A little more than three years ago I was listening to Entrepreneur on Fire Podcast with John Lee Dumas a lot. Not only did I love the different interviews he was publishing on a daily basis with successful entrepreneurs, but I was fascinated with his process for creating podcasts and blog posts from interview content.
Dumas’s process seemed so simple. Each day Dumas would bring on a different entrepreneur as a guest and ask them the same series of 8 – 10 questions about how they started their business and along with their keys to success. Dumas would then publish these interviews daily through iTunes and write summaries of the interviews on his blog. Dumas’s success story has been well documented at his website EOFire.com and hundreds of other blogs if you’re not familiar with his journey and want to learn more. Fast forward to 2017 and Dumas consistently brings in over $200,000 in revenue monthly from his business through advertising revenue and product sales that are a direct result of these 1,500+ interviews.
Although Dumas’s business is a bit more complex today than it was a few years ago, the foundation of his business remains simple. Dumas finds experts, interviews them, and hits publish.
[This is also what Self-Publishing School does with the Self-Publishing Success Summit]
Interested in learning how to use interview content as the backbone of your online business? No sweat.
You Can Do This Too!
Inspired by the simple process that Entrepreneur on Fire used, I started my own iTunes podcast and blog called FoodTruckEmpire.com abo
Just like Dumas executed in the early days, I kept my content creation as simple as possible. I reached out to people I viewed as experts online in the food truck industry to request an interview. Then I published those interviews on iTunes and my blog.
After just over 3 years of publishing, FoodTruckEmpire.com is now one of the most authoritative and popular websites online on the topic of starting a food truck business. I’ve even been featured in popular magazines like Entrepreneur about the topic and sold thousands of digital products including e-books, live courses, and consulting services.
Although I’ve created a much smaller than the digital publishing business than Dumas has created with Entrepreneur on Fire, the foundation of my business was created in the same way using interviews to become an authority in my particular market.
In the rest of this post, I will share three specific ways I have leveraged interview content to not just build my brand, but also generate products and revenue for my own business. I hope you can find some ways you can use interviews (both audio and written) as the backbone of your own digital publishing business!
Start New Relationships
One of the benefits of publishing interview content is that you have an excuse to talk to anyone in your niche. If you have a blog about how to improve your writing, you can request to interview authors that you respect and ask them any question you want. I urge you… do not take this powerful tool for granted!
As you begin to interview more people in your industry over the coming months and years, you’ll be surprised at how many movers-and-shakers you become acquainted with. In my case I’ve had the opportunity to speak with not only food truck vendors, but founders of popular food franchises and other business owners that serve this industry as well. Although many of these relationships have started out as a simple interview, many have progressed and become business relationships overtime.
A couple real life examples of guests on my show that have eventually become clients or customers:
- One business that I started by interviewing has now become a consulting client that I provide online marketing services for.
- Numerous interview guests I’ve have gone on to pay for monthly banner advertising on my website as a way to reach their target audience.
The first point of contact or the “ice breaker” to each of the above scenarios has been to schedule an interview.
Now one thing that I feel obligated to point out is that the vast majority of your interviews will not lead to any type of business relationship or direct revenue. Also, some of the folks I interviewed did not become customers until literally years after interviewing them for the first time. This is not a short-term strategy! You will need to take the longview on this strategy if you want it to work for you.
Building Evergreen Blog Content
Building evergreen blog content is the most common way that I’ve seen other bloggers and website owners leverage interviews. After all one of the fastest ways to get unique and valuable information for your website is to simply go out there and ask an expert how something works. (Note: By evergreen blog content, I simply mean content that will remain valuable and relevant for a long period of time.)
I won’t harp on the benefits of this bullet section too long since this is one of the most commonly used ways that publishers leverage interviews. Whether you’re doing an interview in an audio format though a podcast or a written Q/A style piece make sure to cover topics and questions that will be relevant to your audience for years to come.
Overtime, as you publish more information about a topic your audience and traffic will grow slowly assuming you publish consistently and high-quality interviews. If I had to put a number on it, I would estimate that around 75% of the content on my own website FoodTruckEmpire.com is made up of this evergreen interview content.
Incentivize Email Signups
This is an important one for me. I see a lot of new bloggers that worry spend a ton of time creating an incentive or bribe for people to sign up to an email list. Frequently used bribes that I’m sure you’ve seen before include Free Whitepapers or potentially an e-book on a certain topic. These type of bribes work well to collect email addresses, but here are a few other angles that you can use based on existing interview content that work great for me.
1.) Instead of just publishing a podcast interview on iTunes and summarizing in on your blog. Take the same audio and call it an Audio Lesson instead that people can signup for. If the interview content teaches your audience something this can really work well as a way to encourage email subscribers. I’ve found that if you list something as an “audio lesson” there’s a higher level of perceived value.
2.) Another way I incentivize email subscribers to join my list is to organize past interviews. One specific call to action is “Learn How 6-Figure Food Truck Owners Earn a Living–Register Here.” After a visitor opts-in they receive an email with links to five different past interviews from different food truck owners that generate over $100,000 in annual revenue. Best of all, this method of encourage people to subscribe does not take a lot of time on your end after the interviews have been produced, but they also provide a lot of value to readers.
I hope this post has helped get your creative juices flowing for how you could leverage the power of interviews on your own website. As super successful entrepreneurs like John Lee Dumas have already proved, you can build a profitable online publishing empire by mastering this single type of content.
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