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”).

Get the #1 best-selling book eMillions: Behind-The-Scenes Stories of 14 Successful Internet Millionaires for just $13.57 on Amazon

A lot you might be wondering, how on earth was a 15 year-old (back then) able to land so many interviews with these big-name internet marketers?

Well, it really comes down to perseverance, a bit of luck and writing a killer email interview proposal.

As I said before, I’m going to be as transparent as possible by documenting every step I take. So this video reveals that “secret” email behind this entire project:

I hope you’re getting a lot of greaet value out of this current blog series on Profiting With Interviews. Remember to leave your comments and let me know what you think

1. How did you first get started with internet marketing? And eventually site flipping?

Hey Stanley. I got started in internet marketing when I was 15 year old. After reading ‘Rich Dad Poor Dad’ by Robert Kiyosaki, I realized that I need to make a life changing decision and I decided to make money on the internet.

My first business on the internet is by selling customized stuff on eBay and I wasn’t doing very good. After realizing I need to move on, I bought the late Corey Rudl’s “Insider Secrets to Marketing Your Business On The Internet” which is a home study course. I started to get into niche marketing and made some money out of it selling $97 eBooks.

Then, there was this blogging trend when everyone has a blog and I decided to get into the blogging business as well. Unfortunately, I am never a good blogger and decided to sell those blogs away and I was shocked to be able to sell 5 blogs for a combine amount of $3,000.

And that’s how I got into the site flipping business.

2. What was your most successful site flip? What niche was it in? How much time and money did it take?

My most successful flip is really a fitness and diet membership site that I sold back in 2008 for $12,000. It’s not a lot of money but I only took less than 10 days to complete the website and recruited over hundreds of members that will pay the recurring fees.

After seeing the result of that flip, I managed to duplicate the success over and over again.

3. What types of sites should people flip? What types of sites should people avoid flipping?

There are a lot of sites that people can flip – from forums to blogs. I personally recommend people who do not know anything about site flipping to flip turnkey script sites. There are a lot of turnkey script sellers on the internet and sometimes you can even buy them for as low as $10 and best of all, you can use the same script over and over again on different domain names. Plus, it’s very noob-friendly.

The type of sites that people should avoid flipping is really…none. I personally believe that every site can be flipped. Even if the website is the worst website on the internet, you can develop the site for a few days and that website can be sold for a higher price that you could imagine.

4. How do you find the right niche?

I always pick the hottest niches like health, dating and money niches. I suggest newbies to go into the hot niches too because in hot niches – it’s impossible for you to go wrong.

Otherwise, you can always go to Clickbank and check out what’s hot and what’s not. If a lot of people are buying that stuff in that niche – you can always be sure that that’s the niche that you want to get into.

5. What is the number one mistake people make when it comes to site flipping?

There are actually 2 number one mistakes that people always make.

The first mistake is pricing their sites ridiculously high. I’ve seen some sites that have no traffic, no earnings and bad designs without any history selling for $1,000. For example, not long ago, I just saw a plain blog with plain designs, 6 blog posts, no earnings and no traffic was listed for sale for $450. Of course, that blog was not sold.

The second mistake is skipping the basics. You have no idea how many of newbie site flippers actually skip the foundation of site flipping. You need to learn to start from scratch so you know how to outsource the works easier and cheaper as well as how to build the best sites.

6. Many of the readers here at TUK are bloggers. What are the keys to flipping a blog?

Blog designs.

Blog’s value has dropped ever since the CPA marketing trend took over. But generally, if you can have a blog that makes $100 per month (easily attainable), good theme design, powered by WordPress – your blog should have a value of more than $1,000.

7. How do you grow your website after you’ve purchased it or built it from scratch? When is the right time to “flip”?

The best way to grow websites is to prepare a schedule of when you want to bring traffic to it and also a plan on how to make money of it.

For example, if you bought a product site which sells eBook in the internet marketing niche (big niche in the “money” niche), you can plan out how much you want to run PPC on it. The most effective methods to quickly grow it are to leverage other people’s mailing lists and forum marketing. You can run a WSO (Warrior Special Offer) on the Warrior Forum and after making some sales – you could flip it for big profits.

The right time to flip is very subjective as it depends on the market and types of sites which we will cover in The Site Flipping Code.

8. How are you able to demand the best prices when selling your websites? How do you write the best ad copy for your website listing in the marketplace?

