Ask any blogger what their biggest advertising woe is, and you’re likely to hear a variation on the same theme: it’s becoming increasingly difficult to feature advertising on your blog without compromising your vision of providing readers with content they enjoy. Most “contextual ads” make about as much sense in context as a machine translation, while affiliate links and programs only appeal to a select group of people. But since they’re pretty much the only games in town, most of us bloggers have hobbled along with them for ages.

But you don’t have to!

Take Glam.com, for instance. Oh, they might be an online media giant, a Top 10 Display Ad Publisher with over 700 publishers and 90 million unique visitors globally, but that doesn’t mean you can’t take a lesson from them.

When it came to providing advertising opportunities for their network of blogs on fashion, beauty, celebrities, entertainment, and more, Glam Media knew they had to do something extraordinary. What they developed is GlamApps, which they’ve dubbed “power tools for websites and blogs.” The idea is to drive user engagement and, in some cases, to provide advertising in a way that appeals to readers instead of making them want to skip over your blog. While Glam Media is currently in beta, available only to select publishers, it will soon open up to include bloggers everywhere who are looking for something different.

And among many extraordinary applications, you will find Kwanzoo’s quiz widget.

Aside from being utterly adorable:

Kwanzoo’s widgets can be are a fun, engaging way to monetize your website or blog. In the case of Glam Media, we have worked with them to develop a widget that displays Glam Media ads in between quiz questions that keep users from clicking away. Sites have found that the ads embedded in Kwanzoo’s widgets have five to ten times the clickthrough rate of typical ads. Yes, you read that right: five to ten times. Readers love relevancy. A new ad displays in the widget every time a page loads and every time a user clicks through a few questions, which means even more revenue for publishers.

If a Glam blogger chose to display a Kwanzoo widget, users would see a quiz like this on their site:

Followed by a brief advertising interlude:

And then back to your regularly-scheduled Daniel Radcliffe. Kwanzoo will automatically serve up fresh questions every day if you choose an existing widget topic, or you can search for questions on a particular topic and create your own widget.

Currently, Kwanzoo offers thousands of questions on celebrities, TV shows, movies, video games, and football, with many more topics coming soon. All of these questions are tagged in such a way that you can choose to serve a quiz on almost any topic within these broad categories: whether your users want trivia on Brad Pitt or Bruce Wayne, Kwanzoo is here for you.

But where do these questions come from? While the majority of our content was written by our own trivia experts, we are constantly adding user-created content, which is edited for quality and moderated for content before it goes live on the site. If you prefer to write your own questions, Kwanzoo can serve those as well, merely using the widget design as a vehicle for your content. Kwanzoo’s widgets are 100% customizable to your specific needs, and while GlamApps provides many options, they’re just the beginning of what Kwanzoo can do. But let’s take a look at what even limited customization can do.

Through an easy-to-use customization screen, a user of GlamApps could change the color of a widget:

And, of course, choose their own topic:

And come up with any title they’d like:

Anyone with a free account on Kwanzoo can play around with these widget options and embed them back on their blogs. Very soon, we will be introducing ads in the quizzes that are available via widgets on Kwanzoo.com.  If, like Glam Media, you are interested in creating a special partnership with Kwanzoo to further customize the quiz widgets, all you need to do is contact us and tell us what you want. Go on – don’t be shy!

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