Do-You-Know and Can-You-Guess Blog Marketing

“Do You Know Who Invented These Life-Saving Vaccines?” the editors of Mental Floss Magazine ask readers. (Who created the rabies vaccine?) “How Much Do You Know About Black Cats?” (Are there more male than female black cats?) “How Much Do You Know About Jeopardy? (How many clues are written for each session?)”Can You Guess the Gadgets Star Trek Invented?” (TiVo was not.) (“Can You Define These Colonial-Era Slang Words and Phrases?” (What does it mean to describe something as macaroni?)

“Interactive content creates a two-way dialogue between two parties, seopresser.com explains. Quizzes grow your list in several ways, Chelsea of herpaperroute.com adds, because:

1. In order for them to see their results, they must sign up to your list.
2. Readers will be segmented depending on what answers they click on.

At Say It For You, we’ve found, even if readers are not required to sign up for your list, quizzes are a very good strategy in blog marketing. Blog readers tend to be curious creatures and “self-tests” tend to engage and help readers relate in a more personal way to information presented in a blog.

Another aspect of quizzes is that they offer variety. Since one of the biggest challenges in blogging for business over long periods of time is keeping the content fresh, quizzes help vary the menu.

To me as a content writer, there are three even more important aspects to quizzes in blog posts:

1. People are looking to their advisors for more than just information; they need perspective. In other words, quiz questions and answers can to offer a different perspective on fact sets readers have forgotten.
2. When readers strain to remember something and then find the answer, they tend to repeat that fact set in their conversations with others.
3. Our curiosity is most intense when we’re testing our own knowledge, making tests, games, and quizzes hard to resist.

All in all, “Do-You-Know?” and “Can-You-Guess?” are great tactics for blog marketing.