15 Ways to Create an Interactive Blog Post That Engages Readers

Let’s face it: static stuff occasionally becomes a touch dull.

It accomplishes its objectives and can assist in keeping audiences informed by offering pertinent information, but it fails to pique readers’ interests.

The future of content marketing is interactive content.

By identifying areas in your content marketing plan where interactive content components may be added, you can boost audience engagement and keep them coming back for more.

Viewers enjoy interactive experiences, and the proliferation of interactive films, calculators, and quizzes has assisted businesses in capturing the interest of important target markets.

Blog entries are one thing that gets neglected quite a bit.

Blogs often contain static information that helps users learn more about your products or sector as well as answers to frequently asked queries.

Finding a technique to keep people on your website for as long as possible is important when creating a blog. In this manner, you will have enough time to get to know them and keep them coming back.

You must therefore establish an interactive blog. Add interactive aspects to your blog posts to increase involvement instead of letting readers read them passively.

However, by writing interactive blog content, your business can increase reader engagement and audience growth.

This post will demonstrate how to create an interactive blog and provide examples that you can use with your current material.

What are Interactive Blog Posts?

Compared to other forms of interactive material, blog articles are interactive.

For instance, an interactive video is a complete strategy unto itself. However, interactive blog posts are fundamentally static content pieces with interactive components included.

This makes the static content more interesting while preserving the blog post format.

Any sort of material that viewers may click on, click through, or interact with is considered interactive content.

Examples of interactive material include:

• Tests
• Surveys
• Videos
• Calculators
• Interactive maps
• Games
• Photo sliders

Users must actively participate with interactive material rather than passively receiving it, such as when reading a text-only article.

Traditional blog posts can be made more engaging for readers by incorporating these interactive components while yet keeping the blog post’s identity intact.

Although the post is static, it portrays itself as a more interesting form of content that enhances the reader’s experience.

In that regard, using a GIF or image in place of an interactive feature is not a good way to boost engagement.

Even if a GIF is animated and more fascinating than a static image, readers do not engage with it.

Users must take a more active role in interactive features.

A better choice is a calculator that assists in calculating ROI in a blog post about the significance of tracking ROI.

What Advantages Do Interactive Blog Posts Offer?

Why are interactive blog posts crucial then? Do they actually have a positive impact on your content marketing strategy?

You may use interactive content in a variety of ways to achieve your marketing objectives, and interactive blogs are crucial to this success.

Your most frequent and reliable source of material is likely blog postings, and you probably update your blog frequently to improve your SEO and increase visitors.

Their reach can be expanded by including interactive components. Let’s discuss the advantages of interactive content before delving into the “how” of developing an interactive blog.

Boost Time on Page

When there are interactive components on a page, your users stay there longer.

They have a reason to stay thanks to the embedded content because they can interact with the interactive parts by clicking, playing, and learning instead of just scanning an article and clicking away.

Even though time spent on a page isn’t a KPI that directly affects your revenue, it does have an impact on engagement and conversion rates.

Longer page visits from readers increase their likelihood of moving on to the next level of your marketing funnel.

Increase Brand Recognition

The most successful companies have a message and aesthetic that are instantly recognizable, which allows them to stand out from the crowd and stay ahead of the competition.

You have new opportunities to develop your brand voice and give your audiences tremendous value when you use interactive content.

Create Loyalty

Visitors can have a memorable experience with interactive content that they wouldn’t obtain from other blogs. Additionally, because they are actively involved, it makes your readers a part of the narrative, which can help them develop trust in your company.

An increase in click-through rates

For businesses of all sizes, increasing click-through rates, or CTR, is frequently a top marketing objective.

The percentage of your readers who click on a link, such as your CTA or hyperlinks, is referred to as CTR. Additionally, this conversion metric aids in customer journey tracking.

Readers are more likely to click on links when there are interactive CTAs or other interactive components that help them find value in the content on the page.

Boost SEO

The amount of time visitors spend on your pages will rise if your blog has interactive material.

Additionally, it can help you enhance social shares, click-through rates, and backlinks, all of which will raise your website’s search engine ranks.

Increase Your Sales

In addition to directly assisting your users in improving their interactions with interactive content, it can also assist you in indirectly assisting your users by gathering vital information for sales, assisting individuals in moving through the sales funnel, or identifying the needs and pain points of your customers.

Any actions you can take to improve the user experience will help you move your users on to the next stage of their journey, which is the ultimate purpose of marketing: to assist in guiding consumers into the sales funnels for your brand.

