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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.

Go Green With eBooks

1. No Paper: eBooks are “green” because it doesn’t require printing unless you really want to print it to read it. You can read your eBook fully online or through the new hand held eBook readers that let you carry a large amount of eBooks around in a digital format.

2. Easily updated: Instead of having to reprint a whole book you can easily update your eBooks but simply going into the file, making the update, reconverting the eBook to PDF and uploading it again to the site. No full printing of the book again saving a lot of paper.

3. Less ink. eBooks are green because they use less ink than required in a printing process. Printing books requires more colored inks too. You can use colorful illustrations in an eBook that don’t have to be printed in color and save on that resource. Even if your readers choose to print, they can do so on grayscale instead of using colored ink.

4. Protect Profits. Now eBooks can be protected from piracy eliminating lost profits by using a PDF protection system, like protectedpdf.  Unlike other PDF protection technologies, protectedpdf does not make it difficult for legitimate readers to access your PDFs. Authorized readers can view your protected documents using Adobe Reader V6.0 or higher, just like normal PDFs. There is no need for readers to download any special plug-ins, proprietary readers, viewers or other additional software.

5. Printing Costs. eBooks are definitely green because they save on the process of using the printing press to create a book. You don’t have to use the electricity or employee power to print an eBook as it is delivered directly to the desktop or eBook reader of the person reading the book.

6. No Inventory. You don’t have to stockpile eBooks. They are the real print-on-demand type of writing that can be downloaded when the person needs and want it.  No inventory means no wasted printing or use of storage space.