these automation programs," and then we don't. We collect all this data and then we don't do anything with it or we do too much with it and we start to annoy people. They start opting out. We're so enamored with the technology, we're using it to do things that we shouldn't actually be doing.

David: Well, we imagine we can just sit on the couch in the business. If we have all the right automated programs running, it's just at the end of the day, looking at a screen, seeing how much money we've made and then we just need to tweak the algorithms. It's not quite that easy, but I'm heavily influenced by my own experience.

I know I am not a normal person and anybody that knows me knows that too. Thank you for keeping your mouth shut at this very moment, but I'm so annoyed by gating in general. What really gets me is to go through the hassle of completing a form, knowing I'm automatically going to be on somebody's list. That doesn't bother me so much because I figure, oh, well I can just unsubscribe.

It's like at the other end of this, I'm thinking, are you kidding me. Shit. This is what I filled this out for. This is not worth it. This is not great content. I'm consistently feeling that way. I'll admit that my approach is influenced by how I want to experience this stuff and I don't think I'm all that normal. Maybe I shouldn't be all that wrapped up about it.

Blair: Is your approach also influenced possibly by where you are in your career, you're an established name in this field of creative services firms advisors, you have a massive catalog of content possible that you're making this decision from a position of luxury that maybe listeners don't have.

David: In a sense yes. In a sense no. Yes, in a sense that experimenting like this is not all that risky for me because I have multiple ways of people hearing about what I do and so on. Having said that, I feel like somebody earlier in their career or a firm earlier in their career, it makes even less sense to gate content and what you really ought be doing is just impressing the hell out of your readers and not creating any friction.

I think, yes and no, it's not about how long I've been doing this and whether I can afford to do this from a risk standpoint, it's more about what I sell. If I were selling a lot of books or nothing customizable or whatever or maybe a considered sale where it was really important that you move people through the funnel and you understand where they are.

I could see it making sense. In fact, I think some firms should completely ignore this advice and some of the firm's clients should completely ignore this advice. I just want people to think a little bit differently. I just want to stretch people's thinking a little bit.

Blair: Yes. To your initial point in reply to my question about, are you doing this from a position of luxury? I think you're correct in that, in the early days you shouldn't be gating anything, you should be building a name. You should be building awareness. You should be building a reputation. I'm not going to use the B word, but others will, and then you can think about gating.

I remember even early, when Win Without Pitching was a consulting firm and my business was closer to yours in terms of a business model, solopreneur, selling advice. I remember entertaining very early on the idea of gating everything. Basically, you can't see what's on the website unless you pay a small amount of money. I thought that was so audacious that it might just work.

David: That feel like so many of your ideas, so audacious. I think it might work. It's like on the circle it's approaching crazy, but if we keep going, it'll come back around to normal.

Blair: What's on the other side of crazy. You ever ask yourself that? Huh?

[laughter]

David: Yes. Sorry, I interrupted you. What were you going to say again? I just couldn't get past that.

Blair: Oh, just this idea of gated content and websites. I've talked about Alt Design in Auckland, New Zealand. I forget what the URL is, but if you look up Alt Design Group in New Zealand, I think it's altgroup.net. It's just one page. It says this page intentionally left blank. It's been that way for years and I used to have too many glasses of wine and in the middle of the night, I'd go to that website and just stare at it and sip my wine and think, "Ah, I wish I had the guts to do this," but at the other end of it would be like a version of a website. It's like, okay, everything is gated.

Even who I am or this business is, it's gated. You got to pay money to-- it's the same principle as the Alt Group's website. The idea that a mystery is a powerful marketing mechanism.

David: Yes.

Blair: What's behind this paywall?

David: We've mentioned this before, but this is a good time to bring up the fact that a couple of books ago, the manifesto you left I think it was completely ungated, wasn't it?

Blair: It was initially completely ungated. You could read the whole thing, but you had to do a lot of clicking.