Demanding a good price for your site is easy if you know what the main selling points of your websites are. Most of the time, you need to know what the buyers want in a site. Most buyers obviously love sites that are generating good earnings (passive would be even better) as well as good design. Some go for long term potential.

Another great way to demand good price is to increase the number of bids in your auction listing. The more bids you see, the higher chance that the buyers will want to “buy-it-now” bid your site. Of course, you will need to know how to fish for more bids. One method that I like to use to fish more bids is to give away review copy of whatever that I am selling on my site to bidders only. This prompt interested buyers to bid.

Writing a good copy is essential but a listing copy is very different from a sales page copy. The main thing that you need to remember when constructing a listing copy is to be straight to the point and as simple as possible. Lesser words are always better because trust me, no one wants to read a six thousand words listing copy. Use some basic HTML (if you don’t know HTML like me, get NVU which is a free HTML editor) to give the headline and sub-headline some striking colors like dark red or blue. Make sure you use paragraphing wisely.

9. Tell us a bit about The Site Flipping Code. Who do you think this product is for?

The Site Flipping Code was born when Jani G (my business partner for this project) knew that they were a lot of people approaching me to ask me questions related to site flipping as well as paying me big bucks just to coach them on how to make money from site flipping.

Because of this incredible demand, we decided to create The Site Flipping Code which is both of me and Jani’s biggest ever launch.

The Site Flipping Code is really the best product on site flipping on the internet currently in our opinions because it is broken down into many different courses that cater people who have no idea how to make money online to experts who know how to program a powerful website. Most importantly, the theories and strategies that are outline in the course are proven to be effective after we went through many trials and errors that took us over 6 months to test!

10. Thanks for your time. Do you have any final comments?

You’re welcome Stanley.

I know a lot of people have yet to take action even though they want to make money on the internet. My advice is, just do it.

Just take action and do it. If the outcome is successful, then, that’s great because you can make money…and maybe even lots of money. If the outcome is a failure, you still gain something…experiences and lessons. A lesson that will teach you not to repeat the same mistake again. So, there’s really nothing to lose if you take action.

I started out with nothing. My parents do not believe in me. My friends think I’m lying. My teachers think I’m crazy. But so what? You shouldn’t care about what people think about what you think. You know what you want and it’s your own destiny to pursue it.

Thanks everybody.

Update: Great follow-up responses posted by Desmond below in the comments section

Get the #1 best-selling book eMillions: Behind-The-Scenes Stories of 14 Successful Internet Millionaires for just $13.57 on Amazon

You’ve done your research. You’ve identified the experts you plan to interview. Now the question is… how to get those people to agree to conduct the interviews? I’ve included a few tips below on how I got those interviews for my book eMillions.

1. Introduce Yourself

Get in touch with your expert in a polite and professional manner. The medium I used for my eMillions project was via email. However, it’s a lot more effective if you are able to pick up the phone and talk to them in person. Obviously, it takes a lot more guts and courage to do this.

Regardless of whether you’re using email or phone, you want to start off by telling them a little bit about yourself and how you know them. If you are a customer, subscriber or promoted one of their products as an affiliate before, tell them! If you were recommended by another expert who you’ve contacted, say that as well.

Remember, personalization is the key. Your email/proposal has to speak directly to the potential interviewee. If that means you’re contacting 50 people, it means you’ve got to write 50 individual emails (obviously, you can have the same “rough” layout for each email). Visit their website, subscribe to their newsletter, study their materials. It’s going to take some time, but, trust me, it’s worth it. Never, ever use email blasts.

2. Get Straight To The Point

Don’t go on and on blabbering about yourself, who you are, what the project is etc. These people are usually very busy and you don’t want to be wasting to much of their time. Get straight to the point and tell them why you are emailing them. Something like, “I am writing to ask for a favor to conduct an interview with you…” will do. You don’t want to make it too complicated or “fluffy”.

Remember – KISS (keep it simple stupid)

3. Tell Them How The Interview Will Be Used

Tell them where the interview will be used and an approximate date of when it will be published. The last thing an interviewee wants to see is that they took an hour of their time out to do this interview only to find out that you never published it.

In my case, I told the interviewee that I was currently in the process of compiling a collection of success stories into a physical book published by Morgan James Publishing (NOTE: In this case, it was vitally important to mention the publisher’s name as this helps build credibility for yourself) towards the end of 2008.

4. “What’s In It For Me?”

