I bet that you often think that you give so much to the world and that you get in return only few bucks from Google Adsense. Then you heard that you can make more money if you ask people to subscribe to your list so you can send them offers. If you place a subscription at the end of every article but you will only get several subscribers every week.

You hear about email marketing on all webmaster forums, but I am sure that they did not build those high engaging list only showing a subscribe form at the end of the website. How they do it? Well, they give something for free ( a report, a book, a software ), and they promote that offer like hell ( like they promote a paid product ), and they end up with few thousand of subscribers that they can send offers. You should do that too but this is another story. 

The problem here is how to benefit from the content or tools you provide. Asking them for the email address so they can read your posts won’t make it, because they will leave instantly. However, there is a solution for you. An email address is hard to ask for but what about a facebook like ? or a plus on google ? or a tweet ? Do you think it will be fair to ask for a like in exchange to read your post ? What about it only takes a click for them ? Social Locker plugin can help you do this. You place the “locked” content inside a shortcode when you post it, and they will see the content only if they like it on facebook, tweet it or give you a +1.

Is that too much for their users ? I guess not as they only spend 1 second to like your page. Is this fair for you ? At least you will get some social exposure after you posted that great content. My suggestion is not to use this on every post you write, but if you write a post that is long and disclose very important data, you should do it.

Here is a great strategy: go to your visitor tracking software ( google analytics, statcounter, etc ), and look for the most popular posts in your blog. After you identify several articles that got popular over the time, lock some of the content on those pages.

Here is another example where social locker can be wonderful. I had a website dedicated to an online tool. I got some traction and visitors were coming in. First, I tried to request their email address when they used my tool. I got few thousand subscribers to the list but their response rate was very low, while their unsubscribe rate was very high. The truth is that they only subscribed to my list to use the software, not to send offers and opinions. After that, I decided to use Social Share and so far it is great. The traffic increased, ad revenue is high  and now I am working to release a premium version so I can make some money too.