There are several reasons to create private content on your website. You may want to gate a premium piece of content for exclusive subscribers. Or, perhaps you need to hide certain information because it’s only relevant to your paying customers. No matter the case, with HubSpot’s Marketing Enterprise CMS Membership tool, you can easily control which audiences see individual web pages, landing pages, and blog posts.
What is HubSpot’s CMS Membership?
HubSpot’s CMS Membership allows Marketing Enterprise users with publishing permissions to control what audience has access to pages and blogs. By using HubSpot lists to determine who has access and who doesn’t, you can quickly create private content or membership-only content.
You can either make your visitors create a password to view the content or have them register with their email to receive access. It’s important to note that search engines will not crawl private content, so be sure to carefully examine what you’re gating if you’re interested in maintaining good SEO for that content. You can also stay on top of who has access to this information directly on their contact record. And, if they need help to reset a password or to register, you can email them details directly from their record as well.
How to Make Blogs Private
Using CMS Membership at the blog level can make sharing premium content to your audience a cinch. For example, you can automatically enroll your existing subscribers with the list selection feature, or expand your audience by creating new lists.
Here are the steps to make individual blogs private:
- Navigate to Marketing, then Website > Blog
- Click “Select a blog to modify” in the dropdown menu
- Hit the General tab, then select “This is a private blog – registration required”
- Choose your lists by hitting Select Lists from the dropdown menu
- Click Save
How to Make Landing Pages and Web Pages Private
Restricting access to your landing pages and web pages is useful for companies to provide exclusive content for their paying customers or members. With this feature, you have two options to make your content private: Putting it behind a password you give to your customers or requiring them to create a username and password themselves.
Here are the steps to make certain individual pages private:
- Navigate to the landing page or web page under website
- Select the actual page you wish to make private
- Click Edit, then Settings
- Hit Control Audience Access, then select from your options:
- Public – default
- Private: password required
- Private: registration required. Selecting this option involves additional steps. Click the dropdown menu and select the checkbox(es) next to the list(s) of contacts that will have access to this content. These contacts will receive an automated registration email to create a password to view this page – which also automates password resets when needed.
What Content Should Be Private?
Plenty of businesses have product information they need to share with their customers that may not fit anywhere on their public website, thus creating the need for membership content like this. Outside of creating a login for paying customers, there are other reasons you may consider restricting access to certain blogs or pages:
- You want to share premium content with a select audience
- You’re looking to generate leads from gated content
- You’re hosting an event, such as a webinar, that people need to register for
- You want to hide pricing information to only qualified leads
- You want to share roadmap information with customers in a secure location
Lynton’s All Access Content
We saw the value of creating membership-only content at Lynton. After brainstorming on how to execute this, we created our All Access Content where interested blog readers can sign up to get access to all of our articles, guides, webinars, infographics, and more – without having to fill out form after form to download the premium pieces.
We utilized the Control Audience Access feature within the CMS Membership to restrict this page to a specific blog subscriber list. To receive the content, people have to register by creating a username and password. Now, All Access members can benefit from all our content, and we can download the registration and sign in activity to learn more about how often they access it. This kind of information can help us determine what type of content to create more and less of.
Wrapping Up
Creating private content is easily done with HubSpot’s CMS. In a few short steps, you can gate certain pieces for lead generation, event registration, customer-only information, and more. For help controlling your audiences, reach out today.
