How to Write A Personality Quiz
Writing a quiz has many parts to it, and that can be complicated, but this guide will talk you through how to write each part of your personality quiz so it gets tons of quiz takers.
1. Writing the quiz title
2. Writing the quiz questions
3. Writing the quiz results (personalities)
4. Writing the quiz opt-in formMake Your Own Personality Quiz For Free
Writing a quiz is not like writing an article – it’s a completely different animal. An article is meant to be a one-to-many medium, where a quiz is one-to-one. You wouldn’t talk to a friend at a bar as if they were a crowd of people, so don’t write a quiz like it’s addressing a crowd of people. This isn’t something we are used to as writers. Typically we create pieces that will hopefully be read by thousands of people and perhaps commented on, talking directly to someone through a quiz is a new task.
Here’s how to write the perfect personality quiz.
Part 1: Writing the quiz title
So you’re writing a personality quiz, and the first step is to figure out what you want to name it. This is the part where I see the most people get tripped up. People always over-think it and end up with absurdly long and specific titles like “Let’s Find Out What Your Biggest Business Problem Is So My Company Can Sell You Some Stuff”
Okay maybe that’s a dramatization, but often-times what ends up happening is people create quiz titles with their own goals in mind and it ends up coming across like the quiz literally just exists so it can collect data.
No one will want to take a quiz that’s meant for you as the business to collect data and sell things, they’ll only want to take quizzes if the quiz will be useful and fun for them.
The reasons a quiz would be useful and fun are two-fold.
1. A quiz is useful if it helps me solve a problem
2. A quiz is fun if it tells me something about myself
Our goal is to write a quiz title that indicates the quiz taker will both solve a problem and learn something about themselves all in one. After analyzing 50,000 quizzes that have generated 9,000,000 leads, here’s the method we’ve come up with for how to formulate a quiz title.
1. Define your audience in two words or less. For example, at interact we sell to marketers, so our audience is “Marketers”
Alternate: If you can’t define your audience in two words, define the reason they come to you for help. For example, if you sell jewelry they are coming to you for help with “Jewelry” if you sell business services, they are coming to you for help with “Business”
2. Insert the title of the audience or the problem you solve into a title template. There are three template options.
A. What Kind of (Blank) Are You? alternate Which (Blank) Are You?
B. What is Your (Blank) Personality?
C. What is Your (Blank)
Let’s run through some hypotheticals here. In our case at interact, since we sell to marketers, the first option works. “What Kind of (Marketer) Are You?” if I was selling Jewelry I’d go with the second option “What is Your (Jewelry) Personality? if I was selling business services I’d go with “What Kind of Business Owner Are You?”
Something to keep in mind that’s very important is that whenever you write a quiz title you have to make sure it’s written for an individual person. Even if you sell to businesses you can’t write the title towards the entire business I.E. “What Type of Business Is Yours?” Remember the second reason people take quizzes is to learn something about themselves, not something about the business they work for. So instead you’d make the quiz about that individual and say “What is Your PR Personality?” if you were writing the quiz for the PR department of a company.
If you’re totally blanking on ideas right now check out this list of quiz titles you can pull from and modify, we’ve got ideas for every kind of business in there.
Part 2: Writing the quiz questions
For the personality quiz questions I’m going to go in reverse order. Right off the bat, here’s a list of personality quiz questions you can use.
The reason I’m putting that there right now is so it gives me room to get really detailed with my advice on writing quiz questions in this guide. I’m going to go in on this and get really specific.
Let’s get the logistics out of the way.
Your quiz should have.
-6-10 questions
-Each question should have 3-6 answer choices
-For more information on how the questions connect to the personalities, here’s a guide on personality quiz logic
Now that those things are out of the way let’s get into strategy for writing your quiz questions. The first and very most important thing to keep in mind when writing quiz questions is who you are writing them to. Before you begin, think of one person who is the ideal quiz taker for your quiz and imagine you are writing the questions to that person. The closer you get to the way you’d ask the questions in real life, the better your quiz will do.
Remember that a quiz is not some fancy internet gimmick, it’s a re-creation of a real conversation between two people in the world. If your quiz is being used for your business then you probably have some common questions you find yourself asking clients all the time, and this is your opportunity to ask those same questions to a bunch of people at the same time.
Here’s the thing though, you have to remember that one person will take your quiz at a time, it will be a personal experience, as if they were actually sitting across from you answering your questions.
*Rant Over*
Now we can get into some tactics for how to get into the right headspace for writing great quiz questions.
Speak Casually. The same way you would in real life. It’s too easy to forget that a quiz is simply a conversation between you and one other person who is taking the quiz and assume that it’s for a mass audience. Quizzes are the most personal kind of content that exists and there is no barrier between you and the person taking the quiz.
