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Building Blogs: Interviews
< Building Blogs: Reviews | Unsorted Posts | Constant distractions will kill your focus >
This is now the third in my Building Blogs series. News, Reviews, Interviews (do you see what I did there?).Publishing an interview is all about working someone else's opinions into an article or blog entry. There are a few ways to do it, and there are a few key things you can do to make your interviews stand out.
Who are you interviewing?
It takes a bit of thought to choose who to interview. Will a "big name" attract lots of people to your site? Will they have time to reply if you send them questions? Would their presence on your site be relevant to your readers?I've interviewed ProBlogger (Darren Rowse) and Entrecard's founder, Graham Langdon. I made a point to choose people who are recognisable, influential and relevant to the readers of my site.
It's not just who you choose though.
What are you asking?
I don't see much point in publishing an interview if I already knew the answers before I asked the questions. Questions like "how long have you been blogging?" or "what plugins do you use?" might yield interesting answers, but you could probably find out the answers without looking at the interview. If the interviewee has recently written things on their site that would answer your questions outright, you might want to have a rethink.With Graham's interview I made a point to ask a few questions where I thought people would want to know the answers. Those were not the kind of questions you'd find in the Entrecard help pages. They were aimed at very specific aspects of Entrecard as a whole, and I think the detailed answers resulted in a really great post.
As Darren is in the "blogs about blogging" niche there are a lot of questions you could ask him. I decided to focus on a theme that has been discussed on my site quite a few times. Linking the questions together like that is important if you want to publish a coherent interview.
Publishing medium
An email interview with a Q&A style post isn't a bad thing, but if you have the opportunity to take it to the next level, why not embrace that opportunity? You could try an audio interview or a video interview to add some personality to the Q&A session.Final thoughts
Keep it relevant to your audience. Write great questions. Look for people who will add value to your site!Related Content
Comments on Building Blogs: Interviews
Oh yes, I agree you might not always get the interview. I'm very focused on asking the questions people will want to know the answers to. If I was sent back a different set of questions with some answers, I wouldn't publish the interview. If the interviewee wants to have control over what's being asked, they might be better off writing a guest post.
I think finding someone to interview is much easier than getting them to agree to the interview.
I'm just in the opinion that the interviewee would not even bother to have a second look at you if you happen to be a new blogger in the neighborhood. I guess it would be much easier to ask for an interview if you have already earned some credibility or something.
Just my thought..
Yan
Blog for Beginners, welcome to my site. :) I don't think the interviewee would ignore someone for being new to blogging. If a brand new blogger asks the right questions, I think they stand as much chance of getting replies as anyone else. Equally, I don't think an established blogger has any guarantees of a reply, at least not more of a guarantee than a new blogger does. I think it's all in what you ask, how you ask it, and how many questions you raise.
Finding someone to interview is sometimes more difficult than you described.
Quite a while ago I ran a 'news' blog and I tried to set up an interview with a local South African politician. To my dismay I found out that this guy would only agree to an interview if he was allowed to set up the questions. I did not go through with the interview as it would not have served any purpose.
This little incident had quite an impact on me. Every time I read an interview these days I cannot help but wonder who was actually asking the questions.