Simple Interviews Can Build Your Credibility and Authority

I started interviewing people way back at the recommendation of a sales trainer.  I needed more referrals and wanted to build ties with people who could refer me business.  I had an active blog that I promoted using email, Facebook and Linkedin.  So adding video interviews to my blog was a natural next steps.

Interviewing people did a few things for me.

1. The obvious one is it provided me with more content I could share with my audience.
2. It demonstrated to my audience that I have ties to people "in the know" in my community.  You get the audience thinking, "This guy's connected to a lot of people."
3. Most importantly, it established and strengthen ties to people in my industry connected to my idea customers.

This was win-win all around.

Let me share with you what I did when I launched my "Defining Infusionsoft Success" video blog.  It's a lot easier that you might think.

So you know my background, I run a team of online course and membership site builders.  Our sweet spot is building online courses using two tools Memberium and LearnDash for small business owners using Infusionsoft.  Infusionsoft (recently renamed Keap and Infusionsoft by Keap) is a CRM providing email marketing and marketing automation features.   It's a great tool for any small business owners.  Schedule time with me if you want to learn more.

Since I wanted to get to know people selling to Infusionsoft users, I invited other Infusionsoft partners and online marketing providers servicing Infusionsoft users to be guests on my program.

The invitation part was easy.  I started with people I knew who I saw promoting something on social media.  My focus was to highlighting solutions I knew my audience would find interesting.

What did I cover in the interviews?  I took a very simple approach.  I started a casual conversation allowing my guests person to:

• introduce themselves,
• explain why they thought to build their solution,
• tell how they got to where they are now and
• cover the solution they offer.

On rare occasions, I had the interviewee to do a screen share to demo their product.

As time went by, this got easier and easier.  People would ask to be featured on the program.  When as I saw something interesting come through my inbox or social media feed, I would reach out and invite authors to my program. I found the process was fun for both me and my guests.

Before our call, I told every interviewee to NOT prepare.  The interviews focused on stuff these peole already knew well and was likely part of their daily conversations with customers.  That takes pressure off the guest limiting their time investment to the time it takes to record the interview.

I run my programs for 20 to 25 minutes.  If the interview seems to be running long as I was recording them, I stopped the program around the 20 minute mark explaining to the audience that we'd be publishing a part 2.  In those cases I published the interview in two parts.  Two blog posts, yeah!!!

The tools for running are simple to use.  Gotomeeting was the tool to used when I started.  I switched to Zoom when that tool became available. Their free version enables you to do what I call "two-talking head" side-by-side on the screen and their recording feature works really well.  When I finish the interview, Zoom saves the interview as a video MP4 file I upload to YouTube.  I write up a few paragraphs explaining who was on the episode and what we discussed.  That explanation goes in the YouTube description and on the blog post where I include the video.

The real benefit here is I am honoring my guests with an invitation to showcase them and their solution.  I end each program with the interviewee sharing information on how to best contact them.  I included that information in the program notes.  When I published the interview, I email the guest thanking them with a link to the video blog encouraging them to share and promote it to their audience.

I'm coming up on program 100 soon.  I have changed the name from "Defining Infusionsoft Success" to "Transforming Small Business Thinking" to allow me to venture outside of my immediate Infusionsoft / Keap audience.

The process is straight-forward and easy to manage.  I encourage anyone to give it a shot to see for yourself how you can promote yourself taking a similar approach.

Hope this helps!