inbound marketing

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.

SEO Basics for the Online Business DIYer

Five minutes of exposure to any form of today’s media—TV, magazines, the blitzkrieg of emails from trendy companies you don’t remember giving your email address to—will tell you that we’re living in the Do-It-Yourself era. Grow a vegetable garden on your windowsill! Get that kitchen you always dreamed of! Cook Thai cuisine at home! The ever-growing lineup of home renovation shows and YouTube videos on How to Trick People into Thinking You’re Good Looking are now being joined by another category of DIYers: the online entrepreneurs. Where we used to see ads for designer business cards, now it’s all about website design (GoDaddy.com, WhoIs.com, and Wix.com, to name a few). More and more self-starters are taking their businesses online without the help of web designers. So how do you know if you’re doing it right?

Successfully marketing your business online is more than simply having a pretty website (though we certainly appreciate the pretty ones too). The DIY website operator needs one very important tool in his or her skills toolbox: search engine optimization (SEO). Without it, your site will be about as visible as a sandwich board on the side of a dirt road in back-country New Mexico.

So what is SEO, anyway?

SEO is what makes your website show up in Internet searches; knowing some SEO basics can mean the difference between being on page 1 or page 237 of Google search results. You want to make sure your website will be found easily by potential customers.

Can I really do SEO on my own?

Yes, yes, a thousand times, yes! Okay, so maybe you don’t need to be as dramatic as a Jane Austen heroine, but celebration is definitely in order. SEO doesn’t require coding or even knowledge of HTML; it’s about word choice and placement. What’s that? Could it really be that simple? The following SEO tips for beginners should get you started.

1. Use your words

Choose your keywords carefully (these being the words potential visitors are likely to enter into a search engine), and direct their placement even more so. Your primary keyword should be in the page’s URL, your content’s title, the page description, and ideally in the first 50 words of your body text. Keywords should appear throughout your content but not so often as to make the writing feel clumsy or spammy.

2. Tag, you’re it!

Don’t neglect your alt tags and image tags! With every image and link on your page, you have an opportunity to pump up your keyword usage. These tags (the text that appears when you hover your mouse over an image or link) should always be filled in with a concise label or description that contains your primary keyword.

3. A picture is worth a thousand clicks

A trick to jumping ahead in search engine rankings is to use different forms of media. Not only will eye-catching images and interesting videos appeal to visitors to your website, but they’ll also show up in image or video searches and even in regular web results. As Google displays the most relevant videos and images at the top of its results pages, you can sneak into visibility ahead of even the best-optimized text-only websites.

4. Content is king, but you don’t have to be a prince from Bel Air to be fresh!

We can’t stress enough the importance of fresh, relevant content. Visitors to your website won’t stick around (or come back) if what they find was last updated in 2002. That being said, constantly posting updates just for the sake of updating while falling behind on real need or quality won’t help you. Be mindful of what you’re saying when you post. Are you addressing the current needs and inquiries of your customers? Are you staying up to date and on top of trends? Determine a reasonable strategy, whether it means daily social media posts, posting blogs or articles two to three times a week, or seasonal promotions.

5. Feel the need—the need for speed!

Nobody likes a sluggish website. When the next option is only a click away, the chances of a potential customer actually waiting for a stalling website to load are slim to none. Cut down on bandwidth-hogging applications like Flash or JavaScript, and compress your files and images. Page speed is factored into search engine rankings.

6. Stay mobile

The popular build-a-site websites we mentioned earlier each come with arsenals of free templates for the not-so-technically-inclined. Make sure to choose one that is also designed to suit mobile devices. Not only are visitors unlikely to stay on your page if it isn’t readable on their phones and tablets, but Google is now factoring mobile optimization into its ranking system.

7. ‘Cause it’s all about those links, ’bout those links, no bouncing!

Basic but beautiful is the concept of linking back to your own website. Every time you post new content, include a link back to your site, be it to your homepage, landing page, or archive. If you’re using social media to market your business (and you really should be), include links to your website in your posts. Finally, establish relationships with relevant websites so that you can provide links to each other’s sites. Each link means more potential traffic and a greater chance of appearing in search engine results; just make sure that links to your site are appearing on legitimate, relevant pages.

How do I know if it’s working?

What is success if you can’t see it? Take a moment now to sign up for Google Analytics. This comprehensive system of tools lets you track who your customers are, what it is they need, what they’re looking at on your website, and how they’re reacting to it. You can also monitor what paths bring visitors to your website and from what kinds of devices so that you can continue tweaking your site to further drive traffic and conversions. From there, the power is all yours!

What Can Our Copywriting Resources Do For You?

What is the most important part of a business’s website? Is it the product descriptions? The pictures? The navigation system? No, the most essential part of any website is its killer content. The content is what builds up a website’s search engine ranking, and it’s what keeps customers coming back for more. That’s why it’s more important than ever to make sure that your content shines.

But what if you’re not the best writer or think your writing could be improved? Having to create all this content can be overwhelming.

Don’t fret! With a willingness to learn and the right resources, you can easily improve your content writing skills and develop the knowledge and habits to consistently produce stellar content for your blog or website. Check out the list below to learn some copywriting tips that will form the basis of your copywriting education.

1. Copywriters are, first and foremost, writers.

Businesses want their website copy to be persuasive and earn the trust of potential customers. The best way to do this, however, is not to stuff the website with dry company information or grandiose but empty promises. Producing engaging copy is no different than producing an engaging novel: it must be grounded in a solid understanding of grammar, language, and storytelling.

If a website’s content is poorly written—either filled with typos or filled with cheesy slogans—it says something about the company that produced it. Before you write your website’s copy, make sure you thoroughly edit your work and employ the art of telling a story.

2. Copywriters write for the reader.

As a copywriter, try to put yourself in customers’ shoes. Put yourself into the minds of readers to understand how to speak to them. If your company has developed buyer personas, reviewing these is a great way to create a mindset that will allow you to write something they will want to read. In addition to enticing potential clients to read the content, once you know whom you are writing for, you can help the reader to look at things from a particular perspective. For instance, if you want to draw attention to the benefits of a particular product, gear the article toward the reader by uniting the problems the reader is likely experiencing with the solutions offered by your product.

3. Copywriters write for the business.

In addition to aligning themselves with readers, copywriters should align themselves with their company’s goals. By maintaining good communication with employers and other team members, all parties know what will be included in the copy to produce the desired outcome. This way, the content produced by you, the copywriter, will be in tune with the specific end goals of the business. If you know the end goals, you can clearly convey your company’s message to the public.

4. Copywriters write using search engine optimization.

The Internet categorizes information based on relevance. Search engines will pull up articles that fit certain keywords based on criteria such as the articles’ content, metadata, and posting date. Copywriters need to be aware of what keywords and phrases to include to ensure that the content is optimized and can be found by the readers who are looking for it. This way, the content is brought up in searches more often and will increase the visibility of your site. You should also make sure that the content is not simply stuffed with keywords but incorporates them in a way that sounds natural. This will make the content more enjoyable to read and will help your site avoid penalties from Google.

Conclusion

There’s always something new to learn in the field of copywriting. In addition to having a solid grasp of grammar and being a good writer, copywriters need to stay abreast of new trends and changes in search engine optimization best practices. There is no “finish line” when you’re a copywriter; there’s always a new challenge to overcome or a new skill to learn. This can be daunting, but remember that you don’t have to do it all alone.