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Gating Online Content - What Are My Options?

It seems that PDF content publishers see the issue of gating content to be either black or white, gated PDFs or un-gated PDFs. They throw their arms up in the air, unable to agree on whether it is best to gate content to generate sales lead information or leave the content open. Hiding electronic content behind a web form is known as “gating” content, whether it is in the form of a white paper, data sheet or case study. Effectively, you are only allowing access to that information if the reader is willing to provide a wide range of their personal information to you. Many online marketers use this as a lead generation source, collecting as much information as possible from the reader in exchange for access to their white paper or data sheet. The downside of this lead generation tool is that up to 95% of readers will abandon a site if they come across a web form. On the other end of the spectrum, ePublishers can choose to leave their electronic content un-gated, so as to disseminate their content freely and get their ideas out there. The obvious hitch in this practice is that the publisher will have absolutely no idea who is reading and downloading their PDF documents or if anyone is even interested in them at all. 

Now consider the last time you were in line at the grocery store, or browsing bookshelves at your local bookstore. Is the literature available there hidden behind an obscuring wall, and the only way to see it is to pay for it first? No! Are you able to pick up your favorite magazine or book and walk out of the store without paying for it? No (unless you don’t object to shoplifting). Print publishers have picked up on something that many electronic publishers haven’t yet– the reader likes to browse content before committing to the purchase. Why do you think grocery store checkout lines are lined with glossy gossip magazines with enticing covers (who wouldn’t be a little curious when a cover screams “LEWD” and “SCANDAL”)? Because the bored shopper is going to pick up that magazine, start reading a juicy article and be interrupted by the cashier. At this point, that shopper is forced to choose between putting the magazine back in the rack or paying for it just to find out if anymore of Tiger’s alleged mistresses have come forward. Essentially, the magazine publisher has hooked the reader by giving them a preview of the material before asking that the reader pay for it or move on.  

The same concept is employed at bookstores – anyone can pick up a book and start reading through it, some stores even provide comfy chairs to encourage shoppers to do this! Readers are given the opportunity to decide whether they would want to read the whole book, but do not have enough time to read it cover to cover, put it back and walk out of the store. Bookstores are encouraging their shoppers to browse, as this will result in more sales than by forcing their customers to choose blindly.  

By now you may be asking if is it even possible for ePublishers to give readers a taste of  their PDF documents without losing the “sale” altogether (and by sale, the reader is exchanging their personal information instead of money for access).  Instead of gating all content right from the start with a web form, readers should be allowed access to a few pages of content before being asked for their name and email. The reader can better decide if they think the remaining content is of value to them, making it more likely that they will provide their personal information in exchange for complete access. If the document is gated at the beginning, readers won’t have enough information to decide if it will provide them with enough value to give up their personal information; if the document is completely un-gated, then the publisher won’t reap any reward other than disseminating their ideas and hoping someone reads it.  

So don’t throw up your arms in exacerbation, unable to decide whether to hide your PDFs behind a web form or leave it open for easy access. There is another way! Give your readers a taste of what is to come and let them decide if it’s worth it to give up their names and emails. Chances are, you’ll see an increase in form fills with legitimate information almost instantly.

As a PDF content publisher, what has your experience been with gated and un-gated documents?

PDF Documents: Online Marketing 2.0

After staying static for many decades and consisting mainly of annoying magazine blow-in cards and junk mail, direct marketing’s taken a whirlwind ride through the last 15 years as the Internet changes the way we all view media.

While some markets still rely heavily on paper means of reaching sales leads, the costs associated with printing, mailing, and data entry—especially in a down economy—are too much for many companies to bear. That, and restrictions set by the Federal Trade Commission’s CAN-SPAM Act of 2003 have businesses rebuilding their marketing efforts by using PDF documents.

PDF files offer many upsides and great potential over traditional paper, Web and email marketing:
• Well-planned layouts remain preserved and make the same impact in the end-user’s viewer application—as opposed to Web browsers, which can remix colors and type at the user’s whim.
• PDFs cost little, if anything, to distribute.
• Most computers connected to the Internet have a means of viewing PDFs—a good share of them standardized on Adobe Reader.
• A “gatekeeper” script can request email addresses of recipients who are interested in reading white-paper, catalog, or research report content contained within a PDF.