David: Oh, right. Like page to page?

Blair: Yes. You couldn't download a PDF. You could, but you'd have to pay for that PDF in the early days. Maybe you've covered some of these points here, but why are you doing this?

David: I just wrote out seven things about why I'm doing this and some are more important than others. The first is obvious, but maybe the most important and that's that I'm giving Google even more, to work with. Everything that's not behind a form is indexable and they're really good about indexing my site. Now there's even a greater opportunity for somebody who's typing an organic search, whether they've heard of me or not, Google may drive them there. At the moment, organic search is a pretty big part of what I do. This will enhance that. That's the first reason, just a lot more indexable.

Blair: When you say pretty big part of what you do, you mean how you get business?

David: Yes, exactly.

Blair: Okay.

David: That's the first. The second, and this is probably not the most important, but I'm a huge believer in removing any unnecessary friction for the prospect. From a UX standpoint, I want to make this as easy as possible. You see this when you go to buy something on the web. You see how easy some places make it for you to buy things and then other places it's like, "Oh."

I was trying to buy something last night, for instance, and every time I submitted the form, it gave me some error, but it wouldn't tell me what the error was and it was just driving me crazy. I wanted the product badly enough. I finished it and finally figured it out but I just want to remove as much friction as possible because when somebody doesn't know your firm, they might want to hire you.

There's not usually some huge compulsion to jump through all the hoops because they're just not even-- In their mind, they're thinking, there are tens of thousands of firms. This firm's interesting. Oh, shoot. I don't want them to know I'm that interested yet? Forget it. I'll just go to the next thing. It's just trying to remove some of that friction. That's the second big reason. I don't know how much of that is me versus real.

Blair: Yes. I wonder. I think the principle is a good one. I was reviewing a business's sales process the other day and they talked about slowing things down in the sale. When they are selling their services, and they sell to creative firms. I was thinking, "Oh, this is horrible." I actually know a firm that wanted to hire them but was driven crazy by their lack of response because for some reason, I don't know where they got it.

This business thought it made sense to slow people down when they want to buy. They're just like, "Screw this. I'll buy from your competitor." It's not an insignificant, it's a long engagement and it's not an insignificant amount of money. I haven't given them the feedback yet, but it's coming.

David: Wow. That's interesting. One of my competitors has a prospect fill out a fairly lengthy survey before any phone call and I can see the justification for that. I could see how it would make the call much more efficient. You're probably not even going to have a call with somebody that's not qualified, but it also feels like the more important the person is, that's contacting you, the less likely they're going to want to do that.

I'll get this sometimes where somebody will say, "Hey, I get what you're doing here, you don't have time to talk to me for two weeks, kind of admire that." It's like, "No, I don't do that intentionally." If I can't talk with you for two weeks, it's actually the case, I don't believe in slowing that stuff down, so removing the friction.

Blair: Yes. What's next then? Why are you doing this?

David: The third one is just, heck, I'm not doing anything with the data anyway and we have such amazing plans to do things with data thinking there's just some little secret in there. If they visited this page and downloaded this PDF and if they've opened three of the last six emails, surely by God, they are ready to buy a $80,000 diagnostic from us if I could just unlock that.

We have these ideas and then it sits there because it's never super urgent. Now I have done stuff with the data in terms of selling books and it's been very, very effective, not effective enough where I want to violate this plan here. If you're not doing anything with the data, then why do it because there's really only one major justification for gating content and that's that it allows you to collect actionable data that you can do something else with.

Maybe it's as simple as, okay, the prospect is calling you now and I see that they've been on the website for this many times, or maybe I'm going to use this as part of some automated program or workflow, and this will move them through the funnel. I wasn't doing anything with the data. At least I wasn't doing much with it. You just have to scratch your head at this point and say, "Okay, I probably--" Don't introduce the friction if you're not doing anything with the data. That was the third point.