You’ve got to give incentives. What are they going to get as an result of taking an hour of their time with you? You’ve got to have that compelling reason or hook. Take some time to brainstorm some ideas. It takes time to craft an offer, but it’s well worth it. Usually with interviews, the obvious “what’s in it for me” is the exposure and publicity.

People WANT publicity.

That’s the key. It’s human nature that we all have egos to some extend. You’ll be surprised at how easy it is to get some of those people to say “Yes”.

In my case, I gave the experts free publicity and promotion of their products. But on top of that, I gave them the opportunity to promote my book and get 100% commission for each sale when I launch it this November 2008. To the average marketer, this might sound like a stupid idea to give all your profits away, but anybody who understands the power of backend marketing will understand that this is in fact a very smart move. I’ll talk more about backend strategies in a later blog post.

5. The “Cool Kid” Syndrome

When you are able to secure one expert to conduct an interview, leverage that expert’s credibility in your next interview proposals. For example, you can add “Oh, by the way, these people have also agreed to contribute to this project…” I call it the cool kid syndrome because everybody likes hanging out with the cool people at the time. Soon, you’ll be able to fan that out and find the number of “yes” growing very quickly. Sort of like a snowball effect.

However, NEVER EVER LIE. Even if they come back with a “maybe”. Don’t go out there thinking that these experts won’t bother checking those people you’ve given them. If one of those people happen to be their friends and they go and check, then you’re credibility will be damaged FOREVER.

6. Follow Up

If they don’t respond in a day or two, don’t panic. These experts are usually very busy so there’s a good chance he/she might have missed your email. Heck, it might have even gone into the SPAM filters. The solution is to send a follow-up email to remind them. If they don’t respond, follow-up again. And again. And again. You’ve got to persevere.

“Genius is 1% inspiration and 99% perspiration.”

-Thomas Edison

The more you follow-up, the higher your chances of getting the attention of the potential interviewee. Most of the time, a second or third email will do the trick. If not, just wait for another opportunity.

If the person tells you that they’re busy and get back to them 6 weeks later, then get back to them 6 weeks later (no sooner, no later). Make sure you follow-up and don’t push it too hard that the person becomes annoyed (for example, emailing them EVERY SINGLE DAY for 6 months). For example, with Yanik Silver, it took me 6 months before we were finally able to get together on the phone. You’ve got to be patient and persevere.

7. Don’t Take Rejections Personally

Inevitably, you’re going to get “No”s. In fact, many will not even respond. Don’t take it personally. Just thank them and move on. During my quest to getting interviews for my book, I probably send out around 100+ emails and got 15 “Yes”es.

If you really, really want to get hold of that person, perhaps you can wait for several months and ask them again (if you believe that it their reason for rejection was because they were busy at the time). Read the last point for more information on following-up.

That concludes the post. Remember, you’ll get better and better at writing those proposals as you go along. In a way, getting interviews is much like a joint venture proposal (actually, technically speaking, it is a joint venture). You might want to read my post – 5 Reasons Why I Won’t Read Your JV Proposal

You’ll be surprised by how much people will say agree to the interview. Miracles will happen. People who you might not have expected to say “Yes” will say “Yes”; people who you expect to say “Yes” may say “No”. I would have never even dreamed of being able to talk to people like Mark Joyner,ShoeMoney, Rob Cowie etc.

In the next post, I’ll be talking about how to arrange and conduct the actual interview itself so you can extract the best content out of your expert.

Get the #1 best-selling book eMillions: Behind-The-Scenes Stories of 14 Successful Internet Millionaires for just $13.57 on Amazon

Now that you know the power of creating instant content using interviews, let’s take a look where you can find those experts for the interviews and hopefully be able to develop a list of potential interviewees.

First off, I’m going to assume you have chosen a niche and have some sort of idea as to the product you want to create. Just to go over very briefly, these are the things you need to look for when picking your topic:

1. Is it something you’re passionate about? I stress very strongly about passion in the post “Do What You Love And The Success Will Follow”.
2. Is it something you’re knowledgeable about? In this particular case, this doesn’t apply as you’re leveraging your expert’s knowledge and credibility.
3. Is there sufficient demand? In other words, is there money to be made in that market? Is there an economic engine that will drive your business forward?

Generally, the more focused your topic is, the better the end result. Now, before we go out and find those experts, we first need to know what “type” of expert we need to look for.

