It is important to share content that is valuable and of interest to the people in your networks. As I scroll down my LinkedIn Home Page, I navigate to the people and articles that inform, educate and provide reference material for conversation, training or blogging. I’m also interested to see what my network is posting and what they find valuable.
I see quite a bit of content shared from the Wall Street Journal, Harvard Business Review, local business publications and membership sites. While these are great articles to post, they often are not freely accessible. Why? It’s gated content for subscribers only. Not all newspapers, magazines or websites give all their content away. Unfamiliar with what gated content is? Click here to read and watch Rand Fishkin’s take on gated content.
If you are a subscriber and see an article that you want to share with your network, be careful. You can post it, however when the other person clicks they will be taken to the source website and receive an alert to either subscribe or sign-in.
Below is an example of a post I saw on LinkedIn that I was interested in reading but couldn’t. I checked back on the WSJ site before publishing this Quick Tip and the article remains gated. By the way, this is not a knock on the WSJ or any other publication that has subscription, premium, or gated content. It’s a part of their revenue model.
Sometimes the publisher will release the subscriber-only article after a few days. Not always though.
Note to self; before sharing an article or post, you may want to sign out of the publication you were reading, go to Google and see if the content is available to everyone. If not, hold the article for a few days and test it again before sharing. I know this doesn’t help when it’s timely content but it’s also not helpful when no one can read it.
The puropose of this Quick Tip is to remind you to be thoughtful about the content you’re sharing – share the articles/posts that are most valuable, relevant and widely share-able to your network.
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