That’s the beauty of PDF marketing: If someone’s so interested in reading what’s beyond the cover page of a document that they’re willing to submit their email address to the host, that’s a much higher-quality lead than an email blast to a questionable address list a company purchases. Or, worse yet, poorly targeted leads harvested from a web page that in some cases run afoul of CAN-SPAM regs and make a company liable for fines and costly legal proceedings.

Yet, up to now, technical complexities of lead generation prevented most companies from tapping into the potential of PDF marketing, because while the technology has been available for years, the technical barriers (JavaScript, forms setup, database servers) seemed to outstrip the value proposition.

Most companies experimenting with PDF marketing run an end-around these technical issues by simply posting a web form a reader needed to fill out before receiving a PDF download—losing valuable leads from email pass-along circulation (and reposting to internal web sites) in the process. That’s when a person fills out a web form truthfully in the first place.

This week, Vitrium is releasing PDF Sales Leads, a robust service that harnesses the power of PDF marketing for small-to-medium sized business through dynamic web forms embedded inside PDFs.

Because it’s hosted by Vitrium using the software-as-a-service (SaaS) model, businesses that just couldn’t afford the software infrastructure—and consultants to build it and train employees—can start putting quality content they own into attractive PDF files and start leveraging the power of this web-based “marketing 2.0″ tool. A simple, straightforward setup walks even non-IT staffers through the process in a few minutes.

“PDFSalesLeads gets one more costly business process off a company’s server and into the cloud, and that’s where it should be,” says Vitrium Systems CEO Peter Nieforth. “It saves dollars over traditional paper sales-lead generation, but more importantly, saves trees and gives our clients a win-win without the huge financial ramp-up PDF marketing traditionally requires.”

Making the Case for Document-Level PDF Rights Management

A decade ago, Adobe and future merger partner Glassbook published Stephen King’s Riding the Bullet, a 16,000-word short story, as the first major eBook. Its digital rights management (DRM) failed as hackers hacked, King got mad, Amazon ended up giving it away. The eBook—and DRM—suffered a brutally black eye.

About the same time, iTunes rose and record labels struggled to rein in MP3 music pirates, DRM as a technology got beat up badly, caught in a riptide between freethinking music consumers and bottom-line-oriented copyright owners.

Adobe, somewhat quietly, released a product called Policy Server (currently part of the LiveCycle Enterprise Suite), and later, Digital Editions, to rights-manage documents and eBooks. Even it wasn’t without hitches, as arguments over text-to-speech features erupted between publishers—who reap revenue from audio books—and advocates for visually impaired readers.

Yet despite the hard knocks DRM has taken in the mainstream media, DRM has become an essential technology of the electronic documents world, protecting and tracking use of business-critical data. Without it, PDF would never have supplanted paper as the standard electronic document. Most businesses have some content, somewhere, that needs some level of protection—be it sensitive internal data circulating among employees or external communications going out to customers and partners.

DRM in the PDF world can mean a lot of things, from simply password security to more elaborate schemes. Typically, though, the DRM decision involves considering the following issues:

• Overcoming software issues: Some vendors offer DRM, but PDFs can only be read in a custom viewer or in Acrobat Reader only after installing a custom plug-in. While these schemes can be effective, they offer a layer of inconvenience and pose tech-help issues for already stretched IT staffers.

• Track or disable pass-alongs: For proprietary content like research reports or e-books that took a considerable investment to assemble, limiting opening to one computer can be a good business model—if people pass it along, it stays locked but offers the recipient and opportunity to purchase an unlocking code. At minimum, document owners can block pass-along recipients from opening a document until they register an email, snail mail, and phone number to get to the content—making viral marketing a lead-generation tool.

• Deciding what level of protection the document warrants. Maybe everyone can look at it onscreen, but you should disable printing, copy/paste functions, or offline access.

• Expiring a document. DRM offers owners of catalogs or drafts of documents a way to expire or update a document, which comes in handy when, for example, you need the 2008 price list to be rendered inoperable. Or it’s not advantageous to have a draft of a contract or purchase agreement floating around a company’s email system.

One final decision, as always, involves analyzing costs. The main upside to setting up your own server for PDF DRM is that you maintain custody of your documents at all times during the process. A much less expensive option is purchasing DRM on a per-document basis from a trusted vendor, who can host your documents online and can administer the DRM on your behalf and let your company test-drive DRM or roll it out on a small scale for a limited set of documents.

