Running an online store or a blog is hard work! With all the work you have to do as a merchant or a blogger, it’s hard to keep an eye on the simple yet important things that can grow your site: acquiring new visitors, engaging them in your content, and effectively marketing your products and services are all important pieces of the puzzle. Believe it or not, there is one simple tool that can help you do all of these things. And its name is the Kwanzoo widget.

If you’ve ever tried to shop for a digital camera, then you know how mind-numbing the experience can be. Point and shoot, megapixels, SLR, digital zoom, optical zoom…most of us don’t know what these things are, or how they will ultimately affect our picture-taking experience. Gone are the days when you could simply pick up the cheapest disposable camera at the grocery store – if you want to be plugged in to the awesome potential of digital photography, you need to branch out into a more complex technology. With a quiz like this, all those confusing choices are distilled into 15 simple questions that invite users to better understand their own needs – at quiz’s end, they are presented with an option that narrows the products to ones with the features they seek.

It’s not hard to see how this can help you, if you’re an online merchant. No matter what products you sell, a quiz like this would be an effective way to distill the kinds of features that consumers can find on review and gadget search sites like Cnet, Retrevo, and DPreview. Rather than sifting through the options to estimate what they might need, users can simply take a quiz – a fun, engaging five-minute exercise – and be directed right to a product that fulfills their needs. It’s not hard to see how this accomplishes four important tasks:

It engages users because it is a fun, eye-catching challenge.

It converts browsers into buyers because once the quiz is over, they can purchase with confidence.

It drives traffic because once you have a widget of your own, you can host it anywhere you like! Instead of boring banner ads, give out widgets that link back to your site.

It brings in revenue because, even if you don’t have any products or services to market on your site, Kwanzoo widgets can integrate with major ad networks like the Google Content Network. They can also help you like to affiliate network merchants all over the web, from Amazon to Commission Junction to Linkshare. Since the widgets come in the standard ad size of 300×250, it’s no trouble at all to serve your ads inside a widget instead of on an easily-ignored sidebar. The clickthrough rates for ads served this way are up to 10x higher than standard ads.

And these quizzes can be applied to any topic you can imagine. Products like flat-screen TVs, cell phones, and computers lend themselves easily to this kind of “personality style” quiz – but the possibilities are truly endless. Dishwashers, gardening supplies, apparel and accessories…if products have different features and can be compared to each other, then they can be written into a personality quiz. Or, if you just want a quiz in which to serve ads from other sources, the quiz can be on any topic you like – from comic books to movies to video games.

But who does the quiz-making? Though it’s an easy job with the help of our quiz creation page (click for big):

- developing a viable quiz can still be time-consuming. For that reason, the Kwanzoo team is always hard at work writing new quizzes – and we’ve got the experience and expertise to create your quiz in record time. Using the tried-and-true “personality axes” method, we come up with three or four sets of opposing traits that sum up the different aspects of whatever our quiz is about. For the digital camera quiz, they were:

Expensive vs. Inexpensive
Hobby vs. Professional
Small vs. Large

Then, by drawing up every possible combination of all these traits, we were able to determine what camera would most likely fit the needs of each possible test result. Because we’re taking three important factors into account, we can confidently steer test-takers towards one (and only one) accurate result.

Whether you’re interested in learning how to do this yourself, or if you just want us to write a quiz for you, now is the time to get in touch with us. We’ll do everything we can to meet your needs.

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