Heather Vale Goss, Content Director of LWL Worldwide, Inc. explains the importance of conducting good interviews for your business.

It’s a standard recommendation from internet marketing teachers: if you want to build a list, drive traffic to your website, or create a quality product fast, find some experts in your niche and interview them.

After all, interviewing allows you to leverage many aspects (that means you do a little work for big results). You can leverage knowledge (you don’t have to know a lot about the topic, because your expert does), celebrity name power (people will buy your product based on who you interviewed) and traffic (you can have the expert promote your interview to their subscribers and customers).

You can use your interviewing skills to host teleseminars, podcasts, create information products and books, and more. You can use them to sell products that are yours, products that you’re an affiliate for, or you can make the interview the product itself.

It’s the perfect solution… and it’s easy, right?

Well, it certainly is simple, but that doesn’t always mean easy.

First of all, how do you get those experts to say yes?

And then once they do, how do you know what to ask them?

Most marketing teachers will leave you to flounder on your own, because while they know how powerful interviews are, and often even have a natural skill for it, they don’t know how to teach what they do. In fact, they usually don’t know that they’re doing anything besides having a conversation and recording it, so that’s what they’ll often tell you to do.

But a regular conversation differs from an interview in a few ways. A regular conversation is weighted pretty equally, while an interview puts the spotlight on your guest. And a regular conversation is between two people, while an interview is all about that invisible third party: the audience.

And honestly, let’s face it… most conversations aren’t worthy of being recorded or sold. They’re just plain boring.

Going into an interview thinking it’s just going to be just like a conversation is one of the three biggest mistakes new interviewers make. And what they end up with is a bunch of lightweight, shallow fluff rather than hard-hitting, deep, informative content.

If your interviews don’t deliver on providing information that your audience doesn’t know, or can’t find elsewhere, you’ve failed. Your interviews won’t drive traffic, or help build your list, or get you loyal customers. You might get people at first who are hoping for something good, but once they hear the quality of what you’ve created, they’ll never support you or buy from you again.

Knowing how to ask the best questions possible for any situation, and how to draw unique content from your guest, is vitally important to conducting top-quality interviews.

The good news is, it’s not that difficult to learn the techniques and methods that the best interviewers in the world use. You can do it by watching and listening to other interviewers, determining exactly what they do that works, and then using the process of trial and error in your own efforts; or you can get some guidance from someone who’s been there.

Personally, I did a combination of both, over 15 years ago. I made a lot of the same mistakes other beginners make, but I couldn’t let them keep happening. My interviewing career started on TV, with a lot of people watching, so I had a lot of motivation to get good, fast!

And I’ve spent the last five years interviewing hundreds of experts online.

That means I know exactly what to do… and what not to do.

I’ve also interviewed numerous other top online interviewers to find out what they do to get the best content possible from their interviews. And I put it all together in an easy-to-understand physical package called Interviewing Unwrapped, so you don’t have to do this the hard way.

Interviewing is something everyone can learn to do well, if they want to. Just like any other endeavor you undertake, it all boils down to the desire to do it.

Sure, it can be scary at first… but if you go ahead and do it anyway, you’ll find it becoming easier, and your content getting better, every time you get behind the mic (or the phone).

Heather Vale Goss has been interviewing experts and celebrities since 1993, when she began her media career as host and producer of an award-winning TV show. She is now on a quest to share the interviewing skills she has developed with others, so they can create top-notch online content too, through speaking engagements, interviews, and her physical home-study resource Interviewing Unwrapped.

Tags: Content Creation, Heather Vale Goss, Interviewing, Interviewing Unwrapped, Interviews, LWL Worldwide