Although some vendors offer one form of PDF DRM (hosted or server-side) or another, only Vitrium is doing both right now with ProtectedPDF, offering a cost-effective means to phase-in DRM based on need, with upgrades available when they become necessary.

PDF Content + Tracking the Next Big Thing for Publishers

The flagging economy launched torpedoes at the grand old-media Condé Nast fleet yesterday, sinking Gourmet, Cookie, Modern Bride and Elegant Bride. The moves—including a rumored 180 layoffs connected to those magazines—come as the publishing industry struggles to invent new models to derive income from its content, one of them rumored to be a Hulu-type digital store.

Help is on the way, and indeed it may already be here for some beleaguered publishers.

Interactive PDFs are an emerging format for porting paper publications to electronic editions. Not only do PDFs incur zero printing and shipping costs, they also lock down layouts for advertisers and magazine designers frustrated with graphic-design limitations posed by the user-controllable look and feel of web browsers. Their main drawback? They tend to be money losers or zero-gainers.

We’re guessing Adobe plans to put the ability to track content, inside PDFs as a way to make ads in PDF editions more valuable. It took a huge step toward accomplishing that when it announced intentions to acquire web-metrics aggregator Omniture for $1.2 billion last month.

Adobe CEO Shantanu Narayen didn’t come out and say point-blank that his company plans to bring web-style metrics tracking to PDFs. He did, however, say in the company’s Sept. 15 financial analyst call that “our customers have been asking us to help them deliver more effective solutions for assembling and delivering targeted web content…that can be measured and optimized.” That, he said, and monetizing web content.

Publishers looking for a head start on PDF metrics tracking don’t have to wait and see how Adobe will integrate Omniture’s code into its applications a year or three down the line. Right now they can check out Vitrium’s docmetrics, which can be tested on a single document and used to measure how readers use their PDFs as well as collect leads for subscriptions and advertisers.

Putting in trackable ads just might be the missing link that could give publishers the ability to port the financial model driving print-ad revenue to PDF editions. It’s still going to be tough to get readers to pay the same cover price they would for a print magazine, especially given all the free content available on the web. Less printing costs and more ad revenues, invariably, will bring down cover prices for electronic editions.

As more and more print publications teeter on the brink of insolvency and there’s less and less competition, someone’s going to come up with a winning model that will work. Looks like Adobe’s betting a billion that it will involve PDF. Vitrium’s here, now.

Market Research Reports: Valuable Enough To Protect?

Usually individuals associate the term Market Research Report with descriptions such as robust, expensive, delayed, but also important and necessary. Market research reports are a fact of business and essential to certain industries. The amount of time and money allocated to even the smaller reports make these files very valuable.

Market research is defined as a grouped document of information used to make decisions. In most cases, to obtain a grouped document of information multiple individuals are reviewing it simultaneously, consistently passing versions and information between them. Do we ever think of the possibility of that document being lost, misplaced or mistakenly forwarded? Even when the report is complete the information is usually kept restricted to certain individuals internally.

If we compare the value of a market research report to other tangible items, we may be provoked into securing them in the same way. Think of the items that you own valued at more than one thousand dollars? Ten thousand? One hundred thousand? Do you secure these items? Do you lock your car and your house? Do you secure your jewelry? We can argue that certain information is more valuable than any tangible item any of us own. Does your file cabinet have a lock? My point is why are we not more careful with our PDF market research reports? During creation, secure them when passed internally. Upon completion, secure them as they are distributed to the necessary individuals.

A market research report can be one of the most important documents on your computer, treat it as one.

Protectedpdf can protect and track your market research reports. This tool will give you the piece of mind knowing that your valuable research will only be viewed on the screens you choose. There is also no additional plug-in required to view the document, so it will open just as any other PDF file.

White Paper Lead Generation

I recently read a blog post about how to use white papers for lead generation and the big debate was whether or not to gate your white paper with a web form or to have a call to action at the end.  What if there was a middle ground.  What if you could still query your white paper readers, like a web form, but have it at the end, middle or wherever, of your content that way you are asking for your readers information after they have been engaged with your content.

THERE IS A SOLUTION OUT THERE!

PDFSalesLeads, coming October 2009 does exactly what is described above.  PDFSalesLeads is a PDF lead generation tool that embeds a form within your PDF white paper so you can query your readers while they are engaged with your content.  Here is the BEST part, the form stays with the PDF white paper so you are able to obtain all the lead information from who ever the PDF white paper is passed along to…its the POWER of PASS ALONG!

PDFSalesLeads is the future of marketing your PDF documents.  From one marketer to another, using web forms is a thing of the past…if you really want to obtain more qualified sales leads you are going to try PDFSalesLeads, the ROI will present itself immediately!  Right now they are offering a FREE NO RISK TRIAL…check it out www.pdfsalesleads.com

How to optomize your white papers into lead generation machines!

White papers have become established as a cornerstone for most lead generation campaigns, and the content format continues to be one of the most successful response drivers during the recent economic downturn. For example, the 2009 Media Consumption Report from TechTarget showed white papers continued to be the top content source (cited by 66% of respondents) buyers turn to when evaluating new technology.

The content format also continues to have strong viral impact—one with 93% of buyers passing along up to half of the white papers they read/download, according to InformationWeek’s Best Practices Research Series on white papers. However, in order for white paper offers to stand out and succeed in a crowded field of lead gen offers, cutting edge marketers are realizing the need to stand out from the crowd by trying new approaches and integrating outside tools and tactics to optimize their content messaging.

Turn your white papers into lead generating machines, checkout PDFSalesLeads…a new lead generation tool for your PDF content!

When “Confidential” isn’t Good Enough: Preventing Unauthorized Distribution with PDF Watermarking

One of the tools that has emerged in the effort to keep confidential content from being distributed beyond its intended audience is PDF watermarking (sometimes referred to as PDF Stamping). PDF watermarking consists of placing text and/or images, often semitransparent, somewhere on the pages of a PDF document. The watermark may consist of a company logo, or a reminder to the recipient that the material is “Copyright”, “Not to be Redistributed” or “Confidential”. Although watermarks of this nature serve as a reminder to recipients, PDF watermarking of this kind does little to dissuade those whose respect for privacy and intellectual property leaves something to be desired.

To realize the full potential of PDF watermarking it is important that the watermark include the name, or some other identifying feature, of the recipient. For example, if John Smith, working on a film in development, is emailed a copy of the script, do you think Mr. Smith would be more likely to email it along to his friends or movie website if the watermark running across the pages of the PDF said “Confidential”, or if watermark read “This Script is Only to be Read by John Smith”. Although “Confidential” clearly spells out the intention of the distributor, John Smith can still be confident that if he does pass along the script, it is highly unlikely that he would ever be found to be the source of the script’s release. However, by individualizing the PDF watermark by name, John Smith is now accountable for keeping the script confidential. If John Smith were to pass it on, he would run the very real risk of having the script appear on the internet and having the leak traced back to him through the watermark it contains.

Although a movie script is used as an example, PDF watermarking would be just as effective for deterring unauthorized distribution for architectural designs, eBooks, and any other intellectual property or confidential material in PDF.

PDF Watermarking: think of it as the honor system with added incentive.

Online Textbooks the Solution to Educational Budget Cuts in California…?

It seems California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger’s answer to the states $24.3 billion deficit and significant educational budget cuts lies in technology! Instead of raising taxes to pay for the $350 Million in new textbooks for California State Schools, Arnold is looking to move to online textbooks, which costs a fraction of a printed textbook.

Moving to electronic textbooks in PDF format solves a lot of problems, like being cheaper and there are no version issues.  But what about protecting the publishers from textbooks being shared without authorization or copyright issues.  A PDF can be easily forwarded, what is stopping a school from buying one copy of a textbook and copying it for each student?

Do you think electronic textbooks in PDF format is the answer?

“Oops…” Leaked Confidential Internal Communications

In the age where every form of communication is digital and you’re finding more people opting for instant messages versus picking up the telephone, the opportunity for confidential information to get leaked is extremely high!

The consequences for a leaked PDF containing confidential information has gone far beyond the simply slap on the wrist. Companies will face hefty fines and a tainted reputation in the market place as being insecure.

There are ways to combat this issue and avoid the embarrassment of having company info leaked. Protectedpdf offers and PDF Protection and Tracking solution that is a perfect fit for this costly problem. Protectedpdf is a reader friendly PDF Protection solution that does not require any software downloads. Your reader will simply enter in their credentials and have access to the information. Also, with protectedpdf you can track how many times the PDF has been opened and by who.

Protectedpdf puts an end to these embarrassing leaks that are costing companies millions! To get your no risk free trial today check out www.protectedpdf.com