(NOTE: Keep in mind that they may or may not have ALL of these features. It is more or less a list of things you should look out for.)

What Defines An “Expert”?

1. Authors. In fact, the word “authority” comes from author. Some one who have published books, created products, or written articles is generally a good choice
2. Publishers. As in somebody who operates a well-established blog in your niche, or publishes a weekly newsletter (digital or physical) with large numbers of subscribers.
3. Awards & Recognition. You need to ensure they have the right qualifications and is recognized as an expert in your field. For example, if your topic was about legal issues, you would need to find a qualified attorney.
4. Produces Results. Lastly, but most importantly, you need to make sure that your expert actually “practice what he preach”. You need to have actually taken what they’ve said, and produced actual results.

With that out of the way, let’s talk about where to actually find those experts. You see, experts don’t just come to you (unless you happen to be the expert), you’ve got to go out there, find them, and approach them.

In my opinion, there are 4 main “expert hangouts” (that’s places where experts chill out):

1. Forums

This is the most obvious place. The best people in your niche tend to hang out at the top forums in your niche. The reason is because that’s their passion. People hang out with people who share similar interests. That’s where they get to share ideas. That’s where they get to discuss about their topic. So if you want to find the best video guy, you go to the best video forums. If you want to find the best graphics guy, you go to the best graphics forums.

If you don’t know any forums in your niche, just go to Google.com and type “[your niche] forum”. For example, if you’re in the dog training business, then you type “dog training forum”. Once you’ve found the top 3 or 4 forums in your niche, look around and try and see who are the experts. There are 3 signs which you should look for:

1. Moderators. If they are one of the forum moderators, chances are, they know what they’re doing and they’re passionate about what they’re doing.
2. Look out for names. Look around for a few days and see what names come up in the discussions. See who people are talking about. Usually, those people are the well-known top guns in the industry. Heck, if you are really stuck, just go in there and create a thread titled something like “Which guru do you subscribe to?” or “Who is your favorite expert?”
3. People with quality posts. Look out for the people who post the best suggestions, people who provide the most value to the community. This usually suggests that they know what they’re talking about and they’re passionate about the topic.

2. Bookstores

Remember what I said earlier on about what defines an expert? Authors! Go to your favorite bookstore and note down the author’s name of books related to your niche. Or you can even go to Amazon.com and type in the keywords related to your niche and see which names pop up. Chances are, if they have published a book on that topic, they know what they’re talking about. You can also take a note at the Amazon.com rankings to see whether or not that book is a hotseller. The better the ranking, the more authority that the author has in your niche.

3. Website Owners

Identify website owners who are positioned as authority figures. Go to your favorite websites relating to your niche and try contacting those owners. You can tell whether or not that particular website is an authority in your niche by looking at the Alexa graphs over at Alexa.com.

4. Offline Events

Attend offline events and seminars in your field and begin networking with the people. You’ll soon find out who the experts are. Usually, the experts are the ones that are speaking on stage. Try approaching them at the event before or after they’ve spoken and see if they are willing to do a video interview.

From those 4 places, you essentially need to write down a list of at least 20-50 people. Obviously the more, the better. The reason you need AT LEAST 20 people is because not all the experts will say “Yes”. In fact, many will say “No”.

However, in the next post I’m going to show you some cool tips and tricks on how you should approach those experts and create an offer they can’t refuse. In other words, increasing the “Yes” rate

Get the #1 best-selling book eMillions: Behind-The-Scenes Stories of 14 Successful Internet Millionaires for just $13.57 on Amazon

But, what if there was a proven system where you could create your own information product in as little as 12 hours… without having to write a single word?

In fact, this was the exact same system I used to create my #1 best-selling book, eMillions. It actually worked too well that my publisher rejected the manuscript telling me it was “too long”. (More about this in a future blog post)

But before I tell you, let me give you a classic example on how this system works.

On the left is a book called Chicken Soup for the Soul. It’s a huge bestseller and probably one of the best selling book series of all time. Over 100 million copies of this series had been sold worldwide. I’m sure you’ve read it before, if not, at least heard of it.

Anyways, let’s get right to the point. The whole secret behind this success is actually right on the front cover – the subtitle 101 Stories To Open The Heart And Rekindle The Spirit.

You see, Mark and Jack (the authors) really didn’t write too much of the book. They might have written the introduction but that’s pretty much it. But for the most part, it was from… guess what?

OTHER PEOPLE.