Enhance Conversions

Users are more likely to become email subscribers or customers if they spend more time on your website and interact with your content. As a matter of fact, research demonstrates that interactive content produces 2X more conversions than passive material.

Improving client experience

The fact that interactive blog posts and interactive content in general enhance the user experience for visitors to a page is one of its main advantages.

Even if the information is significant, reading through a wall of text isn’t really interesting.

Interactive components put your customer in charge and give them a sense of control over their own purchasing process.

It makes students feel more invested in the information and makes their study and discovery periods more enjoyable.

Additionally, it makes your company stand out from the competitors and helps your readers appreciate the experience.

Aids in Data Collection

The information you may gather from readers who interact with your content through interactive blog articles is another advantage.

The allure of the interactive features is frequently sufficient to persuade readers to fill out their information for some sorts of interactive content, such as calculators or quizzes, which may include forms to gather information.

Some of the platforms used to develop interactive content, such as Ion, may also include behind-the-scenes data gathering tools available to collect audience statistics and information that may be utilized to enhance interactive content or learn more about participants.

In either case, purchasing a tool can greatly speed up the creation of interactive content.

We’ll look at some interactive content ideas that you may utilize on your blog now that you understand the value of interactive content.

Effective Techniques for Increasing Interactivity in Your Blog Posts

Here, we’ll demonstrate the many forms of interactive material you can provide and provide some production-inspiring examples.

These resources include some interactive elements, such as calculators and quizzes. On the other hand, some information, like ebooks and infographics, can be made interactive.

Also keep in mind that you can combine many interactive content kinds into a single piece of content.

The user can take a quiz at the conclusion of the page to assess their understanding of the topic after viewing an interactive infographic (and for you to check the efficiency of the content).

Let’s now discover some of the most excellent categories of interactive material and become motivated!

1. Develop a Clickable Table of Contents

A clickable table of contents is a common feature of interactive blog sites. These are called anchor links, and they let readers quickly access the parts of the article that pique their attention.
Our longer articles at flashreviewz.com often include a linked table of contents:

A lengthy blog post may not be something your visitors want to read from beginning to end. As a result, it is simpler for visitors to find the information they need thanks to the anchor connections. They will stay on your website longer as a result of this.

2. Switch on social sharing

Want to increase interaction on your blog while also promoting your content? The next step is to make social sharing available on your website.

With the help of social sharing buttons, readers can quickly share your blog content on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and more.

In order to quickly add social media share buttons to your WordPress blog, we advise using a free plugin like Shared Counts.

Shared Counts include buttons for Twitter, LinkedIn, Yummly, Facebook, Pinterest, email, and more. Additionally, it will show how many times your material has been shared overall so users can gauge its popularity.

You can encourage readers to share key quotes from your blog post rather than just the full thing on social media.

You may convert passages from your blog article into quotes that readers can tweet with just one click by using the Better Click to Tweet plugin.

3. Show content from social media

As long as we’re talking about social media, you can also immediately embed social media feeds on your website to make your blog more interactive.

Readers can explore your social media content, as well as like and comment on your postings, without leaving your website by embedding social media feeds.

Using a plugin like Smash Balloon makes adding social media feeds to your blog the simplest task possible.

You may show fully customisable Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and YouTube feeds anywhere on your WordPress blog by using the plugins from Smash Balloon.

It is simple to set up, and you have complete control over the social media content you want to highlight and how it will be presented.

A Smash Balloon Instagram feed can appear like this on your website:

Additionally, if you publish fresh information on social media, Smash Balloon streams are instantly updated. Your blog will always be current with interactive, new information that viewers may explore.

Related reading: 21 Easy Social Media Marketing Tips for Small Businesses

4. Insert Videos

Another interactive element you may use in your blog entries is interactive videos.

These are videos that depend on user interaction to get various results. For instance, clicking a pop-up in the video may direct you to a particular section of the film, another pertinent video, or provide users with additional controls for their video viewing experience.

Interactive films may enhance engagement with your content and keep visitors watching them for longer.

It’s an additional method of user experience optimization and improvement that will also make your blog material stand out from other static posts.

Interactive films can boost your company’s appeal and assist you in developing a more compelling brand voice that connects with viewers in addition to aiding with data metrics.

Following that, you can continually drive traffic to your blog.

Inserting video content into your blog is another approach to make it interactive. I supplemented my blog post with a video lesson in the instance below:

You won’t lose any visitors who aren’t interested in reading the post by allowing viewers to watch a video. Additionally, it enables visitors to pause and engage with your post.

