Across our sites, our quizzes reach millions every month – educating and entertaining people from markets all over the world. But this kind of reach doesn’t just happen overnight. Our content is carefully crafted over time to engage users, inspire them to share and keep them coming back for more. Today, our talented team of writers share their top tips for creating the perfect quiz.
Know your audience
The secret weapon to creating a viral quiz is data and using it smartly to better understand your audience. By segmenting our audience and creating custom content that specifically meets their needs, our traffic can reach new heights. This is why we build a profile for our target user to better understand who they are and what topics they might be interested in. Once we have this, we can adopt a style of writing that will appeal to them and build results that they will genuinely want to share.
“Your writing style should be easy to read, but also deep enough to be taken seriously. Sense of humor is always important. Writing quizzes is not the same as writing a book: if you want your quiz to succeed, you should always put your audience first. I always try to research who my audience is and to think like them. It should be a balance between surprising them and giving them the result they wanted all along.” – Patricia
Find a hot topic
Finding a relevant topic is key to clinching a quiz with some virality. We utilize Google Trends, social media and tools such as Alltop to stay informed and keep up to date with the latest movements which may inspire content ideas.
It’s also good practice to think outside the box and find a unique perspective when fine-tuning a quiz idea. There are hundreds of quizzes for example, asking ‘What Kind of Dog Are You?’, but why not take this one step further and give something extra to spark your readers interest? ‘These 10 Questions Will Determine Which Hogwarts House Your Dog Is In’ has a much more enticing spin to it, don’t you think?
“To create a successful quiz there are at least 3 main points: motivation, research, and imagination. A mixture of these with a good understanding of your readers, is the perfect combination.” – Elena
Pick a click-worthy title
Whether we like it or not, people tend to judge a book by its cover and if you can’t get the initial click it doesn’t matter how amazing the rest of your content is. Good quiz titles let your audience know what they’re getting into, so we try to be straightforward and honest when choosing ours. In addition to transparency, a powerful title should make your readers feel something – when you can trigger an emotional response, you’re more likely to draw users in.
Write compelling questions
If your questions are boring, then your users will leave the quiz quickly. We try to keep our questions short, funny and easy to understand. Simplicity is key and making sure the reader understands what your asking of them makes all the difference between a user engaging with the question or leaving the quiz altogether.
Finding new and interesting ways of asking questions is important too. Instead of asking, ‘Which food do you like most?’, we would go for ‘If you could eat only one meal for the rest of your life, what would it be?’ And don’t forget your images. Pictures are a great addition to any question. They tell a lot using very little space and, we find, help keep our readers more engaged in the content.
Create irresistibly share-worthy results
People like to share results that are entertaining and make them look cool or intelligent. Make the results all about them. Results don’t have to be positive, but if they are going to be snarky then we make sure that they are genuinely funny. When writing results, we always ask ourselves – would we share this?
Don’t believe us? You can discover thousands of great content on our leading GimmeMore quiz platform and see for yourselves!