Blair: Yes. Maybe a more meaningful way to get more meaningful data is to make the content free as you are and say, "Hey, if you'd like more of this, if you'd like to receive it when it comes out, sign up here."

David: One thing I did differently through the advice of the firm that I work with, Newfangled, is put a very tasteful popup that doesn't pop up for the first, I think, 15 seconds, it's completely ignorable. You don't have to click through it. It only pops up if you've not already been cookied, and that had a huge impact on increasing organic signups, but that one felt like it was worth doing although I was pretty nervous at the beginning.

Blair: When you said tasteful popup, I was trying to imagine what that-- like a little chat thing that says, "What are you wearing?"

David: It comes with a piece of candy. You just need to reach out and get it.

David: The fourth reason is about my whole relationship with content and a lot of my clients feel the same way in their relationship with content. I just love the fact that everybody has immediate access to it, and it just gives me an incentive. It's the difference between delivering a keynote to an empty or sparsely populated room and one where they're standing room only. That's how it feels to me to have ungated content. I know that's totally a philosophical piece of nonsense, but for me, I'm sitting there writing. I usually write something every Saturday or Sunday, and sometimes it takes me three hours, sometimes it's just 40 minutes, but I'm consciously thinking about that.

All right, people are going to read this tomorrow or today and it feels good. It feels good to just splash it out there like just nail it to the telephone pole by the bar. It's like anybody can see it. This is a weird little thing, but it's just something that's important enough to me. I spend 20% to 25% of all my time doing content. I don't think of it as marketing. I think of it as insight generation. Obviously, it has a marketing role so this just fits with that. Dovetails with it.

Blair: I wonder if that number isn't even a little bit low, but I guess you do have to serve clients. There's the actual client work that gets in the way.

David: The next one, fifth one, this is a philosophical thing. If you are not going to write a long proposal and have multiple phone calls so that the prospect has a really good sense of how you thinking, what you might recommend for them, then by God, how is it that you're going to charge a lot of money and require that it all be paid upfront and maybe not give them references?

That's just an unfair exchange in my mind. To whatever degree you're holding up high prices, and you're being very careful about who you work with, it does seem legitimate to me to consider the fact that your prospects have a right to know how you think. It just seems like a fair thing. Now, if you're going to write long proposals for free and so on, well, they know how you think in that but if you are committed to not doing that, how are they going to get to know how you think?

There's this philosophical platform I have around this, that they have an absolute right to sample how you think ahead of that purchase, and this is especially true if your terms are fairly stringent, maybe you require 50% upfront or whatever that is and so it just makes sense to me. They have a right to know how you think. It just seems fair.

Blair: Going back to an earlier point here, anybody who's going to hire David Baker or total business review, new business audit, whatever it is you do, they know how you think because you've published for years, you must have hundreds of thousands, maybe over a million words in the public domain. You could gate all of it tomorrow, retire, and charge people for that stuff.

David: That is the plan I've been waiting to tell you this, going to need a new partner. That it's all true, but also what would gating do for me?

Blair: It would give you money for doing nothing. I'm not even sure if this is a podcast anymore. This is me and you talking about our next business models.

David: Okay. Let's say I dropped the consulting stuff and opened a Substack account. Then obviously I'd have to gate it, for sure.

Blair: Okay. Sorry to derail you.

David: You got me pretty excited about stopping work.

Blair: We're talking about the seven reasons why you're gating your content and the fifth one that you just talked about is you just philosophically, you think it's right. What's next?

David: Next is just that it makes selling so much easier because, oh my goodness, I'm a huge believer in efficiency. I don't know the exact numbers and again, this is about my world. Most all of our episodes are about your world as a listener, but we're just flipping the equation here and I'm talking about my world, but in my world, about 10% to 15% of my clients, we never have a call. They've seen enough. We have an email and bam, that's it.

Blair: You mean before you're hired?

David: Before I'm hired, right?

Blair: Yes.