People actually spend 1.4X more time on pages with video than without, according to a Wistia study.

Video footage may be easily embedded. Copying and pasting the URL of your YouTube video into your WordPress article is all that is required.

But you can use Smash Balloon’s YouTube Feed Pro to integrate a YouTube video feed on your site for additional interactive features and customization choices.

You can display YouTube channels, playlists, and live streams in any WordPress post or page using the YouTube Feed Pro plugin. You have a choice of different feed layouts, can customize the feed to reflect your brand, and even add unique video pause and end actions.

5. Employ slide shows

An excellent approach to fit a lot of information into a manageable number of pages is via slide show presentations. Additionally, they enable users to engage with your material by clicking through the slides.

You might incorporate a slideshow to better demonstrate your arguments if you’re writing about a complex subject. Alternately, you might include a slideshow to summarize your message at the end.

The free, web-based Google Apps package includes Google Slides, which makes it simple to build a slideshow presentation.

6. Animated GIFs are welcome.

Animated GIFs can help break up the repetition of words in your blog posts and keep visitors interested for longer.

To make your content more enjoyable for readers, you could, for instance, incorporate humorous GIFs. Just make sure you’re utilizing them selectively and that they’re pertinent.

Instead of utilizing static images, you may use animated GIFs to show how to do something, like use a tool.

You can look for pertinent GIFs to use in your blog posts by using a website like GIPHY. Or you may use a free program like Make A GIF to make your own GIFs.

7. Make polls and surveys

Why not include surveys and polls on your blog? People love to express their thoughts. It’s the ideal method to give your website an interactive component and gather insightful audience feedback.

Do you want to know how to make a survey in WordPress? The finest WordPress survey plugin, according to our list, is WPForms, which we strongly advise installing.

Over 5,000,000 professionals use the well-known form builder WPForms. It includes a ton of templates and simple drag-and-drop capabilities that let you build any kind of form, including polls and surveys, for your website.

Likert scales, star ratings, multiple choice, net promoter scores, and other fields are among those that you can add.

Additionally, WPForms will automatically create interactive reports that you can use to show visitors the results in real time.

8. Add a Quiz

A form of interactive format called an interactive quiz guides the user through a series of questions and provides a conclusion.

Users’ responses are used to generate the results, thus each user can get unique results rather than just a few predetermined possibilities.

Quizzes are a fantastic way to inject some humor into your blogs and guide readers to alternative conclusions.

They can also encourage your users to view their issues and potential solutions from new angles.

You could, for instance, provide a quiz to assist users in choosing which of their marketing initiatives to tackle first.

You can rapidly make your quiz and add it to your blog posts by using platforms like Ion or other tools to create an interactive quiz.

Following the creation of your desired questions, you can design several responses based on the inputs into your quiz.

Conversion rates can be increased by connecting your quiz to the theme of your blog post or the CTA.

Your readers can check their understanding of a particular subject via quizzes. They can also find out more about themselves by taking a fun quiz a la Buzzfeed to see which “Stranger Things” character they are most like.

Quizzes like this one are quite popular on social media and receive a ton of shares because of how entertaining and interactive they are.

Therefore, you can enhance blog traffic in addition to blog interaction.

9. Employ gamification

Gamification in marketing refers to the tactic of incentivizing individuals to engage or take action.

By incorporating game-playing aspects like point scoring, rules of play, or rivalry with others, you may compel people to engage with your material in the same way that they do with games like Candy Crush.

Reddit accomplishes this by allowing users to commend one another for contributions with upvotes, badges, and other awards. To create something similar on your website, utilize a plugin like Thrive Comments.

Gamification may be used to expand your email list in addition to increasing engagement.

Gamified wheel popups are available from OptinMonster, the leading lead generation solution on the market. Visitors can enter their email addresses and spin the wheel to earn a promo code or other incentive for a discount by doing so.

With OptinMonster, you can easily generate interactive email optin popups thanks to its simple drag-and-drop popup builder, 75+ expertly designed campaign templates, and a ton of other useful features.

10. Run a contest

Run a giveaway on your site as another interactive approach to thank your readers.

Giveaways frequently demand consumers to take some form of action in order to enter. For instance, in order to qualify for the giveaway, a user could need to respond to a trivia question.

We advise utilizing RafflePress to make your contest even more interactive.

The greatest WordPress giveaway plugin is RafflePress. It makes it simple to start an online giveaway because it has a drag and drop giveaway builder and pre-made viral giveaway themes. But RafflePress really shines when it comes to how users enter contests.

