Diversify Your Blog Content With Expert Interviews
By Ann Smarty
Let me break it to you: For every well written blog post you write, readers can find a dozen just like it (covering the same topic), and probably just as helpful. It’s time that we diversify and stand out. It’s time that we offer something more than useful advice and tools: It’s time that we explore more formats, packages and marketing channels!
One way to diversify your editorial calendar is to offer expert insights from outside contributors. Expert interviews provide a personal flare to a fledgling style. Rather than just laying out information based on your own experience, you are relying on the expertise of others who have been highly successful in the industry. It changes the overall tone, and attracts readers as much for the knowledge that will be imparted as the name attached.
Expert interviews have been used a lot lately: Even though they help you add something refreshing to your editorial calendar, there’s still effort needed to pack them the way the content attracts more attention and caters to different channels.
Changing Up The Platform
Different platforms vastly change the overall outcome of an interview. A discussion conducted on an open social network will encourage others to participate. A call in show will make it mostly between the host and guest, with a few questions or comments from third parties. A video conference will be between the expert(s) and host(s) only.
Using different tools can keep your interviews fresh. One may also work better for certain experts, because it fits with their schedule. Say you are at a conference, and you want to set something up quickly. Obviously doing a live interview through a social network might not be the best idea, but having a quick question/answer session published as a transcript will work much better.
Here are a few platforms to to hold your interview:
Google Hangouts
Google Hangouts On Air have become something like the unofficial format for anyone looking to conduct group interviews. It offers a very convenient way of having multiple people jump onto a video chat, and then streaming that chat live, and/or recording it for later use. If you head over to Youtube, you will find a ton of these interviews from every industry imaginable.
If your aim is to get a group of people together for a chat, this is the perfect way to do it. Simple to set up, no complicated equipment necessary, everyone just needs a webcam with a functioning mic.
Example: Alex Mandossian does an awesome job hosting regular Google HOAs in the radio-show style inviting featured experts, switching between questions and engaging the audience too!
Twitter Interviews
Twitter offers a great way to get your readers/followers involved in the discussion. Set a day, create an itinerary complete with questions submitted by followers/with an open time for them to ask their own during the chat itself, and promote it. You can even brand a hashtag that can be used for future interviews.
Once you have completed the interview, make sure you save the transcript to use later on. You can show it to those who didn’t make it, or re-purpose the content, like mentioned earlier.
Twchat has a great post and template for Twitter interviews.
Re-Packaging Interviews
Reusing content is difficult when it is an interview you are drawing from.
Generally, you are just going to be taking pieces of the whole to apply to something else. In other words, you will be providing quotes. I have seen this done in several interesting ways:
- Create a visual version of the post, against a colorful or relevant background, and link it through social media to the interview.
- Quote a portion in a wider collection of expert opinions.
- Ask people from some of their favorite quotes on a topic, and include one from the interview as an example of your own.
- Put quotes on Twitter, Facebook, or other social networks, linking to the original. This is especially useful on Twitter. You can share it multiple times through a day with different quotes.
Here’s a great example of the visually-repackaged group expert interview. That’s the whole new content asset, an infographic which can be promoted on Pinterest, SlideShare, Visal.ly and many other visual marketing channels. It appears to have done very well on Pinterest!
Anything you can think of that gives you an opportunity to attract people to the interview is going to be beneficial, and perhaps spark new traffic after it has gone a bit cold. This guide on how to start your blog outlines some major formats you can re-package your expert interview into:
Here’s a great example of re-packaging an expert interview into a viral SlideShare deck to give you an idea.
Another great idea to re-package video interviews would be collecting them into a Udemy course.
Conclusion
Re-purposing blog expert interviews takes a bit more planning and creativity than re-purposing other content. But you can still wring out every bit of benefit possible from every one, and use it far into the future to benefit your site. All while providing something valuable to your readers, and keeping them coming back for later installments.
The original version of this article, titled “How to Diversify Your Blog Content with Different Forms of Expert Interviews“, first appeared on Basic Blog Tips. Sign up here to download Ms. Ileane’s free social 
media traffic ebook.
Ann Smarty is the brand and community manager at Internet Marketing Ninjas and founder of MyBlogU, the innovative and free blogger collaboration platform
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