If you're trying to get visitors to engage with your site's content and share it, it helps to create the kind of content with which they'll want to interact. That's not easy, but if you start with the right idea, and put yourself in your readers' shoes, you'll be surprised as how popular your site could become.
It's hard to resist something that encourages you to interact with it, or that seems to be interacting with you. That's why video games are so much fun. And when we're having fun with something, we naturally want to share it with others. The content ideas I'm going to give you today, mostly from Jordan Kasteler's recent guest post on Search Engine Land, will help get your readers involved and interacting with your content and your website.
The first one that comes to mind as a type of content that can engage your readers is “The Quiz.” Casteler notes that quizzes are popular for several reasons: “they're interactive, they're fun, and they're user-focused.” And anyone who takes a quiz will naturally want to pass it on to his friends, so they see what results they each got. So there's a built-in spur to discussion.
Casteler notes that there are three main types of quizzes. The first kind is user-focused. These can be whimsical (“Which Superhero Are You?”) or quite serious (“Are You Saving Enough For Retirement?”). You can build either kind around the product or service you offer. You might even be able to disguise a serious quiz as a whimsical one. I haven't seen anyone do this yet, but imagine an investment company offering a 10-question quiz that asks what you would do if you suddenly won increasing amounts of money (say $100, $1,000, $10,000, $50,000, etc). From your answers, they could get a sense for what kind of investor you are. Obviously, serious investments with them will rely on more than just a quiz, but it would make a nice icebreaker, wouldn't it?
The second type of quiz tests your knowledge. There's one out there that challenges you to name all 50 United States capitals in 10 minutes. I'm really bad at geography, so the quiz that asks you to name all the 50 states in the United States in 10 minutes is more my speed (I got 46 the last time I tried). This quiz boasts a particularly nice interface; as you enter each name into a box, if it's correct, the name sails down from the text box onto the correct state on a blank map of the US that shows all the state borders. There's a count down clock, and if you press the “Give up?” button before your time is up, it fills in the names of the blank states in red (the state names you guess successfully show up in black). You don't need a fancy interface to make this work, but it does add to the fun.
Speaking of fun, the third kind of quiz is just for fun. You can even make it kind of silly; Casteler points to the one that asks you to guess whether you're seeing the name of a rapper or McDonald's menu item. In a sense, it's a subset of the “test your knowledge” kind of quiz. Keep it quick, make it fun, and visitors are more likely to share it.
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