The Beginner’s Guide to Creating Quizzes for Your Website

You can’t just open up wordpress and type in a quiz (unfortunately). Quizzes are much more involved and take the use of a tool to create. So why even bother? Is it really worth it to make quizzes? It absolutely is. Quizzes not only have the potential to drive massive traffic (Buzzfeed averages 1.5 million visits per quiz), but you can also use quizzes to grow your email list (we have one client who has collected over 10,000 emails from one quiz). Quizzes have a lot of moving parts, and it can be daunting to create one (especially if you are the one on your team tasked with doing it and your boss says he’s counting on you to make this a success). Don’t worry, I’ve personally helped over 1000 businesses create quizzes – from corporate giants like Ericcson to one-person shops like Clark Wire and Cable in Akron Ohio. I’ve broken this tutorial down into three sections. First, how to design your quiz, second how to write the questions and results, and third how to share and embed your quiz for maximum visibility. By the time your done with this tutorial, you will be a quiz master.

Part 1: Designing your quiz.

Not surprisingly, the way your quiz looks has a direct effect on how many people decide to take it. Design is a beast that’s tough to tame, but we’ve created some helpful guides to make the process a bit easier. Here are the top considerations to keep in mind when it comes to designing your quiz.

• Follow your brand’s guidelines. It’s very important to keep continuity between your quiz and your company’s overall design. Quizzes get shared all over the place, from social sites to reddit, to news blogs – and you want to be sure and carry your brand through everywhere the quiz goes.
• Don’t overdo the style. If you decide to branch out and get creative, don’t go too crazy. To help you decide on color schemes, we’ve created a nice little visual guide to which colors of font and background go well together. Check it out below.

Part 2: Writing your quiz

This is the part you are probably already good at, but I’ll throw some pointers your way based on what I’ve learned from creating a ton of quizzes. The general theme of these tips is that quizzes are a one-to-one medium, meaning that you are able to speak directly to another person through a quiz rather than addressing a large audience all at once the way you do with blog posts that are a one-to-many medium. Without further rambling, here are the pointers I’ve got for writing the different elements of a quiz. Writing quiz titles. The title alone accounts for 80% of clicks to your quiz. The other 20% is design and such, but the lion’s share of your quiz traffic will be attracted by how your quiz is named. Here are a few quiz title templates that tend to outperform just about everything else.

• The “Actually” title: “How much do you actually know about technology?” this quiz is a spin-off of a simple knowledge test. In reality you are simply checking to see how much people know about a particular subject, but by adding the word “actually” the quiz becomes a challenge – and no one likes to back down from a challenge.
• The Celebrity comparison title: “Which Celebrity would play you in the movie version of your life?” when you look at this one objectively, the real quiz is just an adaptation of the meyers-briggs personality quiz, but when you add a layer of pop culture it becomes so much more fun.
• The Which Blank are you? title: “What kind of cake are you?” is a quiz recently created by Food 52, a New York based entertainment site – the quiz has received over 20,000 visits today. The nice thing about this one is that you can adapt it to virtually any business, and once again, it’s just an altercation of the traditional personality quiz.

Writing quiz questions The questions are my favorite part of the quiz-making process. This is where you get a chance to speak directly with every single person who takes your quiz and build up some rapport with them. This is the real magic of quizzes, the ability to be conversational and candid with hundreds or thousands of people all at the same time. Here are my top tips for being conversational.

• Follow the pub rule. This is a rule named after the Irish Post, an Irish newspaper that created a quiz which received 10,000 visits in one day. They did such an amazing job of making their questions conversational. Basically what the rule means is that you should only ask questions and speak in a style that would be fitting if you were sitting in a pub chatting with some friends.
• Get a bit personal. People really enjoy talking about themselves. Ask your quiz takers personal questions and give them a stage to express themselves. With a bit of perceptiveness you can deduce the right answers to your quiz questions so that people can pick an answer they feel represents them well.
• Keep it short. Don’t ask too many questions, and don’t drone on with the questions you do ask. We all like to talk about ourselves, but we also have very short attention spans (two minutes online). That means you should keep your quiz fifteen questions or less.

Writing the results of your quiz.

The quiz questions were your chance to build a connection with your quiz takers, and the results are your chance to have them share your quiz and click through to check out your actual website. The results are where you get the chance to get value out of your visitors, and here are some things to keep in mind to maximize that value.

• Follow Shaq’s rule. NBA all star Shaquille O’neal has a formula for twitter that also applies to quiz results. His formula states that 80% of your content should be made to entertain, 15% should be to inform, and 5% should be to sell. Your quiz results should mostly be fun, a little bit to be informational, and there should be a very brief call to action asking people to share or click on an offer.
• Be positive. No one wants to take a quiz and find a result that tells them they suck. Make each and every one of your results positive and uplifting. If you do this, people will be more likely to share, since we like to look good on social media sites and share things that are positive.
• Prepare for sharing. There is a specific formula that works best for sharing quizzes. It goes like this “I got (my result)(name of the quiz)” for example “I got Jennifer Aniston, which celebrity are you?” Name your result titles appropriately to encourage sharing.

Part 3: Sharing and embedding your quiz

Every quiz is different – some perform best on Facebook, others on Twitter, and still others work best as blog posts. You’ll want to get your quiz out on all platforms to maximize the possibility of it really blowing up. Here is how to share your quiz everywhere.

On Facebook. Facebook is the leading source of traffic for quizzes. Partly because they look very nice when shared on Facebook, and partly because we waste time on Facebook and quizzes are amazing time wasters. There are actually two different ways to share on Facebook, I’ll go over both.

1. On the timeline. You can share quizzes directly onto a Facebook timeline by adding an image and a link. Check out the example below.

2. As a custom tab. This one’s a bit more involved, but not to worry, here’s a guide for embedding quizzes in a custom Facebook tab. This option works best if you want to have your quiz as a more permanent fixture. One good example of when this makes sense comes from UC Davis. They created a quiz “Which Famous Aggie are You?” and added it to a custom tab on their associated students page. That way when new students visit the Facebook page they can take a fun quiz and feel immediately welcome into the UC Davis family.

On Twitter. Twitter ranks second when it comes to sending traffic to quizzes. The formula here works virtually the same as for Facebook.

On your blog. To add a quiz to a blog post, you’ll need to embed a simple code. If you’ve embedded a youtube video in your blog or website before, it works exactly like that. If you haven’t, here’s a guide for embedding into WordPress.

So that’s it – everything you need to know to get up and running with quizzes of your very own. Once you get the basics down, it’s pretty simple to create quizzes and start driving traffic and generating leads. To take advantage of these tips, make your own quiz and see what kind of results you can get!