Content marketing is no longer a new concept. For the last few years it’s been touted by every marketing company and over 91% of businesses are now producing content in some way on a regular basis.

The struggle now is to stand out from the massive crowd of content that’s produced every day. One way to differentiate your brand is to make your content feel more like a game. Here are 6 ways to do that.

1. Quizzes

Imagine that you have ten different articles on your site that reach ten different groups of people. You want to serve up the right article to each new visitor, to keep them engaged. To guide every new visitor to the right article, use a quiz that serves up a different piece to each taker depending on their interests.

Bonus: Quizzes can also be used for lead generation by asking for an opt-in before showing the quiz results.

2. Crowdsourced lists

Have you ever seen a great list post that was obviously missing items that should have been included? List.ly feels your pain and created an app that allows anyone to embed lists into their site that can be added to by visitors. The lists also have upvotes and downvotes so your audience gets to decide which items show first.

Bonus: Created lists will also show up on the List.ly site which has a strong audience itself.

3. A timer

The Internet is the ultimate distraction tool. Get lost online and when you finally come up for air it’s three hours later. That’s why putting a time on your posts is an amazing idea. When there are cat videos beckoning your potential readers, letting them know that you only need three minutes of their time to read your article can be enough to woo them into your site.

Bonus: The reading time plugin for WordPress is free and available for download here.

4. Leaderboards

Show off your most engaged readers by having a comment leaderboard. Not only does this reward the people who are the most interested in what you have to say, but it shows first-time visitors that you take pride in your audience.

Bonus: Include a link to top commenters’ sites and send traffic their way to gamify the process even more.

5. Stars

Give your audience a way to rate content that doesn’t take time. A simple widget after each post ranking the content on a scale of one to five stars will do. Ratings are a great way to let readers voice their opinion without investing too much time.

Bonus: In some cases, Google will pull rankings and place them in search results, and it’s never a bad thing to have gold stars next to your article in search results.

6. In-line surveys

Writing is full of facts and opinions, that’s why we enjoy reading it. Many of the claims in writing are bold and debatable, which creates the perfect opportunity to place an opinion survey in the middle of a long post. Give readers an opportunity to engage with your content and see how their opinion compares to the average person on a specific issue.

Bonus: You can use survey data that is interesting or striking to construct future posts that target interests you know readers have.

Content has to have a “wow” factor to stand out – and interaction is one way to accomplish that. Setting up interactive snippets in content doesn’t have to be difficult or cost a lot, but adding conversation to content is an amazing way to differentiate your content from the crowd.