This blog post is part of a 6-part mini-series on “Profiting With Interviews“.

So you’ve got the expert to agree to do the interview. And now, the time to conduct the interview has come. You’re on the phone with the expert… You’re extremely nervous… And you’re not prepared. 10 minutes into the interview, disaster strikes. You’ve run out of questions and you begin to choke. If you’re lucky, the interviewee might just get fed up and enter “speaker mode” and gives you the same old pitch as every other interview. If you’re not lucky, the interviewee will just hang up and you’ve just ruined your opportunity. There’s no second chance.

The above is the worst-case scenario of what will happen if you don’t do this part right. This is the part where most people fail. If you choke, there’s no second chance.

Coming up with a list of good questions is the most important part of the entire interviewing process, so I want to discuss things in full details.

First off, let’s define what a good question is.

What Is A “Good Question”?

1. Specific Questions. Too many people simply ask “general questions”. When you ask general questions, you get general answers. When you ask specific questions, you get detailed answers. It’s that simple. Bad example: “How do I generate traffic?” Good example: “Can you walk us through the step-by-step process of generating traffic using viral marketing?”
2. Open-Ended. In other words, don’t ask questions that can be answered with a “Yes” or “No”. Bad example: “Do you create to-do lists?” Good example: “How can a person use a to-do list to keep themselves focused?”
3. Short. Keep your questions short and to the point. Don’t make it confusing for the interviewee. Bad example: “If you only had 24 hours to generate as much traffic as you can to your website, and $20 to spend on advertising, which 3 places will you invest the money and how will you go about generating that traffic?” Okay, I am exaggerating a little bit but you get the point.
4. Questions Your Customers Want To Know. I can’t stress the importance of this. When it comes to creating information products using interviews, really, you’re asking questions on behalf of your customers. Not what you want to know, but what your customers want to know. If this was just a private conversation, then ask whatever you want. But in this case, it’s an interview created to provide value to your market.
5. Hot Topics. Similar to the one above, you have to ask things which have a market or audience. It’s basic economics: supply and demand.
6. Thought Provoking Questions. What I mean by this is you have to ask questions that are going to make the expert go, “Wow, that’s a great question.” Hence, thought-provoking question. You’ve got to make the expert think in order to not only get the best out of him/her but also keep the interview interesting for them.

I’ve included some template questions which you can use as reference to come up with your own list of questions:

Introduction Questions

• Can you tell us a little bit about yourself and how you got started with ____?
• Can you give us a brief walkthrough of what you plan to share with our listeners today?

Body Questions

• What advice will you give to a beginner who’s just starting out with ____?
• What do you think are the three main ingredients to ____?
• Can you walk us through a step-by-step process to ____?
• What is the best way to ___?
• What inspired you to come up with ____?
• If you had to start all over, what three things will you do differently?
• What motivated you to continue with ___?
• What obstacles did you initially face and how did you overcome them?
• What do you define as ___?

Closing Questions

• What are your future plans to taking ____ to the next level?
• Do you have any final comments you want to add?
• Let people know about your main websites where they can get more information about you

Now here are some ways in which you can come up with your questions and get good ideas from:

1. Your Target Market

The first method is to simply ask your target market. You are asking your questions on behalf of your customers, so what better way to get those questions than asking the people themselves? The biggest mistake when creating an information product is not doing market research and thinking about your potential customers. You need to get inside the mind of your prospects.

By asking your market directly, not only did you have other people come up with the questions for you, but you ended up with a product that is “custom-created” to fulfill the needs of your market. Thus, more likely people will buy that product.

So how and where do you ask those questions? There are two main ways:

a) Survey - You can create a survey and send it out to your subscriber list, post it on your website or submit it to your blog. A good resource to create surveys is surveymonkey.com. Just simply ask them, “What is the single most important question you have about ____?” or “What is your single biggest fustration about ___?“

b) Forums – Go to a forum in your niche and basically post a thread saying, “I’m creating a product about… and I’m going to interview these experts… please submit your questions.” Be up front with them. Tell them your going to interview all these experts and ask them to post their questions. Not only are you getting those questions, you’re also creating buzz for your product before it’s even created (since they get all excited about those big-name experts you’re throwing out)

2. Bullet Points of Salesletters

This is probably my favorite method. Go to the salesletter of a best-selling product or competitor in your field and look at the bullet points. Specifically look at the BENEFITS of the bullet points (not features). The difference between the two is that features tell you what the product is, while benefits tell you what the product will do fo you. Now once you’ve compiled a list of bullet points from the different salesletters, then all you need to do is translate those benefits into questions. Why bother coming up with the questions yourself when you’ve got PROVEN bullet points in front of you already?

Let me show you a few examples, Here are some bullet points I’ve extracted:

• The two biggest mistakes you can make with pay-per-click search engines and why it’s insane that 99% of advertisers make them.
• How to effectively use guerrilla marketing techniques to get million dollar results on a tiny budget.
• Enhance your piano playing skills by 400% in just a couple of days.
• 6 things you should always outsource. Quickly rid yourself of these time vampires and get on with the business of making money.
• How to ‘brainwash’ your affiliates to sell more of your product.

And here’s how I turned those into questions:

• What is the single biggest mistake you see people doing when pay-per-click marketing to generate traffic?
• Can you walk us through a step-by-step formula for using guerrilla marketing to increase sales?
• What is the most effective method to improving one’s piano skills?
• What sort of tasks should an internet marketer begin outsourcing so they can focus on making money for their business?
• What are some of the ways you can use to motivate affiliates to promote more?

Just be careful not to fall into the trap by asking the exact version of the bullet points in question form, other wise you can very easily end up with the same product as your competitor (meaning you have no differentiation and unique selling proposition

3. Table of Contents

Go to a bookstore or Amazon.com and search for books related to your field. For example, if you’re in the dog training niche, then go to Amazon and search for dog training. Then look for the table of contents, and poof, you’ve got your list of questions. Like the bullet points on salesletters, just simply turn those into questions.

4. Brainstorming

Begin brainstorming and start coming up with your own questions. The cool thing about brainstorming is that once you come up with one question, it almost always spawn up 4 or 5 more related questions. That way, in a very short period of time, you’ll have a bucketload of questions you can ask for your interview. It’ll be even more better if you can get a buddy of yours to join you and have a mastermind session. Although it’s best if you do this face-to-face in a conference room, there’s always the option to doing this over a telephone via conference calls, or online private chat rooms.

Final Tips And Tricks

1. Prepare at least 20-40 questions. It’s always to better have more questions prepared. You don’t necessarily have to ask all 40 questions, but use them for guidelines during your interview in case you get stuck.
2. Prepare an introduction. This is usually just a small speech at the start of the interview introducing your expert. Usually a short biography of him/her will do fine. You can either ask for a bio from the expert himself or go to their website.
3. Ask! Just ask questions. Too many people don’t actually ask questions because they are shy. Be brave and have the guts to ask questions, especially controversial ones.

In the next post, I’m going to talk about the right way to conduct those interviews and how to make yourslf comfortable (and overcome your “shyness”).