driving traffic

Dissecting the Anatomy of Quizzes as Content

Editor’s Note: The following is a guest post written by JP Misenas. JP is the Content Marketing Director and Audio/Visual Technician/Engineer at Interact.

Nowadays, people have begun using quizzes as a form of content to enhance their brand’s strategy. The goal of content is to attract readers, but good content makes all the difference in the world when it comes to the volume of traffic it can attract.

You might be surprised to find out that quizzes aren’t just great for engaging audiences and boosting social traffic. In marketing, they’re also capable of driving revenue (depending on what your brand is marketing) and generating leads. But you might already know that.

Regardless, we’re here to help you create your own quiz.

At Interact, we’ve helped over 10,000 brands create over 25,000 quizzes, so it’s safe to say that we know a thing or two about creating them; however, there’s more to it than that. As a writer myself, I know that the success of a piece of content depends heavily on its quality.

Today, we’ll take a look at how to create your own quiz and, specifically, how to draft copy that’s engaging, clear, and highly shareable. We’ll dissect the entire creation process from the inside out so that you can create phenomenal content in the form of a quiz. So, what are we waiting for?

Coming Up with an Exciting Title that Attracts

There’s more to a title than most would think. The title of your quiz can say a great deal about its contents and about your brand. The title conveys what is to come, and when it comes to sharing your quiz later on, it’s the very first thing everyone will see.

If you want people to crowd around your quiz, you will want to come up with a title that not only attracts but also engages. What do we mean by that? We’re looking for a title that screams “Hey, this is something you’ll like. Take a look!”

Here are some templates that you can work with when coming up with a title for your quiz:

The “Challenge” Template – Did you know a question changes drastically when you add the word “actually” to it? For instance, take a look at the difference between “How Much Do You Know about Disney/Pixar Movies?” to “How Much Do You Actually Know about Disney/Pixar Movies?” It’s amazing how one word can transform a simple question into a challenge. Use this title template to see if your audience is up to the task. It’s got the perfect grab, and it generates a lot of buzz.

The “Which One Are You?” Template – You’ll probably come across this title often. These quizzes simply ask questions like “Which General Mills Cereal Are You?” They’re simple, fun, and straight to the point. Consider using this title to entice audiences into figuring out which one of something that they are. Take advantage of the fact that these are frequently shared on social media networks.

The “Which One Are You?” Template (Celebrity Remix) – Yep, you heard it. You can put a spin on a title template just by making it revolve around celebrities. Just like its predecessor, it prompts readers to find out who they are most like. The results are fun, and people tend to retake this quiz just to get a different outcome. Consider using this template for the same reason as the “Which One Are You?” template.

Picking the Right Type of Quiz for You

Once you’ve settled on a title that you think works best for you, it’s time to figure out what kind of quiz you want to create. “What?” you might ask. “There’s more than one kind?” You bet! There are two types of quizzes, so choose the one that you feel would be a perfect fit for your target audience:

The Personality Quiz – This type of quiz aims to compliment its taker, and the “self-serving bias” is what makes it so effective. It categorizes people into personalities based on their answers.

The Knowledge Test – This type of quiz challenges how much someone knows about a given subject and delivers results based on accuracy. It’s used as a method to gauge the knowledge of an audience and lets them know how well they did.

Creating the Perfect Questions for Engagement

Not many people know this, but the questions in a quiz are where you can establish a direct, one-on-one connection with your audience. This kind of engagement is amazing and is easily overlooked. In order for you to make the most out of the opportunity, here are some ways to craft the perfect quiz questions:

Inject Your Personality – Infusing who you are into your questions can go a long way with your audience. Approach them as if you were talking to them in person. This sets a more relaxed tone and allows your audience to get comfortable with you.

Make Use of Images – Creating a quiz isn’t just about asking questions; it’s about providing an experience that your audience will enjoy and remember. Including images makes your quiz much more engaging and can instantly transform it into a trivia game. The quiz is already fun, but there’s definitely no harm in making it even more fun.

