I have been playing around with gateways here and there, its a different way to turn traffic into cash. I have been playing with BlamAds and it has been a learning curve for me. The reason is because I can't see anyone doing these things. I then went into a flashback thinking how Dragon Ball Z movies were locked by these gateways in the past.
Content Gateways is something fairly easy to use with marketing, you just need to have a high enough need. My first site using content gateways was trying to take advantage of a trend last year. It kinda of worked, I did get a very small conversion but a lot of bounces as well. I am not sure if that is normal but there are some people who actually fill these gateways out.
Now, I only know of Mr. Eagles BlamAds, so that is where I was using his system. He recently upgraded and has a bunch of awesome features and templates to start off with.
Now some of these template may work depending on what you are locking and what offers you are pushing. The goal is to make it attractive and blend with the website. I personally found creating your own gateway does better, I think because there is full cntrol on how it can look.
There are just a lot of variables to test - amount of offers, text color, text size, border, etc. So here are my personal experience on using BlamAds Content Gateway and getting users to interact.
- Border Thickness and Color - Border thickness is important, sometimes a thin border doesn't create a yield to the end user's brain and doesn't send any message. Having a thick border and a color works, I personally use an amber color for my content gateway's border.
- Amount of Offers - I only use 3-5 offers and asking the end user to complete 1 offer. I mix the offers with a simple submit or a download offer. Depending on the demographic I do games and prizes as they seem to be the easiest to get users to quickly interact and complete.
- The Need - This is actually the most time consuming part, I think. Finding the right niche and the niche is media, now the sub niche is the hardest. I thought I can just take videos and lock it but it is a very searchable popular term. It was hard to get the traffic I wanted. The media can either be pictures, videos, or games. I found videos to be popular.
- Overlay Transparency - Yes, I tested this. For some reason a transparency of 90% does well. I assume its because they can see the content enough that they can make out what it is and are still curious enough to want to keep going.
- Font Sizes - There is a fix size when it comes to BlamAds Gateways, templates. But if you create your own it can be adjusted to whatever width or size you want. I have a headline that is fairly big but not massive and the offer links to be just 2 sizes smaller.
The way I came up with these tips is testing. When I started I noticed a bunch of people immediately bouncing. I needed to see how to control the traffic. I just tested a bunch of variables, since there is a lot to play with. I found that these small changes makes a difference with stats especially "time on site" and "bounce" - to me I think they are these are the numbers that play a big role with content gateways.
