Blogging Interviews – Creating Great Content with Interviews
We all know the importance of having quality, engaging and interesting content when it comes to having a blog. People want to read blog posts that they can get some sort of value from. Whether that’s education, insight, or inspiration, everyone has a reason for reading a blog post.
One of the best ways to add unique and interesting content to your blog is through something that existed way before blogs and social media did – blogging interviews.
Depending on who you interview, you will be provided with timeless content that will truly enrich your blog.
Once you figure out who you want to interview, the most important part is coming up with captivating questions that will provide great answers.
Do Your Research Beforehand
Before you interview someone, you need to ensure that you have done proper research.
If you don’t know who to interview yet, a great place to look is on social media.
You can always publicly announce that you want to do some blogging interviews and ask your followers if they have any suggestions of people they’d like to see an interview with. This is a great way to know exactly who our audience wants to hear from.
Questions to Ask Yourself
Once you’ve figured out who you want to interview, and you’ve done your research about them, you need to figure out why you want to interview them.
Here are some example questions that you can ask yourself to make the process easier “what profession does this person have?” “Why are they an important person?” “What can my readers gain or learn from this individual?”
Asking yourself these questions will help you narrow down your choices and pick an impactful individual to interview.
Be Prepared
Like everything else in life, you need to be prepared for your interview. Whether you are doing it over the phone, through Skype, in real life, or through email, you’ll need to be ready before the interview starts.
Make a list of potential questions to ask, things that your readers will benefit from. You can create a rough draft of questions at first, and make a final draft afterward.
A good amount of questions to aim for is 10. This might seem like too much, but if you don’t like one specific question/answer, you can always leave it out of the blog post.
Asking more than 10 questions isn’t the best idea, because then the answers will be shorter and limited. Fewer questions allow the interviewee to expand upon those questions and provide thorough answers.
Asking the Right Questions
When interviewing someone for a blog post, you can’t just ask any generic questions. It’s important to make the questions tailored towards the individual.
If you want unique answers, you’ll need to ask unique questions.
Keep your questions short, straightforward and to the point. You want the person you are interviewing to do most of the talking, not you.
You can create questions that allow room for conversation if necessary.
Create an Interview Template
Once you have figured out who you are going to interview, and what questions you are going to ask, you need to create an interview template for your blog. An interview should be clearly broken down into the questions, and the answers.
However, before you get into the actual interview blog post, it’s helpful to create some informative headers. Make sure to describe the person that you are interviewing in advance so your readers have a bit of background information.
To end the interview blog post, you can create a list of takeaways, or you can create a simple highlight reel which can include your thoughts on things the reader can take away from the blog post.
Stay tuned for a future blog post with a full blogging interviews template that you can just copy and paste!
Conclusion
I hope this article gave you some insight on additional content ideas for your blog.
Blogging interviews can really take it to the next level, improve your engagement and reach, and bring more readers to your blog.
It’s very likely that once the interview is live, the individual that you interviewed will share the post with their own followers which is great exposure for you.
If it’s successful the first time around, you can aim to make interview blog posts a monthly thing, which will give your readers something specific to look forward to each month.