Keep Things Simple – It’s a good idea to aim to include six to ten questions in your quiz. Keeping things short and simple will allow your audience to spend no more than two or three minutes on your quiz, which is just the right amount of time for most people.

Drafting an Effective Lead Capture

At the end of the day, most of us are focused on creating content that delivers results. If lead generation is your thing, gating your quiz with a lead capture form is the perfect way to obtain your audience’s contact information in exchange for their quiz results. Here are a couple of things to keep in mind when optimizing the opt-in rate:

Be Honest about Your Marketing – Most lead captures will include a privacy policy. This is just to let your audience know what you’ll be doing with their information. Others include the option of skipping the lead capture form altogether.

Consider the Use of Incentives – There’s nothing wrong with offering a little value to your audience. If you want to increase the chances of your audience giving you their contact information, offer things like a free ebook, a personalized email with some advice, or maybe even an entry into a free giveaway. Be creative.

Don’t Ask for Too Much – Only ask for information that you’ll actually use. For instance, what’s the point in asking for a phone number if you’ll never call it?

Delivering Highly Shareable Results

To complete your quiz, come up with results worth sharing. The kind of results you deliver to your audience is crucial to how viral your quiz will become. If you want people to share their results from your quiz, make sure you follow these tips:

Evoke Positive Emotions – You want your results to make people feel good. Positive emotions promote sharing, and vice versa, and no one ever posts results if these results suggest something unpleasant or unattractive. Be encouraging, but make sure that you also speak the truth.

Use Images Worth Sharing – In most cases, when people share results, an image appears when the post goes up. Be sure to use images that attract people’s attention so that they’ll be curious about your quiz and take it.

Include a Call-to-Action – It doesn’t hurt to include a link to your brand website, or maybe your products/services, in your results. Some marketers have even included links to relevant articles or landing pages, depending on the kind of quiz and the results given.

Let’s Review What We’ve Learned

Today, we saw that there’s much more to a quiz than just coming up with a title, filling it up with questions, and generating results. Title creation requires a good amount of thought to ensure that it’s strong enough to captivate audiences, and the choice of the quiz type plays an important role, as well.

How you structure the questions in a quiz will also determine how engaging it is, and there are several ways to improve the opt-in rate if you’re in it for lead generation. Finally, creating results that get shared across the Internet will be the deciding factor in how popular your quiz becomes.

When creating your own quiz, put everything you’ve learned today into practice. Taking the time to flesh it out will be what turns boring content into great content. Aim to create something entertaining every time, and it will be worth implementing in your strategy.

JP Misenas is the Content Marketing Director & Audio/Visual Technician/Engineer of Interact, a place for creating entertaining and engaging quizzes that generate email leads. He writes about innovative ways to connect with customers and to build professional, long-lasting relationships with them. Connect with him on Twitter @jollibeats or @tryinteract.

Taking the First Page on Google with SEO Content Writing

There’s nothing worse than spending hours on content writing for your business’s website, only to then lose that content in the abyss that is the Internet. One of the most important parts of creating quality content is taking steps to ensure you have an audience to read it. Writing with SEO principles in mind can help you make sure that your articles aren’t lost in the sea of competing content.

Learn the SEO basics

Before you began marketing your business, you may never have heard about search engine optimization (SEO). That’s okay—most people haven’t. If you haven’t been trained in the basics of SEO, you may not know the best way to catch a search engine’s attention. What you need to do is educate yourself. Learn how to optimize your content so you get the highest number of hits per article possible. There’s lots of SEO information available online, and there are seminars you can attend and courses you can take to improve your SEO knowledge. Knowledge of the SEO basics will allow you to seamlessly incorporate keywords and phrases into your articles to help search engines find your content and your business.

Understand your market

Your SEO strategy will only be effective if you have a good understanding of the market you’re trying to attract. Because you’ll be working to attract your audience on a daily basis, you need to know as much about that audience as you can. Using consumer comment tools is a good way to learn about your readers. Take the feedback you receive from your audience, and use the best of it to ensure that you’re adapting your articles to the people reading them. Keeping your articles in tune with the needs and wants of your readers will help you attract and retain an even larger readership than you may have otherwise.

