How to Construct Interviews That Rocks

This is a follow-up post to the previous post I wrote the “12 Types of Blog Posts”-post. In this post I am going to explain how to make a good interview, which will be shared and commented a lot.

An interview is not just an interview, with another person. When you are publishing interview on your blog you should do a lot of work before shooting the interview with the person. You should try to get as many opinion from the person you’re interviewing, because everybody want to know about their opinions.

Preparation For The Interview

As when you are shooting a video you need to be prepared. You can’t just get some questions right away. And you shouldn’t only prepare questions, there is much more you should prepare.

Research the Person

Changes are that you know the person you’re going to invite, but even if you do then you should do some research. Just what he does and what he likes etc, if he/she has a blog then it should be no problem.

Just be sure that you know who this person is in general, if you normally are using explicit language on your blog, but this person isn’t then I think you should cut of all the explicit of the interview. The person may feel bad about using explicit words in your interview and may find it hard to tolerate stuff like that. So just cut that off.

Just be prepared, who is this person and why do you want to interview him?

Prepare a Couple of Questions

Questions, questions, questions. That is what an interview is all about. You need to have some question prepared, it can take lots of time if not are familiar with interviews, but it is pretty easy, when you have done the research of the person.

Try to ask the person some questions that you would like to know about him, try to ask new things instead of things he already have been asked before. Then the person will also be more likely to link to it, if it is new, you know? If all this stuff is new instead of the old stuff. You are asking him new things, while everybody else is asking a cook blogger how he cook, or something like that.

So ask new questions, instead of the same “routine questions.”

When you have your list of questions, ask the person you want to interview if they would like them, so they can prepare for the interview as well.

Types of Questions

Changes are that your audience would not know the person you are interviewing, so I think that it is really necessary, that you ask for a short introduction, just shoot the question “Can you tell a bit about yourself?” – that would work. If it is a blogger then the person would tell them where they can find their blog.

As I said before then you need to stand out from the crowd with your interview. Ask new and inspiring questions, instead of the same old boring stuff, if you are interviewing a problogger then you should ask over 95% blogging questions, it is okay to have some off-topic questions.

Also try to be funny, prepare some funny questions, the funniest questions is almost always the off-topic questions.

So try to shoot a couple of off-topic questions, because they are probably the funniest questions you can ask and it can give some opinions and reveal stuff about their private life.

Types of Interview

There is three types of interviews. Maybe more, but these are those I know about.

• Text Interviews
• Voice Interviews
• Video Interviews

The first one “text interviews” is just an interview, where you send the questions to the person and then he/she is emailing the answers back to you. Probably the easiest way to make an interview

The second, “voice interviews” could be you calling the person on Skype and then recording from there.

The third will be the same, but just Skype with webcam.

The second and the third would give you much more credibility, then you actually have talked to for an example Tony Robbins or a person like that.

I hope this blog post inspired you to start interviewing some people. So what is your take? Any way you want to share, how do you construct your interviews? Please let us know in the comments, much appreciated!