Capturing people’s attention is an essential part of blogging. Without it, your blog would be useless. Yes, there are lots of ways to do that. But one of the best ones is by gamifying your blog.
Gamifying has invaded the e-learning landscape because of its effectiveness in fostering engagement. It’s also proven to boost brand awareness and make your content more enjoyable. If you want to propel your blog to greater heights, then the gamification strategy is for you.
But this isn’t just about playing games. Instead, it’s all about engagement and mental stimulation. This gives your blog a more solid audience due to our innate nature of loving games.
In fact, the iTunes App Store currently has over 396,000 game apps. There are even lots of LMS gamification systems nowadays — proof of our fondness for games. With this, it’s safe to say that sprinkling a bit of “gaming” to your blog makes it more appealing.
Here, you’ll learn why gamification is a game changer for your blog. You’ll also know how it can increase engagement and drive more traffic.
What is Gamification?
Gamification is a strategy that integrates game mechanics into your blog. The goal is to drive audience engagement and participation. It also gives you long-term followers that’ll help your blog achieve long-term goals.
This can range from all sorts of activities. It can be a contest for best comments, highest engagement rate, and more. It’s a way of introducing game mechanics to non-game elements like blogs. Achievement, progress, and competitiveness are some of the aspects of gamification.
1. Leveling System
The leveling system is an effective way to boost audience engagement. It’s all about assigning your audience varying levels that depend on their involvement. The levels can range from 1 to 10, with one being the least involved and ten being the most.
It’s then up to you on how to make the levels appear more creative. Splash in a touch of your brand or perhaps a well-thought-out theme. This motivates your readers to interact with each other. After all, we’re all egoistic creatures at the end of the day. We want to look good. And we’ll look good when we have a high level.
2. Introduce Quizzes
We all want to know our real selves. What better way to do that than to take quizzes. Take for example Buzzfeed’s quizzes. It sparks people’s curiosity and makes them interested in knowing more about themselves.
It might be an IQ test or a “Which celebrity do you look like” kind-of-test. Whichever it is, it’s proven to be useful in making your blog known. Buzzsumo even states that a quiz gets shared averagely 1,900 times.
That’ll drive tons of traffic! And what’s great about this is that people want to compare their results with their friends. This makes the quiz turn viral! It’s also easy to make one. There are lots of platforms like ProProfs Quiz Maker you can use to help you out.
3. Leaderboards
One of the best things about humanity is its undying passion for competitiveness. It’s what made us achieve wonders of our own. Why not make use of our hard-wired nature in blogging?
Leaderboards drive your audience’s competitive selves. You can do this by having a leaderboard that ranks your blog members according to engagement. The number of comments, likes, and shares can be some of your criteria.
This is all about driving your audience to outcompete each other. You might also want to give a prize to the top five. This makes them more motivated to rank high. But this doesn’t always mean person-to-person tracking.
You can also feature your most popular articles and rank them by the number of likes and shares. Having a scaling system gives your readers an insight into your blog’s health. They’re most likely to stay when they see people interacting with each other.
4. Reward Badges
This is similar to the leveling system. But this focuses on unranked awards given to your most engaging followers. One of the best feelings in this world is to be awarded something you’ve worked hard for. That’s what we’re going to apply here.
Badges serve as a form of gratification to your audience. It gives them a sense of importance and accomplishment. And it’s in these feelings that they’re inspired to stay on your blog and interact more.
It also gives people the feeling of being “legitimized.” And what do they do when they feel this way? They brag it to their friends. In turn, their friends would also want to outcompete them. It’s a cycle that keeps going on and on.
A good example of this is a badge for the number of blog posts read or comments made. This is what made Quora even more popular as users share intellectual thoughts. Even Facebook’s comment section is gamified.
The more interesting, thoughtful, or funny your comment is, the more likely you gain likes. And when you’ve got lots of likes, you become an instant sensation (sort of). The same goes for Instagram’s likes and Twitter’s shares and retweets.
5. Work on Challenges
Life would be boring without challenges. So does blogging. This is why it’d be wise to challenge your blog’s visitors. Don’t worry about them leaving because it’s “challenging.” Instead, think of it as an opportunity for them to interact.
And they’ll do because of the thought of getting a prize. It can be a simple freebie or an incentive. An example would be to ask your followers to share photos on social media about your recent blog post. Or perhaps ask them about their opinion about your niche. It’s all about compelling your audience to voice out with the hope of getting something in return.
Conclusion
Gamifying has shaped blogging and the whole virtual world. It’s out there in more ways than we ever thought of. From the comments and likes to the number of shares and views, it’s easy to say that gamification is everywhere.
Engagement equals more traffic. And higher traffic leads to higher profits for your blog. It’s all about ingenuity at the end of the day, or a case of manipulation perhaps? Nonetheless, gamifying is the way to go.