Mark and Jack got people to contribute stories, then all they did was edited and compiled them to create this phenomenally successfully series of books.

It’s all about finding a way to profit from OTHER PEOPLE’S INFORMATION.

LEVERAGE is what this is all about.

So, the question is:

• How can YOU apply this to YOUR internet business?
• How can YOU become somebody who profits from other people’s information?
• How can YOU create a product that is yours to sell and control, without actually writing the content yourself?

The “long answer” will be revealed over the course of the next few days into a 6 part series.

The “short answer” is simply…

INTERVIEWS.

That’s right - Conducting interviews with experts, thought-leaders and authorities in your field.

That’s what I’m going to be talking about over the course of this 6 part mini-series: How to profit from other people’s information by interviewing them. Interviews are a great strategy, but ONLY if you know how to do them. I know it because I’ve been through the process with my eMillions project.

Interviewing is one of the most important skills you can learn as an online information marketer

In a nutshell, this is a rough outline of what the 6 posts will cover:

1. Why you should do interviews
2. How to find the experts
3. How to land the big interviews with experts
4. How to come up with good questions to ask
5. How to conduct the interview itself
6. Packaging the content

BONUS: How to write a killer interview proposal (video)

Without further to do, let’s tackle the first one – why should you use interviews to create your content?

1. Leverage

a) Knowledge – You get to leverage and tap into the knowledge of the person you are interviewing. If the person is an expert in your field, chances are, he/she will know a lot more than you and is able to bring out that knowledge (if you interview them in the right way – more on that in series #4 and #5).

b) Credibility – The benefit of interviewing an expert is that they bring credibility and authority. Let’s take Tiger Woods as an example. He is an expert. He has the credentials. He is a leading authority in the golf industry. That’s why his book How I Play Golf is a huge bestseller. On the other hand, I’m not good at golf, so if I wrote a book on golf it probably won’t do too well. But if I were to interview Tiger Woods and turn that into a product, there’s no doubt that it would be a success.

2. “Free” Content

It’s super easy to set up those interviews and extract the content out of the expert (that is if you know what you’re doing – I’ll reveal this in the upcoming posts in this series). Most of the time, the experts will happily do those interviews with you for free, since they’ll get publicity in return. While it’s going to take some work coming up with good questions, the interviewee actually does most of the talking (i.e. content creation).

3. Instant Content Creation

It’s faster than any other content creation process out there. It’s almost likecreating content at the speed of sound. For example, when I interviewed Tom Beal, the time it took from sending the email to him and finish conducting the interview took only 12 hours.

If it wasn’t for the 12 hour time zone between Hong Kong (where I live) and New York (where Tom lives), it probably would have taken a lot less. If you know of any other content-creation methods where I can crank out 13,000 words in less than 12 hours without having to write a single word, tell me in the comment section. I’ll be curious to know 

4. Expert By Association

Similar to the first point about leveraging the expert’s credibility, by interviewing the experts in your field, it adds a certain level of perceived expertise to you. In other words, you sort of automatically “become the expert” as well. The reason for this is because people begin to see you talking to all the other experts and will eventually see you as the expert too, even if you don’t know anything about the topic. So by associating yourself with someone who is already well known in that field, you automatically increase your credibility in the industry.

But beyond this, you actually become a true expert as well after conducting many interviews within one niche. Not only does your customers/subscribers who listen to the interviews learn, you also learn from the experts. The more interviews you do, the more you learn, and the more you become of an expert.

5. Build Connections & Relationships

Let’s say you’ve finished interviewing all those experts and compiled them into an ebook or packaged them into a home-study course. And the time has come to launch your product… you need some joint-venture partners. Well, what better candidates for JV partners than those experts you’ve just interviewed?

If you have done your research right (I’ll show you where you can find the RIGHT experts in the next post), the experts you’ve interviewed should be the ones that have huge influences, large numbers of followers and big mailing lists. Chances are, if you’ve impressed your interviewees well enough by either asking good questions or being very professional and polite, they will come back and promote your product. Hey, why not? They are featured in the product, which means they are getting publicity. It only makes good sense for them to promote the product that they’re featured in.

Apart from the joint venture side, by positioning yourself as an interviewer also opens up more doors to world class though leaders and top influencers in your field. A public interview accelerates your rapport with that expert way faster than a private 1-on-1 conversation. You’ll become friends with industry leaders in your field and be able to leverage their network and connect to more interviewees and business partners.

