I’m going to start interviewing people on my blog. I sent out some requests for interviews last night. I’d been reading different blog posts about interviewing people for a while. One of the ones Darren wrote had some good tips: How to Get and Conduct Interviews for Your Blog. I’ll go through that post here:

1) “Introduce Yourself” - I only wrote a very brief introduction in the emails I sent out. I didn’t want it long because I also wanted to get right to the point and not waste their time.

2) “Outline How and When the Interview Will be Used” - I gave them my url (such an obvious thing, but one that could be easily overlooked) and said I hoped to post the interviews in the next week or two. I couldn’t say for certain because I didn’t know how many people (if any) I’d hear back from or when.

3) “Give Incentive” - I didn’t give any kind of incentive because I have no idea what it would be. The PR on that blog is pretty high but I didn’t really want to mention that and I don’t know that it won’t go back down anyway.

4) “Don’t Overwhelm With Questions” - I asked 3 questions. Now, I’m asking the same questions to a few people all about a particular topic. I thought about asking each one additional question that was specific to their blog, but I didn’t (quite honestly that was too much work!).

Darren also suggest sending an introductory email first with no questions in it. I didn’t do it that way, I asked the questions right in the first email I sent.

5)”Give Different Options for Medium” - I didn’t do this either.

6) “Do some research First” - since I am asking each of them the same questions this was less relevant to me. I did spend some time on each of their blogs though and two of the people I knew fairly well already.

7) ” Don’t be Offended if ‘Rejected’” - I sent out 10 requests last night and have heard back from 6 already - so I’m not doing too bad, with 2 of those already sending in their answers. But I know I may not hear from all of them.

8 ) “Notify them When You Hit Publish” - this I will do when the times comes and I told them I would let them know then the interview gets posted.

So far this first experiment with interviewing people for my blog seems to be going pretty well. I figure I will learn from this and then I have plans for more interviews later on.