Focus on quality

Whether you outsource your editing needs or assign them to in-house workers, you should have editors checking your articles, blog posts, and other content for any potential errors. Your editing process should involve multiple sets of eyes looking at your content before you publish it. Quality always trumps quantity, especially when it comes to SEO content writing.

Why Keyword Research Isn’t as Hard as You Think

Research: You dreaded it in high school, you learned to loathe it during college or university, and you swore an oath to avoid it as much as possible after graduation. Now you’ve started your own business, and you’re working on optimizing your website for search engines. You can’t help but notice that the word “research” keeps creeping up everywhere. It’s not just any research—it’s keyword research, and you have no idea how to do it. You don’t want to know how to do it. You swore off formal research long ago, and you’re determined to stick to your convictions.

Well, my stubborn friend, it’s time to start breaking some oaths, because keyword research is an inevitable necessity of search engine optimization (SEO). Here is a simple guide to teach you how to do keyword research. I promise to make it seem as little like research as possible, though I do have to point out that your reading this article is actually research. (Sorry to burst your “keeping-my-oath-no-matter-what” bubble.)

Step 1: Use Common Sense

You’ve used a search engine before, right? Unless you’ve been living in a cave for the last two decades (in which case I applaud your business aspirations), there’s no way you aren’t extremely familiar with search engines like Google. Because you already have lots of experience as a searcher, the initial stage of keyword research is easy. All you have to do is think about what you would search for if you were looking for content like the content you’re trying to optimize. So, first you need to pick the page(s) you’re optimizing.

Let’s start with an obvious one—your home page. If your company sells energy-efficient lightbulbs, your home page is basically going to say, “We sell this specific type of lightbulb because it’s better than other lightbulbs.” So, what would a searcher type in if they were looking for a company like yours that they didn’t yet know existed? Make a list of possible search terms. For example:

You can also conduct keyword research before you write a blog post. Think broadly about the topic you’re hoping to write about. Again, make a list of possible words and phrases people could type to get them to a blog post about that topic. If you complete your keyword research before writing something, you can integrate those keywords more organically into your prose, which will help you avoid keyword stuffing (which is including keywords too frequently, making your writing sound awkward and unnatural).

Step 2: Start Your Research

Now that you have a general list of keywords to investigate further, you’re going to need to use a keyword tool. The most common tool for keyword research is the Google AdWords Keyword Planner. Plug the list of potential keywords and phrases you came up with in the first step into the Keyword Planner.

The first thing you need to look at is the average monthly search volume for each keyword or phrase you’ve searched. Discard low-volume keywords. You might also need to get rid of keywords with extremely high search volumes, especially if these words are not directly related to your page. For example, the keyword “lightbulb” will have a much higher search volume than “energy efficient lightbulbs,” but the latter will be more likely to attract the right kind of visitors to your site: visitors who are more likely to convert to leads and then to customers. Finally, check the level of competition for each search term; the higher the competition level, the less likely you are to rank high for that keyword.

Step 3: Check Out Your Competition

Okay, so you’ve narrowed your first list down according to search volume. You should have a considerably shorter list to work with now. The next step is to see what your competition is up to. This part is simple. Just search for each potential keyword and see what results you get. If the results page is dominated by major brands or giant companies, don’t use that keyword. You’re not going to beat gigantic brands for the top spot, and if your site never makes it into at least the top 10 of the search page results, no one is going to click on you. You’ll have better results if you use a less popular keyword but make it into the top results for that keyword.

The other thing you need to do in this stage is to ensure that your keyword or phrase means what you think it means. If your search term tends to get results about something completely unrelated to what your company is selling, you need a new keyword.

If you complete the third step and find none of your original keyword ideas work, never fear! Go back to the second step, and look at the keywords suggested by Keyword Planner. Then proceed to the third step again.

Step 4: The Final Step

Congratulations! You’ve learned how to do keyword research. The next step is integrating those keywords into your copy for maximum SEO benefits. Check out this article to learn where you can place those well-researched keywords you’ve decided to use.