The Advantages Of Writing Online Blog Interviews

One of the most powerful tools in blogging is to ask questions! Whether you’re asking your readers, other bloggers or anyone that you are talking to online. Asking the right questions to the right people can really help make your site stand out, and a simple way of doing this is to conduct online blog interviews.

How Do I Get An Online Blog Interview?

Think about all the questions that you would want to ask a fellow professional in your niche (i.e. fellow blogger) and get in contact with them to see if they would be willing to do an interview with you.

If they agree, you can make a feature of the interview and publish it as one of your blog posts. And there you go … you have one more quality post for your blog, helping to drive traffic to your site, or better yet, the post may go viral.

It’s not to hard to conduct your first blog interview, just simply get in contact with the people you want to interview and ask them! The worst they can say is no. Though more than likely, they will probably be flattered to be asked, with the added bonus of getting some free exposure and backlinks to their site.

What Are The Benefits Of Posting Interviews On My Site?

Well the best way to find out is to simply try doing one and see how it turns out. I suggest you try one to start with and see what effect it has on your blog performance. The main advantages you should see from doing interviews is that it helps improve your social and blogging skills, whilst building connections with other people in your industry.

An interview post can fit into any kind of blog, whether its for personal or business purposes. How can that be? Well, the key is free publicity and promotion! Everyone loves that, particularly for business purposes.

Now let’s take a look at some other advantages that you can get from posting blog interviews;

Your Readers Will Appreciate High Quality Interviews

In a blog interview, you take the control! You are the one directing the questions, therefore you can dictate how valuable your reader will find it. You can direct the conversation, so you end up concentrating on one particular topic that you feel your readers would be interested in.

Once published, your readers will see it as free advice from other experts when reading your post. The best part is that they will value the opinions and suggestions of other people within the same field, without having to navigate away from your site.

Your readers will appreciate quality advise from other experienced people within your niche,and who doesn’t like quality advice for free?

Interviews Help To Grow Your Online Reputation

From my blogging experiences, reputation is important, more so if you are trying to make a living from your own blog! Publishing your first interview on your site with someone higher up in your niche helps to grow your online reputation within the blogosphere.

Interviews help to give you a better impression of you as blogger. It shows you are determined to provide valuable content, not just for your readers but also to your interviewee. Once you start to build a reputation within your niche, it will help to open doors and give you more opportunity to take your blog to the next level.

Interviews Can Go Viral!

I noticed a significant spike in traffic every single time I did an interview’, which made me want to conduct my own interviews for my blog this year.

So far, I have conducted three blog interview for my site, with; Lola Lobato, Mavis Nong, and the latest with OnlineIncomeTeacher’s very own Matt Smith!

Each of blog interview can have varying results, but one thing for sure is it almost always brings in more traffic and more exposure for both the interviewer and interviewee.

Interviews Help To Build Contacts

When you are trying to organize an interview, you need to get in contact with other people to be the interviewee. This process not only improves your communication skills, but also open up new relationships with other bloggers.

Once you have successfully published your interview with such individual, you will have access to a wider community of people. This includes your interviewee’s online community as they will want to share it with all of their followers to help improve their own online reputation.

The result of each blog interview will be different, but free publicity and the value that you provided can give you a better change to expand your online relationship with other people!

Interviews Help You To Keep Publishing Regular Content

One important rules in blogging survival is ‘Publish Regular Content’! You need to keep your blog updated regularly with fresh content to maintain your blog SEO, and more importantly keep your readers coming back for more.

This, for some bloggers is an easy thing to do, but for many, blank blog post syndrome is a serious thing to overcome. One of the effective ways to solve this is through conducting an interview. After all, it can be much easier to think of questions to ask, rather than answers.

I bet you have a lot of ideas that you want to talk about on your blog, but sometimes it can be hard for you to convey what you want to write about. Making a blog interview post could also ease that situations.

For example, you may run a blog within the food niche. Suddenly you have a brilliant idea to make a post about healthy food, but you don’t know exactly what to write about. Well why not try and get an interview with the owner of ‘HealthFoodLover’ or someone similar.

How Do I Get My First Online Blog Interview?

Getting a blog interview is not too hard, but it’s not too easy either! Not all of my blog interview requests were accepted, but from that experiences I have learned what helps to get a request approved. Here are some tips that you might find useful;

Plan Out Your Questions In Advance

Planning out what questions you want to ask in advance is always important. It helps you to know what direction you want to take the interview and what topics you want to concentrate on. Think about what questions your readers would want to ask and prepare your list of questions accordingly.

Then you must prepare your interview request to send out, emphasising why they should accept your request. Try to find a reason from their background of expertise, or ask them more about one of their posts that caught your eye. Make sure to send them what questions you want to ask them beforehand, so they get a better idea of how the interview will pan out.

If you show enthusiast and knowledge within your interview questions, they will probably accept your request.

Be Patient and Polite

As I told you previously, blog interviews help to improve your communication skills. You must learn to act politely through your introduction with your interviewee and you have to be patient too.

Never assume that your request will be accepted straight away! Be patient in waiting for a reply and accept that they may want to answer only certain questions.

If you really want to ask a specific question, then ask again politely. All you can do just ask politely and patient because you don’t know how busy your interviewee is, right? Hassle them for quick reply’s will only put them off working with you.

Choosing People To Interview

Choosing who to interview is very important. You can ask high profile bloggers for an interview, but accept that you may not succeed in hearing back from them. These bloggers may be too busy, or only work with more established bloggers, but sometimes these bloggers will be more than happy to let you interview them.

Often, you may need to work on developing your own online reputation and growing your site before you can attract the big names for interviews. But that doesn’t mean there aren’t other people within your niche that will be happy to work with you. Try to pick people based on what value they can provide for you and your readers.

Set A Reasonable Time Period

You never know how busy your interviewee is, so don’t burden them with a tight deadline. Set a reasonable time period when you want to publish, let’s say 2-3 weeks later and stick with that schedule. This will give whoever you are interviewing plenty of time to reply to your questions.

If you are conducting your interview over Skype or a webcam, try to fit in with your interviewee. Try to be flexible and work around their schedule. Also, remember the different time zones if you are interviewing someone from the other side of the world.

Even though you have set a 2-3 week timeline to have the interview go live, but then you get it back within the next couple of days, you have to stick with your first plan (publish it two weeks later), don’t switch into sooner. It shows that you are a fully committed blogger in front of your interviewee.

If you really have to change your post date, then inform your interviewee in advance about the change of plan. This way, they can still share it with their own followers on the day of publishing.

Let Them Read It First!

Before you publish anything, let your interviewee see the draft before it goes live! This way, it’s much easier to make any changes that they are unhappy with. After all, you are using their name and their responses, so show them the respect of letting them read through it first. They will appreciate this, and be more willing to work with you in the future if they are 100% happy with the outcome.

If you have found this post useful, please share it with others. If you have your own experiences with blog interviews, or further questions on how to conduct your own, than please leave your comments below and I will be happy to discuss it with you.