Editor’s Note: Here’s a post from Alan Steinborn, President, Real Money, and Anna Colibri, Blogger & SEO Copywriter
Do you ever get the feeling you are writing into the wind? The feeling that all of your wonderful, experience-based information is falling on deaf ears?
If you’re a blogger, you know two things:
- You want to help people and
- Everyone you know is suffering from information overload (right?)
As bloggers, you want to share your valuable insights with your readers, yes. But you also want to do more than that.
You Want to Change Lives
To be totally honest, you want to change lives. And lives can only be changed when behavior changes. Are you with me?
The cold, hard fact of the matter is that very little behavior is changed through reading alone. No matter how awesome your financial advice is, it doesn’t mean a thing if you can’t inspire people to take action.
Think about it. Some people — not anyone we know, of course — toodle around on Facebook, surf the internet, and read a bunch of blogs just so they can avoid doing things like balancing checkbooks or planning budgets.
In other words, worst case scenario, your valuable information could actually be holding people back from achieving their financial goals.
What can bloggers (like you) do to not only share their tips, but make sure that readers take those tips and turn them into reality?
We Have the Answer
As President of Real Money, a hot-off-the presses social platform for people who want to get good with money, and as a blogger who blogs about online marketing, we’ve had to give this very question a lot of thought because it’s very important to us, in fact it’s our mission: To help people make, save, grow, and enjoy their money.
Borrowing from the wisdom of children, we came up with gamification, which is turning things into games. Real Money uses quests (small, adventure-like activities) to encourage people to take action on their goals.
Just as important, we reward community members for taking action — and it’s just as easy for a blogger to do the same thing.
To prove our point, this article is gamified. Keep reading to find out how…
Three Quests
Having read up to here, you’d like to know more about gamification and how it works.
Quest 1: Find an article about gamification and send us a link. Or…
Quest 2: Email us a question or comment.
You’ve got the idea, no problem.
Quest 3: Gamify your next blog post and send us a link.
What You Get
Take up any of the above quests, and we’ll reward you, of course! You’ll get an official Real Money Attaboy or Attagirl — delivered with love, straight to your inbox.
As a blogger, if you start taking action on this plan, you’ll get even more than just our love, including:
- A leg up on your competition (no one else is doing this yet, but they will be soon)
- Increased engagement and
- The satisfaction of know that not only are your readers reading your great advice, they’re taking it
There you have it, simple and effective advice for making the difference you, as a financial blogger, want to make.
Let the games begin!
About Alan Steinborn
Alan Steinborn, entrepreneur, curriculum developer, and workshop facilitator, is launching a new social media platform aimed at 20 to 35 year-olds who want to get debt-free, simplify their lives, attain financial freedom, and improve their relationships with money. When Alan is not working, you can find him drinking tea on his porch with his girlfriend, playing sax and going on epic walks.
Anna Colibri is a San Francisco-based SEO Copywriter, blogger, and digital strategy consultant. Anna’s philosophy is that great copy is only the start. It’s her mission to make sure that websites everywhere are the marketing tools they were meant to be and that her clients get the kind of visitors who convert to paying customers and raving fans. When she’s not writing or strategizing, she’s meditating, doing yoga, taking walks, or having (offline!) conversations with the people she loves.
Image credit: Jamie McCaffrey
Comments
NoComments
One word: leaderboards.
Leslie,
Thanks for your comment.
Leaderboards are great and are a step in gamifying a blog or article. The problem occurs when you want to engage beginners who are not so keen on competing with others. Also, a leaderboard is only one step. You need to create steps to be completed for points. These steps need to be well thought out. That way you can measure whether or not you are actually creating the difference you intend.
Alan