If you’re like me, sometimes creating content for your website or blog can be a brain-racking experience. A fun, informative, and easy solution is to interview people or companies that relate to your topic or industry.  Not only do interviews provide great content – but they can be an excellent source of traffic.  Not only will the person that you interview tell the people that they associate with (friends, blog readers, etc.), but they are great for getting links from other sites and blogs.

The great thing about interviews is that they can be used for nearly any type of website, blog, or topic.  Some people will naturally attract more traffic, links, and attention than others – but discovering or interviewing people who rarely (if ever) do interviews can be an excellent way to build your traffic and readership.

How to do an interview for your website

There are a couple things that you will want to plan when preparing for an interview that will be posted on your site:

• What questions are you going to ask?
• What format (phone, email, video)

I find that there are benefits of each type and you should experiment to find which works for you.  Email is the easiest because you can simply email the questions, they type the responses, and you post it on your website.  Video can engage your reader in a very powerful way, while phone interviews are great because people can listen to them while they are working or can’t sit in front of a computer screen.

Appeal to your visitors’ curiosity

People tend to be curious creatures – and appealing to their inquisitiveness is one of the keys to a successful interview.  When interviewing, you want to try as much as possible to put a unique twist or offer a fresh perspective that people have not heard or cannot read on other sites.

Create a compelling title

While it is easy to title your interview something along the lines of “My Interview With XXXX”, a much more compelling and intriguing twist would be something like what Business 2.0 did when they interviewed a guy who owns about $300 million in domain names – “Kevin Ham, The Man Who Owns The Internet” (which is an excellent article to read when you have a moment).  Not only is this title extremely interesting – many people are curious to see how he does it.

Spread the word

Once you have finalized your interview, you want to spread the word as much as possible.  Mention it on your blog, Twitter, Facebook, and more often than not you will gain exposure from the person you interviewed because they will want to tell all of their friends to go check out the interview they just did.

Wrapping up

While interviews are an excellent way to create content for your site, you want to ensure that what you are giving your readers is very quality information.  You don’t want to turn into a blog or website that produces mediocre content – doing so will make it more difficult for you to secure future interviews.