Gamify Your Blog: How to Add Gamification Techniques In your Content

Humans love games. Games are mentally stimulating and fun. Also, our fondness for games is rising every year. A study shows over 2.69 billion global video game players in 2020. This figure is expected to rise to $3.07 billion by 2023. This clearly indicates that a major chunk of the population is into gaming.

Considering this trend and the love for gaming, if you want to boost engagement, increase brand awareness and make your content enjoyable, gamification is what you should invest in. 

In this blog, we’ll go through what gamification is and how you can gamify your blog.

What is gamification?

Gamification is the process of applying game elements to non-gaming activities. It is considered a marketing strategy to boost engagement. Such game-like elements have been used to engage, entertain, and educate for thousands of years. Three of the most common and classic game elements are points, leaderboards, and badges. 

One of the greatest things about gamification is that it’s fairly easy to implement. Especially if you are running a WordPress website, all you need is a good WordPress rewards plugin! In addition, you can choose from a wide variety of ways to use game-like elements to boost your content. Here are some specific gamification techniques you can start with. 

The Best Ways to Reward Your Website Audience 

Badges

People love to be rewarded for their efforts. I’m pretty sure you remember getting a sticker in elementary school in return for doing something good or performing in class. Similarly, rewarding your audience with virtual badges has become a popular strategy to reward your visitors for the energy and time they invest in your website. 

These badges will convince your audience to share them within their friends’ circle via social media to show off their achievements. Badges can be rewarded for a number of reasons. If you want to increase the number of blog comments on your posts, you can award badges for the number of comments someone leaves on a post. 

Many websites like Twitter and Quora reward celebrities and influential people with such badges. You can also gain similar status by simply being active and helpful. 

Leaderboards

Humans love to compete! Deep down, we all want to outperform our competitors and become the next top dog. Leaderboards have been around for ages. With the right efforts, you can get your name listed among the world’s top ten players in games like Pac-Man and Clash of Clans. 

By introducing leaderboards on your website, you can encourage your visitors to do whatever you want. You can build a leaderboard and rank members by the number of replies, comments, and shares they make. Or, you can even rank your authors by the number of blogs they write for you. This will increase the number of blogs on your website, with greater chances of getting ranked for various keywords and experiencing more traffic. 

Leaderboards don’t specifically have to be used for people. You can also rank blogs on your website with the number of views, comments, or even according to the date published. With this strategy, you’ll always have your key blogs listed on your homepage. 

Leveling 

This is similar to badges in that it helps people achieve a certain status. However, instead of digital badges, you assign your readers to different levels according to their level of involvement. If there are ten levels, with the 10th being the highest, it could encourage people to get more involved to reach that level ASAP!

Readers can gain levels by reading more, commenting more, or any other leveling factor you set. On many of their interactive pages, sites like Credit Karma and others use the leveling feature.

Actual Games

As I mentioned above, people love playing games. If you feel that you are unable to attract visitors through your content, simply add actual games. Even if the game has nothing to do with your content, it will keep people engaged on your website. More engagement, regardless of the reason, is always healthy for your WordPress site. 

You can either add mini-games in the middle of your content or add one on your 404 pages to keep your audience engaged. Google has also adopted this strategy to entertain its audience at all times. If they can do it, so can you!

Wrap Up

Gamification of your content is undoubtedly a great strategy to increase engagement on your blog in modern times. I can also enhance conversions up to 7 times. By experimenting with various gamification techniques, gamify your blog today to enjoy more traffic, a lower bounce rate, and a higher rate of engagement.