I hear you. We'll always read books and articles on topics that matter to us. But consider a couple things here:

A Content Marketing Institute Survey (PDF) in 2016 says that 75% of marketing participants anticipate increasing their utilization of interactive content marketing.

As many as 96% of users who start BuzzFeed quizzes finish them. Not only that, but "BuzzFeed quizzes" is even a popular search term.

And while we don't know the real percentages, a good portion of your readers are kinesthetic learners, meaning they prefer to learn and engage in a hands-on manner.

Blog post comments are great. Don't get me wrong. And I love how Medium allows readers to insert comments right where they're currently reading, highlighting the sentence itself. But what if we pushed ourselves to get much more interactive?

What if we asked readers questions along the way, learning their preferences by asking them simple multiple-choice questions, in order to walk them through a customized blog post that feels more conversational—on the fly?

Sound impossible? Futuristic? Like too much work?

Inspiration for this article comes from Typeform.

Credit for this idea comes from Typeform. Check out what they envision in a more elegant manner than I've crafted here.

It's an incredible concept and it seems long overdue. It might be unrealistic to expect writers and readers to interact in a 1:1 way in real-time, but blog posts can be built to at least feel a little more conversational, right?

Truly interactive blog posts are possible, right here, today in 2017 as I write this. In fact, if you hooked the right email service provider (my recommended ones in this case would be Active Campaign or ConvertKit), you'd have even more phenomenal engagement for readers, along with tremendous insights on those readers in a very seamless way.

Now, a blog post like this wouldn't actually be conversational, clearly. As the author you would have to imagine the conversation in advance and create the guardrails to "manage" it as the reader made her selections. But I've hacked this interactive blog post together myself, to give you an example of what we could be doing more often.

For example...

Great! Then maybe you know what I'm talking about here. Writing content to inform, inspire, engage, or even to entertain people is a shot in the dark. No matter how much keyword research you do, or how well you think you know your readers, with any given post you write you're putting your thoughts into text and then waiting to see what others think.

What if you asked them, they answered so you could learn a bit more about them, and then you shared some relevant follow-up thoughts based on their answer?

What if you gave an opinion, sought theirs, then shared some specific content or additional thinking on a subject?

Or what if you asked your readers how well they know something, then served up different content based on their answer?

Hopefully you see that I just did this to a small degree. If not, change your answer to my last question!

Great! You're going to experience this yourself soon, even with only a few hundred visitors each month.

Google Analytics will inform you tremendously as you hone in on what content your readers seem to enjoy and engage with the most. But as you click Publish or Schedule on a post, you'll always still wonder a little bit.

Okay, maybe you don't run your own blog. But wouldn't it be intriguing to occasionally read an article that adapted to your situation? If you had *this* perspective, it offered another. If you had *that* perspective, it offered different information.

Admittedly it could be creepy, if used to excess, but imagine if publishers provided content that was relevant to you, in your situation in life, if you provided it to them.

Interactive blog posts may be the future for online magazines

If you follow tech trends, you'll know that bots are the hot new thing. There are already countless companies developers can turn to in order to create a conversational "bot" that interacts with their mobile app's users.

There are also bot developers who help website visitors engage or direct readers to specific content in a knowledge base, for existence.

But I'm talking about blog posts or articles that are interactive—where you've thought ahead of time about how your readers might interpret what you've written and you then provide additional content—whether videos, text, links, or even more questions!—but only at the right time, when it's more relevant.

This is a tremendous opportunity for online magazine publishers to differentiate themselves with engaging, rich content. You can deliver custom content based on how your readers provide feedback and responses to your questions.

The benefits of interactive blog posts for publishers

The benefits of making some of your blog posts more interactive like this are many. You would:

• Learn more about your readers without relying on surveys that only subscribers participate in
• Differentiate your publication from others in your space
• Demonstrate empathy and understanding as you share content that's hyper-relevant
• Provide a more thought-provoking reader experience
• Generate more email subscribers by providing more personal value before requiring readers' email addresses

The prolific Mark Schaefer introduced the RITE acronym that reflects his four elements of effective content. The R stands for Relevance. You can't get more relevant than providing content customized to your reader, based on the information they provide you, right?

So...want to know how I made this interactive blog post?

Though I've handcrafted this interactive blog post in the most subtle of ways, I'd love to share the tools and process I followed. Want to know?

Well, alright then. The tech side isn't that important to you.

This post included very subtle interactivity in order to convince you that interactive blog posts are the future. I didn't want to go overboard with the tech and distract from the idea entirely.

Nevertheless, would you be willing to share your thoughts on whether you think more conversational, interactive blog posts are the future, or just another content marketing gimmick?

For this final question, feel free to weigh in via the comments section below!

Here are the ingredients and the process I followed to build this low-rent, minimally-viable interactive blog post.

The ingredients:

• A developer license of Gravity Forms
• One line of code to delete the form submit button courtesy of Richard Wawrzyniak
• Standard post content presented via the Gravity Forms HTML Content field
• Liberal use of the Gravity Forms Conditional Logic feature
• The final addition of the Gravity Forms Partial Entries add-on

Again, I didn't want to get too techie with this post. I'm also not a developer. I know just enough HTML and CSS to be dangerous.

I'm a huge fan of Gravity Forms. Most websites use it solely for controlling Contact us forms. It can do so much more, however. With the developer license, you get access to all add-ons, including polls, quizzes, surveys, and and more.

While I could have used either of those last three for this post, the only add-on I relied on was Partial Entries. This saves form entries even before they've been submitted.

If I had made this a poll or survey, the focus would have been on the results. Instead, I chose to make this about the content—and your reaction to that content.

The process:

Not much to it, really. I wrote the post in Google Docs the way I normally do, decided where I wanted to insert stopping points to ask you a simple question, and wrote how I would respond to your reply.

Then, I created the form in Gravity Forms, inserting much of the content in HTML Content fields. The questions were placed into radio button fields. Some of the HTML Content fields were then set to only display when you selected a specific answer to one of the radio button options. Voila!

The Gravity Forms Partial Entries add-on comes into play only to my benefit. I can see all entries submitted when people begin making selections while reading (which gives me a degree of insight on how engaging a post was), without requiring you to ever click a submit button. I also can get your feedback and preferences before ever asking for your email address, which can be done as a final engagement step in the article or post.

Summary

I believe the future of blogs and digital magazines lies in engaging content that truly differentiates a publication from its industry competitors, while benefitting the publication at the same time.

As more and more content is published, site owners will be under pressure to stand out and deliver personalized content for readers.