Hey there :)

In last week's 5 Minute Marketing Tip I showed you how to come up with 100 ideas for content for blog posts, articles, videos and podcasts.

In my follow-up emails to my email subscribers I also shared a few of the best methods for creating content quickly and easily. One of those was the “Expert Interview”.

I got an email back from Kevin who asked for more details on how to do Expert Interviews. And since they're one of the very best ways to create high value content without needing to do a lot of the work yourself, I thought I'd share the tips on this week's video.

So watch the video to find out what Expert Interviews are, how to find the right experts to interview and what questions to ask to get the most from them.
 

 
A couple of good audio players/podcast services are Libsyn and Blubrry.

I edit my podcasts/audios with Audacity, and then use Auphonic to tidy up the final audio file and add my jingles etc.

Find this video helpful? Subscribe to the More Clients TV channel on youtube to get more of them:

Video Transcript

Hi it's Ian here, welcome to another five minute marketing tip. In last week's video, I showed you how to come up with a hundred ideas for content for blog posts, articles, videos and podcasts. Hopefully many of you are underway creating those. I know a lot of people found that a really helpful start from the comments below the video. Now in my follow-up emails that I did to email subscribers only, I shared a couple of really great ways of producing that content very quickly and easily without a lot of effort yourself. One of those ways was the expert interview and I got an email back from Kevin, one of my subscribers, asking for more details about how to do expert interviews. That's what I'm going to cover on this week's five minute marketing tip video. How to do expert interview videos because it really is an excellent way of getting really high quality content for your website without a lot of time and effort spent by you. I'll see you after the break.

Hi, welcome back. So firstly what is an expert interview? An expert interview is pretty much exactly what it says on the tin. It's where you interview an expert and use the content on your website. Now typically you do an audio interview so you'll do the interview on Skype or on a teleconference service. You'll record the call and then with minimal editing, because usually it happens all in one take because it doesn't need to be word perfect, you kind of top and tail it. Cut off the hello, how you doing type stuff before you start the interview and cut off the oh was that any good at the end. You've got an interview. Now you can use that interview, some people use it as a podcast obviously but you don't even need to go that far. You can just use it as an audio file with a player on your website. I'll put down some of the technologies underneath the video.

Now expert interviews are great because you get expert input, really great ideas that will be valuable to your audience, your clients and potential clients to share on your website but because it's someone else giving the content, you don't have to do a lot of work yourself. It's really a win-win because it's not a lot of work for the person who you interview as well. It's much easier for them to come on Skype with you for twenty, thirty minutes and answer a bunch of questions than it is for them to sit down and type an article out from scratch. It's really good for them as well because it builds their credibility. They get exposed to a wider audience, gives them a link back to their website and, as I said, it's pretty easy to do. All in all it's a win for both sides.

Who are the sort of people you can interview for your podcast or for just an audio on your website? Anyone who is an expert, whose opinion and ideas would be valuable to your target audience, your clients, potential clients. Think through what might people want to hear, who has useful information about that. That could be another expert in the field a bit like you especially valuable there are people who have just written a book or are launching a new program. Obviously they'll want to get out and promote that book or promote that program so they will be very willing to come on your podcast or record an audio interview with you. I've found that pretty much anyone who is an expert is quite willing to hop on a call for twenty minutes and record an interview. It's not that onerous so people are very happy to do it given that it gives them more publicity, more visitors, more exposure.

Now the other people who it's great to interview are role models for your audience. For example if you teach, I don't know, if you teach bookkeepers how to run a successful business then you might want to interview either your clients or well known bookkeepers, if there are such people who are doing well, for their tips on how they became successful. If you offer services to authors or bookkeepers or retail businesses or whoever it might be, you can run a podcast where you interview successful people in that particular field about how they became successful and their back story etc. They become role models for your audience, the people listening to that podcast. Two different types of people and all you do is, even if you know them already, you can phone them up or shoot off a quick email. Tell them about the podcast or the audio interviews you're going to be doing and asking if they'd like to participate. Most of them will say yes.

What kind of questions can you ask? There are two different sorts of interview. One which you often do if you do that role model interview where you're interviewing lots of the same type of person, so if you're interviewing lots of start-up businesses as to how they succeeded in starting up, you'll probably ask the same questions to each of them. Just think through what would my audience be interested in hearing from these people? You might ask them, usually start off with some kind of question about their back story, how did they get started? How did they particularly get into this field? What made them interested in this field etc? An easy question to get them going and then you ask about what were some of the significant events? What are their biggest learnings from when they started up? If they could go back in time, what would be the biggest thing they would change? What would be their number one piece of advice for the listeners?

Many of the questions that we came up with and the topics we came up with in last week's video for topics you can write articles about, those all work really well. Be sure to at the start, obviously ask them beforehand how they'd like to be introduced, and at the end hand it over to them to give them a little bit of publicity. Say, “If people wanted to find out more about you and what you do, where should they go?” Then it gives them a chance to promote their website. Now the other type of interview is a unique interview where the questions are very specific to the person you're interviewing. That's normally the type you do if you were interviewing someone who has just written a book or has a new program coming out. What you do in that case is you get a copy of the book, you either buy it or often they'll send you a copy free and you skim read it or ideally read it fully.

Go through it and mark out the points that you think would be really interesting to your audience. Then just ask questions that allow the person you're interviewing to elaborate on those particular points and bring those points out. I've done that with a number of my interviews. In fact a really good way of knowing how to do them and what questions to ask is to subscribe to podcasts or to go to websites with these interviews. I've done a number but if you look in your own particular field or the business field generally, you can usually find a bunch of podcasts on ITunes where people do interviews. See what sort of questions they ask, don't use the same questions, but get an idea of the flavor and what questions help bring out the most insight for your audience. Of course the final thing you can do is you can ask the person you're interviewing if there are any particular questions they would like to be asked that will help bring out the best insights and the best information that they've got.

I often do that. If people are interviewing me about email marketing, I've got a set of questions usually about how do I get more subscribers? How do I engage them and get people to open my emails or get people to take action on my emails? Some kind of standard ones that I know will be interesting to any audience. If anyone wants to interview me those are the ones I always suggest as questions. That's basically how to do expert interviews. You find the right people, fairly easy, you ask them and then you send the questions in advance. Ask those sort of questions that you think will bring out the best from them, that will be insightful to your audience. After that all you do, as I said, top and tail the interview. Get rid of the blather at the beginning and the end util you properly start the interview. I use a little service called Auphonic that I upload to and it levels out the volumes, adds my jingle on the front and the back. You're done.

You've got an audio file, you can then upload that to an audio player on your website. As I say I'll mention a couple below. Or you can upload it into ITunes as well as a podcast so all great ways of getting content for your website pretty easily. Really all the content is coming from other people but the more of these experts you interview, the more you become seen as an expert yourself. It really helps to put you as part of that expert community. That's it for now, see you next week.