Private content or not: how to choose? - A Hubspot feature

HubSpot offers the possibility to make your content private. The most common way to do it is the use of gated offers, like putting a form to download a white paper or other free content. In this sense, making people sign up to access a free offer is something that has been used a lot in inbound marketing. The principle is simple: leaving lots of interesting content accessible and giving away something that is so helpful that people will happily leave their information to you to get it. However, it's not the only way to do it and Hubspot has a feature that enables you to make some parts of your content private. Let's review them and see what to use in which circumstance.

The things that you can make private in Hubspot.

1. Blog

In Hubspot, you can choose to put an entire blog private. Then, only people in a certain list or with a link will be able to access your content. As you can have multiple blogs on HubSpot, you can use different blogs in different strategies, for example by gating one blog and leaving another open. This might be considered if you want to do a specialized blog only for registrants.

2. Landing and website pages

Landing and website pages are also elements that you can, individually, make private. Set up a registration gate on certain pages can be wanted for different reasons.

3. Knowledge base

For the knowledge base, you can put individual articles private. If you want to apply the registration to multiple pages, you have the opportunity to do it in bulk. This can be wanted if you want for example only to leave the access to your customers.

When you shouldn't go for private content

1. SEO

The thing with making content private is that it isn't crawled by search engines. The other consequence is that every aspect of your website has an impact on the SEO. When a piece of content is not taken into account, it prevents the page or post to give SEO benefits to the rest of the website. So if those are your objectives, private content might not be the appropriate thing to do.

2. Valuable content that could interest your audience

Related to the SEO question, not being on search engines on certain topics will prevent people to find the page/article through search engines, while this can be something that would have brought people to you. Make sure that you don't miss any opportunity on this aspect. Another side of this, is that gating content might bring people away from you. You could be missing an opportunity to convert people by asking too soon for them to register. So pay attention to it.

Private content or not, you need to create a content strategy to pursue your business goals. Download our templates here: