If you’ve followed along with this series from the beginning, interviewing people as a way to create content is not a new idea. I touched on it in the podcast and publicity articles.
There are a few reasons we want to interview people:
- We don’t know everything, so we bring in an expert to share new ideas with our audience.
- We don’t know everything, so we bring in an expert so we learn new things.
- Interviewing people expands our business network with something more than a superficial “thank you” message when connecting on social media.
- Your interview guest will share the interview with his followers because it reinforces that he is a recognized leader. That’s great exposure for you and your guest.
While interviews I’ve done have been audio-based, you can just as easily do a text-based interview. You send your questions via e-mail and they respond by a certain date.
By this point, you already know to share the links to the interviews in the social networking channels.
But for the purposes of this series on content sharing and repurposing, we want to look at how you can repurpose audio interviews.
If you’re doing audio interviews, you’re already a step ahead of most people. But we can do more.
A lot of people miss great opportunities by leaving interviews in audio form.
There are a number of services that will transcribe your audio – or video - interviews.
Casting Words is a service I’ve used. It’s not free, but I felt the price was very fair. But they’re far from the only company doing this.
With most of these types of services, expect to do a little clean-up work as it’s almost impossible to get a 100% error-free transcription. But doing a little clean-up is better than doing the whole thing yourself, especially if it’s a long interview.
So what do we do with the transcriptions?
- You can include a link to it next to the link for the audio version for people who prefer to read rather than listen. If that link takes people to another page on your site, that doesn’t hurt when it comes to search-friendly content for your site.
- You can put the transcription into a nicely designed PDF and offer it as a bonus for signing up to your newsletter. Or offer it for free on your resources page.
- You can offer the interview – or parts of it – to a site that covers the topic you’re talking about.
- You can offer it to your interview guest to share in whatever way she sees fit to so it reaches people outside of your audience.
And while you can do this with interviews you conduct, don’t forget to do this when you’re a guest. Just be sure to ask if they’re OK with you doing that.
The technical side of interviews
The whole idea of interviewing someone may be new to you. If so, here’s some information to get you started.
Keeping things as simple as possible, I use Skype to record my interviews. On the Apple side, there’s a great program called Call Recorder that will record both audio and video. I only use audio for my interviews. When I’m done, the included tools allow me to create an MP3 file for uploading to my site.
On the Windows side, my friend and one of my first interview guests, Traci Hayner Vanover, uses Pamela Recorder Pro.
With Skype, you can talk with anyone in the world. Since it does rely on the Internet, you may have connection glitches. They come up from time to time and you can usually edit them out later with any type of audio editing program like the free Audacity.
If you want to go old-school, FreeConferenceCall.com allows you and your guest(s) to call into a number with your regular phone line and have the conversation recorded.
I used that setup for my first interview a couple of years ago and I have to say I wasn’t thrilled with the quality which was your typical phone-line quality. On the other hand, it’s a free service, so it’s hard to complain too much. But Skype is also free and the quality is better, so that’s what I’ve been using ever since.
Behind-the-scenes with the interview process
When I invite someone to be interviewed, I already have a sense of what their expertise is. But I leave it open if the guest has a current passion for some area, and then we develop the questions from there.
As a courtesy, I do provide most guests with a list of the questions to look over. That way, they can prepare for it or suggest changes.
I also stress that for the best sound, guests need to be speaking into a microphone (usually part of a headset) and not use any built-in computer microphone which tends to pick up more surrounding noise. People aren’t going to listen to an interview if one or both people are hard to hear.
I always want my guest to look good and have an enjoyable experience. That’s just the right approach in general. But a benefit is that if the guest is happy with the end results, they’re more excited to promote it to their followers.
It’s impractical for me to give a complete technical course on how to do interviews. I just want to give you the basics for you to consider and enough information to get you started in the right direction.
Like anything new, it will take time, patience, and probably a few stumbles before you’re comfortable. But it’s worth the effort.
Other articles in this series:
Content Sharing and Repurposing – Your Starting Point
Content Sharing and Repurposing – Twitter
Content Sharing and Repurposing – Facebook
Content Sharing and Repurposing – LinkedIn
Content Sharing and Repurposing – Google Plus
Content Sharing and Repurposing – Guides & Reports
Content Sharing and Repurposing – Books & eBooks
Content Sharing and Repurposing – Guest Blogging
Content Sharing and Repurposing – Article Banks
Content Sharing and Repurposing – Blog Hubs
Content Sharing and Repurposing – Magazines & Newsletters
Content Sharing and Repurposing – Print Marketing
Content Sharing and Repurposing – Podcasting
Content Sharing and Repurposing – Video
Content Sharing and Repurposing – Webinars
Content Sharing and Repurposing – Presentation Hubs
Content Sharing and Repurposing – Press Releases and Publicity
While I wasn’t from the era where some reporters wore a hat with a press tag, I spent plenty of years in a radio station newsroom gathering and writing news stories, and out in the community covering stories.
In my case, I’ve put my 
RSS
Twitter
Facebook
NetworkedBlogs
YouTube