David: Then another 5% to 10%. They'll need to check back in with a second call and then the vast majority, there's just one 30 minute call and they're very simple. They're just seeing, hey, is he human? Is he an asshole? Can he carry a conversation? I have a couple of questions about how this unfolds. Talk to me about how you would solve it. It's a very simple thing and that's because they are so curious that they've already read a whole bunch of stuff or they've listened to a bunch of these episodes and I just love that efficiency.

I just think time is so much more important than money and this applies to so many areas of how you folks listening are running your firms. You've got way too many meetings and especially the standing meetings and then I think you're too eager to talk with a prospect. It's not that precious. If you don't feel like you can't put any friction between you and the prospect. I think if it's meant to be, then the bus is slowly rolling to you and you throw something under the wheel, it's just going to roll right over it and keep going.

I really like the efficiency of all of this, so we can concentrate on things that really matter to them specifically and I don't have to go through and have the same conversation with every prospect because I already wrote an article about it.

Blair: Yes, it's hard to imagine now hiring an expert without knowing what they think, right?

David: Yes, right.

Blair: That's when you get in these competitive shootouts. Okay, I'm putting rolling bus on the David Baker metaphor list. What's number seven on the list of reasons why you're ungating all your content?

David: Well, so I live outside Nashville, I guess most of you know that, and Tennessee about, I think seven years ago, they changed state law because corporations are always state based in the US, anyway, and they allowed for something called a public benefit corporation at PBC. I read about it and researched it, talked with several attorneys, talked with the legislator and I was the very first expert service offering firm to that so you could take your normal corporation and then you could elect public benefit. Then you have to file a report every year saying what you did and so on.

I just loved doing that and I've never regretted it. Part of what I wrote in the initial charter was, I forget exactly the wording, but the idea was that my mission is not just to make money. My mission is to raise the tide for all the boats, not just the ones that are near me and Chris [unintelligible 00:22:52] comes to mind this way too where, what does he say about a billion people?

Blair: Yes, teaching a billion creatives how to something?

David: How to something, yes.

Blair: That's very powerful. Sorry, Chris. No, but it's around the business skills of creativity, something like that.

David: Right, and I've always been impressed with that. I'm embarrassed.

Blair: Hope Chris, doesn't-- sorry Chris if you are listening.

David: Yes, so I've always been impressed with that and didn't hear it until after I did my thing, but that's always struck me since then. To fulfill that mission, it's not like the mission is dead if people have to complete a form to get to the insight, I don't mean that. I just mean it just fits with the idea that I'm just going to give away a lot of free stuff. Some of it will be helpful to people. I don't want to be too precious about this content. I was way too precious at the beginning and I don't want people to say, "Man, he still thinks this content is amazing, really?" You ought to ungate it because once they get it-- I don't know what people are thinking about this. I think it's useful to people, some very, very useful, especially folks that are earlier on their journey or maybe they didn't come from another firm first before they started. It just fits. The public benefit corporation fits the idea and when I die, it probably depends on when my enemies find me. I keep moving.

Blair: That's why you bought the big luxury RV so you can keep moving.

David: Keep moving. Yes, I'm just going to have a 25-year domain registered and it's just going to stay up there and hopefully, it'll be useful to people after I die. That's the whole idea of the public benefit corporation. Not just while I'm alive, but when I die. Anyway, that's the seventh reason. All these reasons together are like, okay, I'm doing it. I know I'm in the minority. That's okay.

Blair: I don't know that you're in the minority as you're talking about this last point, I think times have changed. The mood around content has changed because when you and I were originally creating content, it was more precious because there wasn't a lot of it out there and I think the mentality now is put it out, put it out, make it a share, push it and I think there's just a spirit of content wants to be free, openness around content today that was not there when you and I started our businesses 20 and 20 something years ago, so I wonder if people of our vintage aren't still holding onto some of these old ideas.