If you ever find yourself writing a quiz question where the answer choices are “Maybe” “Sometimes” and “Always” like those job interview quizzes, just stop and throw out everything then start over again. The reason people take quizzes is to feel heard and to learn about themselves. Sounding like a robot ruins both of those reasons because you can’t feel heard by a machine and you won’t trust a robot to tell you something meaningful about yourself. Those things can only be done by a human, which is why it’s incredibly important to speak as if you were talking to one person one-on-one.
A litmus test for this is to read your quiz questions aloud and see if they sound weird to you as you listen. If it doesn’t sound natural to speak the quiz questions you should re-write them until they do sound natural.
Be Understanding. The best quiz questions are ones where the answer choices are exactly what the quiz taker is already thinking. For example, if I ask a question like “What’s Your Dream Car?” and the dream car of the person taking the quiz is pictured as one of the answer choices, I’ve made a huge accomplishment because now that quiz taker believes I understand them.
This type of knowledge only comes when you truly know your audience. You’d never know what type of car is your audience’s dream car unless you had spoken with people for long enough to the point where it came out in casual conversation. There’s not really a cheat for getting to this understanding faster, you simply have to take the time to talk with and listen to your customers and know what they are into so you can use that back in your quiz questions.
Develop a profile for each quiz taker. Don’t make your questions super directly related to the topic of the quiz. For example, if you’re doing a quiz on “What Type of Car Are You?” don’t ask a question like “What Paint Color Do You Want?” but instead ask “What Color Represents Your Personality Best?” This still gets me the same information I need to decide which quiz result this person should get, but it’s a much more enjoyable question to answer and it doesn’t give away the fact that all you’re doing is narrowing down what kind of car they are by what color is going to look best on the recommended car.
Create Your Own Personality Quiz For Free
Part 3: Writing the quiz results (personalities)
This is the part where you reveal someone’s personality after they’ve completed your quiz. This is where you give them the results they came for on the quiz, it’s also where they’ll have an opportunity to share their results and grow your quiz reach which is what you ultimately want.
When writing quiz results I have 3 guiding principles for you.
1. Be positive and even flattering. Personality quiz results get taken seriously, even if that seems ridiculous. If you want people to feel good about your brand and start things off on the right foot, don’t go telling everyone all their flaws they need to improve.
Instead, focus on the positive aspects of each result and play those up without mentioning the downsides of each personality. If you do need to show people areas for improvement call it “area for improvement” instead of “negatives” or something like that. The most shared emotions are happy ones, so make your quiz takers happy to spread your quiz.
2. Keep it personal. When writing the description for each result, keep the description related to the individual who got assigned that personality. The way to do this is by bringing in their answers to quiz questions back to the results. You know roughly how they answered the questions on the quiz if they get a certain result because you set up the result corellations, so use that information to personalize each result.
For example, if someone is the “Dog” result on the “Which Animal Are You?” quiz that you made, and you know that in order to get that result the person taking the quiz probably answered a lot of questions saying they are easily excited and love exploring then in your result description you’d say. “You are easily excited and love exploring, others really enjoy your company because of this.”
One hack for this is to just write down a list of positive attributes about each result as bullet points, then create one or two sentences expanding on each attribute, tie it all together, and you have a result description that is very personal but also uplifting.
People take quizzes to learn about themselves, so keep it very personal when it comes to writing out the descriptions of each result so they’ll be satisfied with what you have to say.
3. Be helpful. Quiz results have the unique ability to provide advice and useful resources based on who someone is, rather than just your best guess about what they might want.
Every personality quiz result should have a list of helpful resources under “Useful resources” or “Recommendations for you”
Personalized recommendations like the ones you can provide in quiz results get clicked on 2.3x more than your average link showing a product.
This opportunity is not to be taken lightly, you can drive a lot of traffic to your site and personalize each site visit by including these links.
If you want to get really advanced with it, you can use landing pages that are totally unique to your quiz results that have resources and links etc. That way the experience is truly unique to each quiz taker.
Part 4: Writing the quiz opt-in form
The opt-in form at the end of a quiz can convert at 50% or higher when done properly. This is the biggest area of mistakes for people writing personality quizzes so please follow this one closely. There is only one principle for this one.
Relevancy, relevancy, relevancy. If real estate has the motto Location, Location, Location, then quiz opt-in forms have the motto Relevancy, Relevancy, Relevancy. What I mean is that people take your personality quiz for a reason, because they are interested in the topic of the quiz, so your opt-in form should follow suit and the reason for opting in should be to learn more about the topic of the quiz. Here are the templates for opt-in form copy.
Header: “Enter Your Email to See Your (Blank)” where the blank is the topic of the quiz. IE. “Enter Your Email to See Your Animal Personality”
Sub-Header: “And get personalized advice to help you succeed based on your (Blank)” IE. “And get personalized advice to help you succeed as a Dog personality type”
All you’re doing is using the topic of the quiz as the opt-in incentive.
