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

You’ve brainstormed your list of interview questions, it’s now time to conduct the actual interview (finally). Here are just some quick tips:

Before The Interview

1. Email The Interviewee About The Arrangements. Do this right after the expert has agreed to your initial interview proposal. Ask them HOW (email, phone etc) and WHEN (time and date) you want the interview to be conducted. Something like, “How does October 22nd at around 3pm sound?” will do the trick.
2. Send A Final Reminder 1 Day Before. Don’t assume that they will remember, especially if it’s an interview which was arranged 1 month in advance. Most experts will have a personal assistant to help keep track, but there’s always one or two who will forget. Yes, it has happened to me where I phoned the expert up, only to find out they had a “last-minute business meeting” and requested me to phone back tomorrow. So remind and CONFIRM just to be on the safe side.

During The Interview

1. Be Pumped Up. It does take some guts at the start to pick the phone up and talk to this “guru”. I know in my first ever interview, I was so nervous that my hands were shaking during the interview. The way I was able to overcome that was to be pumped-up beforehand. You have to be excited, you have to be passionate. Treat the interview as if you’re talking to a friend of yours. It is a little scary at first, but once you overcome that “hump” with that first interview, then the rest will be easy. Heck, if a 15 year old can do it, why not you?
2. Make Yourself Comfortable. You don’t want yourself to be standing in this awkward position for 60 minutes while you’re interviewing this expert. When you are stressed, it will come across in your voice because you won’t be able to concentrate. Make sure you’re sitting down somewhere and have a cup of water next to you (you will get thirsty). I always make sure I have my laptop in front of me with the list of questions and a brief script for the introduction (what the interview is about, introduce the expert, bio etc). It’s also handy to have the person’s website in front of you and a plain word document to take some notes on.
3. Listen! The #1 skill a good interviewer needs is listening. I can’t stress this enough. A good interviewer needs to focus on what is BEING SAID, not what they’re going to say next. It’s not just the matter of reading down the list of questions. You need to know when to follow-up on questions when it’s not being fully answered; you need to improvise or change the questions to suit the context. People can actually sense whether or not they are being listened to. If you don’t listen to them, they’ll feel like talking to a brick wall. You’ve got to help maintain that energy within the expert so you can get the best content out of them. I know when I first started out, my tendency was to focus on what I was going to ask next, rather than what was currently going on. But you can’t know what to say next until you finish hearing what’s currently being said now.

Recording The Interview

If you’re doing this on video, then obviously, it’s just as simple as getting a camera and pressing the record button. It’s slightly more complicated to do this over the phone. There are several ways to go about it:

1. Conference Line. This was the method I used to conduct all 14 of my interviews. The is where both you and the interviewee dial the same number into this “virtual conference room”. Usually, the conference line provider will have a record button where you can record the entire interview. The one I personally used was a service called “Instant Teleseminar“. It costs $47 per month, but you can get a $1 trial. There are plenty of other free conference lines out there, but I can’t personally endorse them since I never used any of them. You can do a Google search for them.
2. Phone Recording Device. You can get one of these from BestBuy or Amazon (or eBay). Basically you plug it into your phone and it will record anything on the line. You can also do this on your iPhone or any phone with a recording feature to it.
3. Skype. If you’re going to use Skype (which I do recommend if it provides a better quality – it depends on the connection) I recommend Pamela Call Recorder. You can get it for a 30 day trial then pay around $15 afterwards. It’s well worth it.

After The Interview

1. Thank Them. Appreciate the fact that they’ve taken time out of their day to conduct this interview. Many of the expert who I interviewed for eMillions usually charge anywhere from $500 to $5000 per hour for their time, yet they did it for free for me. So be greatful and thank them. It wouldn’t hurt to say something like, “Let me know if there’s anything I can do for you.”
2. Follow-Up. After one week after the interview, follow-up on them. Send them the links to the interview. This is also a good time to ask whether or not they can promote your product.

That’s pretty much it for how to arrange and conduct an interview. Let me know in the comments section if I left anything out. In the final post, I’ll go over ways you can make money with your content