Make Money With Content Locking (9)
Heres a quick tutorial on content locking.
If you know about content locking already, then just skip to the end for ideas for content licking campaigns.
What is content locking?
Here is the 1 sentence explanation:
Place "content" that users want access to behind a "locker" so they need to complete one of the offers you put up before they can see it.
http://www.cliconomics.com/content-locking-explained/
The offers
You cant just put any offer up as you are likely to be non compliant with the advertisers terms.
You need offers that are referred to as "Incentivized".
Although your normal CPA network probably has a couple of offers where this is allowed, I recommend going with a specialist network because:
* They have content locking scripts, templates, and tools build in
* They automatically show the user the offers that are performing best at that time
* This type of promotion is accepted and they have lots of incentivised offers
The two I use are BlamAds and Adscend Media.
I found it easier to join BlamAds, whereas Adscend needed some more 'care' to demonstrate I was not using copyrighted materials in my content locking campaigns.
I suggest you check both out.
Usual approach applies:
- understand the sort of campaigns/traffic they like and dont like
- be human
- dont look like a fraudster
- dont use copyrighted content
- read their terms
The Setup
Using the blam interface for this example.
Login to the gateway (not the main hasoffers interface, but the one at http://gateway.blamads.com/admin)
And go to the gateway editor by clicking the Gateway Editor link in the menu tab.
There are 3 screens with configuration options, and you get to them by clicking on Step 1, Step 2 and Step 3 links at the top of the screen.
You can setup and save configurations to speed up when you need to create campaigns or get at your "embed code".
The embed code is a little bit of code you will need to include in your pages to lock the content and show a window with offers to the user.
Get a previous config
You can save each of your gateway configs under a different title, or just save some default templates for future use. You can select previous templates you saved.
Step 1
On this screen you set the offers you want to present to your users, the country, whether you want to select the offers manually or automatic.
You also need to config how many offers the user needs to complete before they are allowed to see your content.
You can also optionally set a 'teaser' time - which basically means that there is a short delay before the gateway window pops up and blocks your content.
Lastly you need to set the country bypass - which basically means show the gateway for users from a specific country.
In the screenshot above I use one of my default settings:
* automatically rotate through the best performing offers
* US traffic
* Users need to complete 1 offer
* Set the time delay to 2 seconds so they get a chance to see some of the content, but as soon as they focus the gateway/locker will pop up
Step 2
In this screen you can configure your gateway look and feel. Theres a bunch of templates that have already been provided.
I particularly like the facebook ones.
Also take note of the "Time Limitation" setting which allows you to restrict the period of time users have access to your content after completing an offer. I normally set this to 0 to give them unlimited access.
Step 3
In this screen you can setup the look and feel for your mobile gateway. Its not something I have used but I can imagine for some more 'private' content that a mobile gateway for mobile traffic has great potential.
Also in this screen you can switch off the annoying video. I recommend you test a lander with and one without video to see which performs better.
Lastly you can add your IP address so that the gateway does not show.
Save
You dont need to save your config settings, but if you want to change the name at the top, and click "save" at the bottom of your screen.
Get Your Embed Code
As I mentioned at the start, you will need to include a couple of lines of code in your landingpage.
Here is an example:
<script src="http://www.wegetpaid.net/assets/js/gwe.js" type="text/javascript"></script> <script src="http://www.wegetpaid.net/assets/gateway/aff_111/g111/user_data.js" type="text/javascript"></script> <noscript><meta http-equiv="refresh" content="0;url="http://www.wegetpaid.net/js_err.html"/></noscript>
For example, if the html of your landing page looks something like this:
<html>
<head>
<title>Wow</title>
</head>
<body>
<h1>Awesome Title</h1>
<img src="">
</body>
<html>
<head>
<title>Wow</title>
</head>
<body>
<script src="http://www.wegetpaid.net/assets/js/gwe.js" type="text/javascript"></script> <script src="http://www.wegetpaid.net/assets/gateway/aff_111/g111/user_data.js" type="text/javascript"></script> <noscript><meta http-equiv="refresh" content="0;url="http://www.wegetpaid.net/js_err.html"/></noscript>
<h1>Awesome Title</h1>
<img src="">
</body>
Creating your Angle
There are different strategies for making money with content locking.
As always - be careful to make sure your content is not copyrighted
Game cheats or prerelease gossip
Find a popular game. This works particularly well with popular sequals.
http://www.google.com/insights/searc...y%207-d&cmpt=q
ie. Diablo 3 - which might not be released until 2012
Find some related content:
http://www.google.com/search?sourcei...ablo+3+beta%22
For example:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nY8PKFA1XPw
Embed the video on a webpage and content lock it away.
Popular image searches
Look at the top searches on google images in the last 7 days
http://www.google.com/insights/searc...=images&cmpt=q
Pick a top keyword, for example tattoos
http://www.google.com/insights/searc...=%22tattoos%22
And build a campaign around:
miley cyrus tattoos
Spy videos
Take a hot anticipated product and find a fake or real spy video or shot.
For example - iPhone 5 is the top search for iphone:
http://www.google.com/insights/searc...y%207-d&cmpt=q
Stuff thats going viral
A great way of coming up with campaign ideas and related content is to use stuff that is going viral.
For example - using TrendMap (Set to US, but you can check out trends for any country), you could build campaigns around the hot trends.
- TUPAC is still alive ! - content lock a link with proof
- NSFW!! Lil Kim Exposed
- Kenny Omega vs 9 Year Old Haruka
You could also use:
http://tweetmeme.com/
Or use popular threads on http://www.4chan.org/
Or find any viral content for popular celebs.
You can find out whats popular here:
http://clues.yahoo.com/top#lt=World&...ci=22&parent=1
Build campaigns around popular celebs
Lets say your building out a PPV campaign, targeting a site which is female centric age 35-45.
What is their most popular celeb?
Yahoo Clues comes to the rescue again.
Jenifer Lopez
Next go back to Google Insights and see what people are searching for, which images are popular, and what the popular news is:
http://www.google.com/insights/searc...y%201-m&cmpt=q
Clearly her divorce/split is getting lots of traction online.
Or something to do with william levy
Ill add some of the screenshots later as soon as my image hosting has started working again.
Hope you enjoyed this.
As usual, feel free to thank me for this post. But it would be more helpful if you could let me know how much you liked this post by rating it:
Cheers
Tijn
ps. working on something for next week that those of you starting out online and struggeling with landing pages will really enjoy!
Great Post! I have been thinking about getting into content locking but was having a hard time figuring out angles. Reminds me of the days when I ran "Poll" campaigns.
hardest part for me is to get traffic for them and have it convert...
like sure with ppv do you first have a landing page then the actual script to run when the user clicks on lets say see tupac alive etc? i just see it as most people will never fill it out / wont believe it anyways.
Depending on the angle you take, with the right one you can throw generic traffic at it from one of the top 1000 domains. This will probably fry your server, but the example is there to highlight that you can get traffic.
With ppv i start sometimes with two landers:
lander 1 - entice the visitor to click through, het them excited.
lander 2 - content lock the content they are after
Other times I build it all in into the popup. I have no hard and fast rules and you should probably test it.
A CTR of 15+% also suggests that people like clicking on this stuff
I appreciate the guide and reference a lot!
@tijn, great article! what content locking providers would you recommend working with?
Originally Posted by cbrughmans
CPAGrip are top Notch!
Used to use a lot of cpalead when this was blowing up on Facebook haha, I noticed there is a new cpalead rep on the network but not sure if they do any content locking anymore
Home > Affiliate Marketing Forum >