Q. Can you tell me the benefits of publishing an online quiz versus a printed one?

A. Well, the first benefit of publishing an online quiz that comes to mind is the fact that it's an outstanding way to drive traffic to your web site. People love quizzes and they take ones that are printed in magazines all of the time. It's reasonable to assume that if these same people knew about the existance of an online quiz that they would beat a path to your home page.

Another great feature of offering an online quiz is that you can change the subject regularly. In fact, you could offer a subscription where members sign up to be notified whenever a new online quiz gets posted.

An online quiz can also be used as a sales tool. One of the best ways of accomplishing this is to link your quiz questions to affiliate sites where you earn money when people make purchases. Then you can have a "scavenger hunt" online quiz where people have to visit those sites to find the quiz answers.

People also like to take an online quiz because they can get instant scoring without having to turn the page upside down, or flip to the end of the magazine, to find out how they did. You can even design your online quiz so that it gives instant feedback after every answer is entered.

One last thing to consider is that you can create keyword-rich versions of your online quiz and then post the URLs to search engines. That way you will not only get search traffic from people who like quizzes, but you'll get traffic from people who are searching on the terms that you include in your online quiz!

So, while it's not likely that a printed quiz is going to become obsolete any time soon. The Internet has once again forever impacted the way that we communicate. Today's latest example? The online quiz.