You can provide participants extra contest entries in exchange for completing certain tasks, such as:

• I’ve signed up for your email newsletter
• Observing you on social networks
• observing a video
• introducing a friend
• sending a picture
• post a comment
• going to a webpage
• downloading a podcast
• even more

You can design a variety of interactive scenarios for your readers with this amazing tool.

11. Establish a members-only section

You can establish a private group of people who share your interests by adding a membership section to your blog. Additionally, this is the ideal location to foster a lively social scene.

You can have a forum in your members-only section where people can engage in conversations and posts.

In order to share your specialist knowledge with your audience, you can also provide specialized eLearning courses. Members have access to video lectures, tests, and progress tracking.

We advise using MemberPress if you want to build a membership section for your website.

The finest WordPress membership plugin for building free or premium membership subscriptions is MemberPress. It is really simple to set up and includes robust access restrictions that let you limit access to specific material to just registered users.

Additionally, you may add forums for users to communicate with one another, and it has an integrated tool for creating online courses.

12. Insert a chatbot

You can communicate with visitors through instant messaging in real-time by using live chat on your website. This enables you to respond to any queries visitors might have, advise them on what to do next, and maintain their interest in your website for a longer period of time.

Additionally, a chatbot function, which is software that mimics human discussions through text, is available on many live chat programs. This enables people to ask inquiries even when you are not present and receive replies.

13. Calculators

A calculator is an excellent addition to your blogs as interactive material.

Calculations made by interactive calculators are based on entered data and already integrated data algorithms. Even more so than a quiz, this gives your readers a totally unique experience.

An interactive calculator is entirely unique dependent on the input of each users, in contrast to interactive quizzes, which will have common responses based on the results you program in.

For instance, an interactive calculator may feature pre-programmed algorithms that assist in calculating ROI based on the budget for the initial campaign and the revenue generated.

Based on the information entered, each customer’s ROI rate will vary.

Your interactive blogs’ readers will value the content you offer thanks to the personalized experiences you’ve built in, and if the calculator produces results they find valuable, they’ll return to use it again.

Since a calculator can help complete a deal or assist customers in figuring out discounts, quantities, budgets, and measurements, they are excellent for end-of-funnel blogs.

14. Graphics

Visually appealing graphics are a terrific method to convey a lot of information.

Making your visuals interactive will enhance the user experience and aid in conveying your message to viewers.

Without having to view the complete visual, interactive graphics allow your users to browse photos and find the details that are pertinent to their needs.

Users have control over their viewing experience as opposed to a static frame. Your audiences will prefer personalized experiences, which will increase their interest in your material.

You may help convey the same static information that you receive in the post itself in a different way by including interactive visuals in your blog posts.

You can get more clicks and make your message to your readers stronger when the visuals are interactive. Additionally, dynamic graphics can convey more information to your audience.

Graphs with clickable lines to provide more information about trends, statistical images that chart the points after interaction, and pie charts that fill in as the viewer interacts with the image are all excellent examples of interactive graphics.

Related post: How to Create Stand Out Visual Content You Need Right Now

15. Maps

Interactive maps are one of the most often used interactive components included in blog posts.

Interactive maps can be tailored to display different information depending on the user’s location or the locations they are searching in.

For instance, depending on the user’s location, a map showing various merchants of your goods across the United States may produce varied results.

This gives your users a tailored experience and enables them to quickly access the most helpful information for their needs.

Weather, demographic trends, environmental data, places, and population data can all be displayed on maps.

By including maps in your interactive blog posts, you may improve user experiences while also giving the content you’ve developed a feeling of place and relevance.

Your interactive blog entries will have a better chance of being read and revisited when they are founded in reality.

Maps are frequently easy plug-ins that may be rapidly added to pages without putting a lot of strain on your team.

Wrap Up

Increased engagement rates, more clicks and conversions, and ultimately more sales for your company are just a few of the many advantages that come with creating engaging experiences with your audience.

Your brand can develop by creating content that bridges the gap between static and interactive media.

A thorough interactive marketing content strategy includes more than just interactive blog postings.

Finding new options for interactive content can help you remain ahead of the trends as digital marketing expands and changes.

We’ve now reached the end of this article. These examples of interactive material should have helped you understand how to make your blog more interactive.

You can now provide your audience with an engaging experience that will entice them to return for more.

If you enjoyed this post, then you might like our guides on: 

• How to Create a Successful Blog Strategy: A Step-by-Step Guide
• 24 Things I Wish I Had Known Before I Started Blogging