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Interview an expert
Secure an interview with a respected personality in your industry and the resulting article is likely to attract great traffic and links to your site.
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How to ask for an interview
Phone or email the person in question with a polite invitation. Explain your website or blog so they can judge whether to grant the interview. You should briefly explain who your audience is and why you want the interview.
I always like to give the person an indication of the angle the article is going to take. You can offer to email the interviewee a list of questions. This keeps you focused on what you want from the interview and puts the interviewee at ease, because they can prepare for the interview and research answers in advance.
Before the interview
Plan the interview and like any good journalist, do your research in advance. Read previous interviews the person has given. Look up the companies they have worked for and the projects they have been involved with.
Make sure you have a pen, notepad and a dictaphone to record the interview. There have been a few times where I’ve been half-way through an interview and found
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my dictaphone has run out of battery power or my cell phone is about to die, so make sure you don’t fall into the same trap.
Where are you doing the interview? Choose a quiet spot with as little noise and interference as possible.
The kinds of questions you could ask
I interviewed Chris Garrett, an expert blogger, for
Wordtracker ’s Academy in July 2008 and here are some of the questions I put to him.
• On your own blog www.Chrisg.com you have said that there’s no money in blogging, yet your blog title claims that there’s a six figure income to be had. What’s the truth?
• How do you blog for dollars?
• What are your blogging tips for someone starting out?
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Section 2: Recipe No. 15 | Interview an expert
• With millions of blogs out there how can I make sure mine is unique?
Hot Tip
• What keyword research do you do before you write your blog entries?
• Is business blogging a waste of time?
Conduct your interview
over the phone rather than email. A face-to- face interview works even better.
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• How do you manage comments?
• On your blog you said the “Build it and they will come” theory is flawed. Why?
• How do you get other bloggers to link to you?
My research helped me pick up on things that he’s written or said in the past.
In the article I link to Chris Garrett’s own blog. It’s a good practice and will be appreciated by the interviewee.
The interview
You’ll probably find that the first question is the trickiest. So, get the interview going by asking about easy questions about the person’s background – how they got into their profession, or what companies they worked for.
Get to the specific questions you emailed to the expert and make sure you are listening and taking notes at the same time. Listen carefully! Your interviewee may give a surprising answer or make a controversial statement, so you need to be ready to react to that and ask for more detail. Follow up with probing questions: ask why they feel this way. Or get them to give specific examples.
Structure
You can write up your interview in a question and answer article, like the one I wrote on Chris Garrett; or you can write it in a structured narrative, such as the article I wrote on Seth Godin , author of best selling book, Permission Marketing, Turning Strangers Into Friends And Friends Into Customers.
Use the questions you wrote down as the start of a structure. The introduction should be a summary of who the interviewee is and why your readers will be interested in what they have to say.
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Section 2: Recipe No. 15 | Interview an expert
At the end of the interview check that the interviewee is happy for you to email them with any follow-up questions. That gives you a second chance to clarify what they’ve said.
Before publishing
Check your facts before you hit the ‘publish’ button. If your interviewee gives you a bunch of statistics or mentions a piece of research, check the source to make sure it’s truthfully and accurately represented.
Once the article’s published, send a polite email to the interviewee notifying them. Encourage them to link to or Tweet the article, and respond to any comments or questions it generates.
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Write an A-Z
This idea is simplicity itself. You can write an A-Z on almost anything: great products you have used over the years; tourist attractions in your state; songs and musicians you admire; or tasty food and recipes.
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Entertain your readers
Many websites have A-Zs in the form of an index, which makes the site easier to navigate. This can make useful
list, so plan your writing before you begin. Have a brainstorming session with your colleagues and pick a broad subject area, so you can fill most of the 26 letters.
content, but go one better: aim to create something fun.
Campaigning A-Zs
An A-Z of well designed products
I got the A-Z idea from Fast Company magazine, which in October 2007 published an A-Z of well designed products. The magazine presented each letter alongside a product, with its photograph, the product blurb, and how much it cost. For example:
“M — Method Floor Mop. From the ergonomic pole to the compostable corn-based cloths, Method is, well methodical about smart, sustainable design. It’s non- toxic and naturally derived to protect your home sweet home (and everyone in it.) $24.99.”
A-Zs can be used to promote a variety of causes. Friends of the Earth, the environmental campaign group, has an A-Z of different types of wood , the amount used in the UK each year, and whether the species of tree is under threat.
Sales A-Zs
Here’s another A-Z , geared towards generating sales. It lists gift ideas for men who can’t think of what to buy their girlfriends or wives.
Note the way that each page is optimized with links to
and from each gift idea.
Plan your list before you begin writing
This is a fairly simple process, as long as you have the full A-Z. There’s nothing worse than an incomplete
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Section 2: Recipe No. 16 | Write an A-Z
Hot Tip
Choose a broad- ranging topic. You
don’t want to get to the middle of the alphabet and realize you have nothing left to say.
Toptenz provides great ideas for your own content.
A-Z dangers
The main danger in writing an A-Z is that you can labor over it too much. It should be a quick guide, not a weighty dossier. Try not to get sucked into writing reams of material — keep to a few sentences for each letter.
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