6. Break Into Niches Even If You’re Unknown

I touched on this already with the Tiger Woods example and the “expert by association” point. So even if you are a complete unknown to that market place, by leveraging your expert’s name and credibility, you can not only turn your product into a hotseller, but also become an industry expert yourself almost instantly. That way, you’ve just successfully broke into that niche.

7. Become A Better Communicator

Lastly, on a personal benefit, the more you interview, the better communicator you become. It’ll help you with business in general in terms of becoming a better speaker and negotiator. You’ll also become better at communicating with your prospects thus close deals more easily.

That’s it for the time being. In the next post, I’m going to be talking about where to find the experts for your interviews.

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I want you to take a moment and think about what brings you joy. What are you truly passionate about? What makes you come alive?

Is it cooking? Helping people? Reducing poverty? Perhaps all three?

Close your eyes and imagine yourself living a life in which you pursue your passions without fear.

(Why are you reading? I told you to close your eyes.)

How does this make you feel?

Feels good eh?

If your goal is to become a successful entrepreneur or even to be happy for that matter, it is essential that you follow your passions wherever they may lead.

Simply existing is no longer acceptable. Today is the greatest time to be alive. More people than ever are consciously choosing to follow their passions and making a solid living in doing so. What’s your excuse?

Too often we fill our lives with people and things we cannot stand , leaving us to live an unfulfilled life.  The key to living an amazing life is to follow your passions. Your passions awaken the powerful force that resides inside you.

One of the reasons I have chosen to pursue the path of entrepreneurship is because it gives me the chance to live the life I love. That’s not to say entrepreneurship is easy.

Following  your passions doesn’t mean that life will be wonderful 24/7.  Life will never be obstacle free, you will always have to PERSEVERE, and will continue to face numerous setbacks along your life journey, however when you follow your passions setbacks are only temporary.

The world needs people who put their passions first and security second, for those are the people who will solve the problems of the world.

What are your passions?

The greatest thing you can ever decide to do is discover and live your life passions. When you follow your passions you then inspire others to do the same. Imagine a world in which everyone pursued their passions.

Quit living an unfulfilled life by simply going through the motions. It is time you summoned the courage and followed your dreams.

Are you living your passions? If not, what are you waiting for?

Bud Hennekes is a 17 year old blogger and aspiring young entrepreneur. His hobbies vary depending the day, but more often than not he enjoys reading, authentic conversation, meditating, blogging, and growing. He is the owner of www.aboundlessworld.com

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Becoming a thought leader in an industry requires expert level knowledge and vision, accompanied with the ability to communicate and align with relevant people. Social media provides that platform and power to reach out to people online and create a powerful and long lasting personal brand. Personal branding is no different than product branding, but this time it’s you who needs to be differentiated.

Developing a brand over social media is a step-by-step non-linear process and it will take some time before you start seeing the results. Remember, creating a personal brand is directly proportional to creating value for other people.

The Power of Blogging

Let’s first start with blogging. Blogging do it consistently and add value. Blogging provides tangible evidence of your expertise and achievements. Before starting a blog, setup all the on-page stuff. Firstly, buy user-friendly, easy-to remember, and content appropriate domain name, and then create blog theme according to your area of expertise and target audience. Meanwhile, set everything else like “About us” page with your personal and professional information, easy to use comments box, RSS subscription etc. Make sure that your blog is well-build for search engines.

Don’t forget to update your blog with quality and relevant content regularly to make your readers keep coming back. A strong, well written content can be the headstone of a great online identity, which in turn is a key element of a great personal brand.

Get Listed To Increase Online Presence

On the other hand, you need to increase your online presence. Therefore, register your blog with the available blog and web directories, claim with Technorati.com, and use Google Reader to store your searches. This way your blog will be easily indexed in search engines. Check regularly who is linking back to you through Yahoo! Site Explorer. Also commenting on other blogs within your area of expertise would certainly help in building connections with the experts.

Brand Extension With Social Media

Besides blogging, to further extend you personal brand, creating accounts on other social networks and media platforms help a lot. Like, Twitter, it connects you to other social media practitioners. Facebook and MySpace could be used for outpost and to stay in touch with friends, and find new ones, LinkedIn for professional networking, which helps in exploring business opportunities and getting advices from experts no matter where you are, Flicker for photo sharing, YouTube for video, Digg and StumbleUpon for voting, Upcoming.org for events updates, and Gmail for docs, readers and more. Creating accounts on all these would certainly give you jump recognition on social media. In addition, creating groups on social networking platforms give you an easy mechanism for communicating with lots of people in one go.

