How to Conduct Blog Interviews

Interviewing successful people in your industry is always a great way to boost traffic on your blog. The problem is that most bloggers don’t have a clue how to conduct a proper interview.

More often than not, the blogger fails to squeeze out any semblance of quality information, leaving the interview filled with irrelevant information and the interviewee with no incentive to share the content.
The following are seven crucial tips to know before conducting blog interviews.

1. Introductions
Prior to conducting the interview, spend at least an hour learning about your subject. Take the time to read their about page, look through their latest blog posts, and try to figure out what they’ve been doing lately through Twitter or Facebook.
Then, write a 2-3 sentence introduction that walks the audience through who the interviewee is, why they’re important, and why the audience should pay attention. If you ask the interviewee to introduce themselves, they will do so humbly and the audience won’t get a sense of how important that person is.

2. The Audience
Your goal with any interview is to get the interviewee to provide the most valuable, specific piece of advice tailored to your audience.
If they’ve never read your blog, then it’s your responsibility to tell them everything about your audience, from the age to their personality type.

3. Small Talk
Once you get the interviewee on the other line, start with a few minutes of talking about where they’re from, their family, or even the weather. This makes them feel more comfortable talking with you. In this way, they’ll open up and tell you more of their secrets.

4. Set Expectations
Right before you start the interview, give them an idea of where you intend to take the interview. Tell them the questions or topics so they can structure their responses based on the information you want them to give, in the order you want them to give it.
Also, tell them how long you expect the interview to take and how you are going to record and distribute the content.

5. Transition Through Questions
The only time you should be talking is in between questions. Wrap up the question by summarizing their response.
Then, transition into the next question by connecting it to their previous response. If you put some thought into crafting and organizing the order of your questions prior to the interview, this should come easy.

6. Anything Else You Would Like to Add?
This is the magic question to ask at the end of every interview. Asking them if there is anything else they would like to add has two benefits.
First of all, it’s almost impossible to cover everything with your questions. This gives them an open door to talk about anything that they believe is important. Second, it subconsciously tells them that the interview is about to wrap up, which encourages them to summarize everything they’ve said up to that point in perhaps the most important two minutes of the interview.

7. Thank Them
At the end of the interview, thank them for taking the time, remind the audience of their name, and direct people to their websites.
Don’t ask them to pitch their sites but instead, do it for them.
Immediately after you wrap up the interview ask them if there’s anything you could have done better. They’ll appreciate you asking and you’ll find out how to improve.
It’s a lot of work to conduct the interview, produce, transcribe, then edit the content, but it makes a world of difference in the quality of the results. Go over these seven valuable points to conducting a blog interview prior to meeting your subject to enhance your chances of success.

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