Lead capture

What gating costs

Every gate trades reach for contacts. That trade is worth making only when the contact is genuinely worth more than the reader — which is true far less often than it is assumed.

Gate: things with immediate practical utility that a buyer would use during evaluation — templates, calculators, assessments, data. Do not gate: thought leadership, anything you want cited or shared, or anything a competitor publishes openly.

Lead magnets

The test is whether someone would pay a small amount for it. If not, it will not earn an email address that gets used.

The best ones are things people use rather than read: a template that saves an afternoon, a calculator that answers a specific question, a checklist for a process they are mid-way through. An ebook that restates blog posts is not one.