Time To Build Networks

After all the efforts, it’s time to start networking aggressively. Interact with people, allow them to reach you easily, thank community often for their time and attention, ask questions for expert advices, share knowledge based articles with your contacts and if you have mistakenly done something wrong, apologize immediately. Doing all these community building efforts grow you out as a natural extension.

Remember…

The concept of personal branding is closely associated to that of leadership and at the heart of its passion. There is much more you can do to standout and become a brand. Remember, Online personal branding using social media is depended on creating quality relationships. Try to look for ways to help those who are best placed to help you, they’ll be more inclined to help you, and if you need to call on them they’ll remember who you are.

This is guest post from Ben Johnson of Logoinn, custom logo design service provider based in UK.

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1. Set Up A “Salesletter” For Your Progam

Just like you have a salesletter for your product where you talk about the features, benefits, why you should buy etc, the same applies for JV partners. You’ve got to SELL your affiliate program/JV opportunity – what the product is about, what benefits will they get (commissions etc), how do they sign up etc.

2. Know Your Conversion Rates

You HAVE to test your salesletter beforehand. JV partners will want to know your stats so they know that your salesletter actually converts in the first place. Otherwise they’ll just be wasting their time and resources.

3. Offer A Large Commission

You just have to do a little more than the rest of your competitors to stand out from the crowd. Usually, for digital products, the commission rate is 50%. Why not do more than what’s expected and offer 75%? Or even 100%? In fact, for my eMillions book launch, I offered 100% commission. Yes I gave away all my profits because I know the money is made in the backend.

4. Make It Easy

Don’t let them do all the work, do the work for them. Give them all the ready-made tools such as email copy etc (to some extent even custom-build those promo tools). Put the affiliate link in the email promos for them (so not something like “Replace XXXX with your affiliate link”).

5. Leverage Results

You just need that ONE partner to get everything started. So leverage it by saying something like “Bob promoted it to a list of X number of people and made Y amount” or “So and so is already onboard” (creates social proof). It’s the snow ball effect.

Do you have any joint venture tips? Leave it in the comments section

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If you take a look at all the young entrepreneurs who have made it to the list of rich and famous, you’ll find that they’ve mostly made their money online, through applications and programs for the Internet. Their success has spurred on others to take up the challenge and see if they can be the next Mark Zuckerburg (Facebook) or Chad Hurley (YouTube).

But not everyone has it in them to be an entrepreneur, even though they may be brilliant geniuses [Stan's Note: I do not agree with this comment] What it does take to be an entrepreneur is:

Guts

When you aspire to become an entrepreneur straight out of college or before you’ve left your twenties, when you’re ready to go it alone without seeking the safety net of a regular job and a month to month salary, you need to be courageous and gutsy. You can achieve success only if you’re confidence level is high and if you’re relatively sure of your capability, come what may.

Fearlessness

You need to be willing to take the necessary risks that are a part and parcel of any business venture. Nothing ventured, nothing gained. If you’re hesitant about taking a large leap based on your intuition, you’re going to lose out on opportunities. You also need to be ready to deal with failure, because as clichéd as it sounds, failure is indeed a stepping stone to success. You can learn much from your failures if you treat each one as a new experience that allows you to prevent the mistakes you made in the past.

Caution

Even when you take risks on one hand, you need to tread with caution on the other depending on the situation and people involved. The best way to do both is to learn to read situations and people and then trust your instincts to tell you the best way to go.

Money

If you have your own money as seed capital, well and good. If you don’t, you need to arrange enough to cover your start-up costs. You may be working out of a single room, but your experiments and market research will cost you money.

Business Acumen

I’ve listed this last, but it is by no means the least important of the list. It’s not enough that you’re a genius who has the best ideas there are in the business, you need to know how the business end of the deal works. If it’s not in your blood, hire someone or join forces with a friend who complements your genius with their business acumen.

Any business venture needs great ideas and a whole lot of persistence and dedication in order to succeed. If you think you have it in you to be an entrepreneur, go ahead and try your luck. After all, how will you know if you’re good at it if you don’t even try?

This post was contributed by Tiffany Davis, who writes about top online college courses. She welcomes your feedback at TiffanyMDavis82 at gmail.com

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