I will be the first to admit that I have been very skeptical about “setting my content free” (not using forms in front of eBooks and whitepapers.)  I feel like if my job is lead generation then I have to capture those downloading.  But after much deliberation and hearing it again and again from David Meerman Scott (I have seen him speak 4 times and I read his books, eBooks and blog), I decided to give it a shot.  I had a new eBook I wanted to promote to my in-house database.  I created a couple of different emails targeted at the segments that the eBook was relevant to.  In the emails, I had a link asking the reader to download the eBook.  Next to the link I was sure to call out that no registration was required.

I will admit that this was not true A/B testing but the results were still outstanding.  Compared to an email promoting an eBook with similar content to the same segments of the database, I saw a 1600% increase in the number of clickthroughs.

Because we can track clickthroughs in our marketing automation system, Eloqua,  the sales team did not lose any information about who was downloading the eBook.  Now, they just had more people to follow-up with.

If you are still scared to set all of your content free, try it with just a couple of eBooks or whitepapers and be sure to track the results.