Again, in some businesses, my business is more product based and more scaled and the way your business and my business is marketed, they're different. They don't necessarily have to be different, but there are some reasons why they might be different, but I think the way content is going is it's either free or you're paying for it in a subscription to a podcast or a Substack subscription. I subscribe to Stratechery for years and Substack is built on Ben Thompson's business, Stratechery.

I think you're seeing content either fully gated, where you're paying for it, or fully free. This mushy middle of "Hey, hand over your email address and then you can get this piece of content." That is becoming a relic of the past.

I think to your point, as you started talking about this, I realized, yes, a few times when I do encounter that these days, I am a little perturbed. Now I say that knowing that, I actually don't know a whole lot about how we do marketing at Win Without Pitching, I'm narrow in marketing, I haven't been responsible for it for years. I don't touch it. I create content. I know we use a lot of marketing automation. I look at the numbers, the numbers say keep using it, but that's not the only way to do this.

David: Be prepared for a angry call from somebody who is really interested. [laughs] "Who are you?" "I run your marketing." "Oh." There's a good example of a firm, now they gate I think everything, so it's not that, but in terms of just a library of content hingemarketing.com, I think does a good job of that, where they just provide really useful stuff for people even if you never become a client. That's my dream for my clients, for them to view differently their commitment to the greater good and also to attract prospects, not just because they're inspiring which, of course, many times they are, but also because the prospect is drawn to their point of view, how they think, how they process stuff, that's my dream. There's some really good examples out there.

Blair: Yes, all right, so you have some advice for people if they do gate their content.

David: Yes, cause most people are going to ignore this, which they do most episodes. Thank God they ignored the one we did recently.

Blair: Yes, thank God.

[laughter]

David: If you're going to gate your content, which most people do probably, then I just got three simple suggestions for you. Make sure it's amazing content and worth gating, because people, they're annoyed that they have to complete a form, but they're more annoyed if they feel like, "Oh, this wasn't worth the little bit of friction." Make sure the content's good.

Second, make sure you're doing something with the content. Even if the content is good, but you're not doing something with the data, then don't mess with gating. Then you might need to balance that smaller pool of organic search with something else, if you're going to gate a bunch of stuff, there's less for Google to work with. Maybe you need to have a regular SEM spend or public relations or whatever it is to supplement that and that's it. You just think about these reasons, see which one make sense, if you're still going to gate it, make sure these are true. It's great content, you're going to do some little bit of the data, and then what you're not gating is sufficient. That'd be my advice.

Blair: Okay, this has been helpful, if I've seen a little reflective, I'm just wondering what the odds are that one day we will be recording an episode where you have gone entirely the opposite direction [laughs], you're living out of your RV and you're charging for access to everything.

David: You're going to throw this in my face if that happens?

Blair: I don't know. Again, I think both of those are totally valid business models where you charge money, so there's -- Again, two types of gated, there's hand me your email address so I can sell to you, I can spam you, et cetera, and the other one is just hand me some money. What you're saying is, "Get out of the middle. It's either marketing content or its revenue generation content, and if it's marketing content set it free." I think that's your message.

David: Yes, it is. When you get dropped into a drip campaign, are there times when you are grateful for it, most of the time, are you not, how do you feel when you get dropped into a drip campaign after providing an email address?

Blair: I'm okay with being dropped into drip campaigns if I'm told it's a drip campaign. 'Hey, do you want to get your series of emails on this?' I could read between the lines and go, "Okay, there's a sales pitch at the end, but yes, as long as those emails are providing value." I don't like the sneaky ones.

David: We're probably in balance just honestly, maybe we ought to just let people do what they want and quit whining about it.

Blair: Maybe we should quit podcasting.

[laughter]

David: This is about where we should end.

[laughter]

Blair: I think we should've ended 10 minutes ago and that's on me.

[laughter]

Blair: For the four people still listening, thanks. Tune in two weeks for a correction episode. Thanks for this, David.

David: All right, bye.