These are exactly the kinds of articles that are most likely to be shared, e-mailed, and recommended on social bookmarking sites like Digg.com (Figure 3.2) and StumbleUpon.com.
List posts require much more work than you may think. In general, the longer the list, the more likely it is to pick up traction and bring in readers. But when you’re listing 52 ways to change a lightbulb, you have to do quite a bit of research and creative thinking to make up the numbers. The post could end up being several thousand words long, taking an entire day or two to write.
Figure 3.2Digg.com, one of the most powerful social bookmarking sites, loves list posts.
It’s unlikely that you’ll want to include too many of these posts in a blog or web site, if only because they’re usually a bit shallow. But toss in one or two a month, and you could find they act as useful traffic bait.
6. INTERVIEW POSTS
While list posts can be shallow, interview posts are high quality. Because every interview, even if it’s with someone who appears regularly on web sites, is different, your article will be unique. And if the person you’re interviewing is important and influential in your field, you can be sure that your readers will read it—and see that your site is ready to put in the effort to churn up exclusive content that they can’t find anywhere else.
There is a secret to publishing interviews, and it’s this: It is ridiculously easy. It looks difficult. It looks as though the publisher has had to go through a whole process of contacting a company’s PR firm, setting up a time for the interview, thinking about the questions, researching the subject, and producing piles of carefully thought-out questions. Sometimes it is like that, and the higher the profile of the person you’re interviewing, the more hoops you’ll have to jump through. Usually though, it’s pretty simple.
Call or e-mail the company, explain who you are, and request an interview for your site. Make sure you provide a link so that people can see where they’ll appear, and be prepared to provide a link back to their own site in the article. That’s the fee that they’ll expect you to pay, and it’s also a service that you should be providing for your readers. Timing helps here, too. If the interview subject has a product to promote, you’re almost guaranteed an interview. You might be put in touch with the company’s PR rep (who will handle everything for you), but it’s just as likely that the person you’re contacting will reply to you directly. The worst thing your preferred contact will do is say no, or not reply at all. That’s not a big price to pay. If it is someone in your field, though, and especially if your site has already built a name for itself, there’s a good chance that you’ll get an agreement.
At that point, you can usually conduct the interview in one of two ways. The first is to set up a time to call. The advantage is that you’re in control of the timing. As soon as the interview ends, you have the material you need, and it’s just a matter of putting it together and publishing it. The interview will also be flexible. While you’ll want to prepare a dozen or so questions in advance, in a telephone interview you can let the conversation wander. That can turn up all sorts of interesting things. Writers often find that they go into a phone interview with one idea for a story they want to write and come out with something completely different—and much better. You’ll be able to ask follow-up questions and really dig around.
The downside to a telephone interview is the extra effort. If the person you’re calling is in a different time zone, you can find yourself working in the middle of the night. You’ll also have to take notes while you’re talking, type up a recorded transcript of the conversation (there are tools available that automatically record Skype calls), or possibly both. On the other hand, you’ll have built a much closer connection with someone who could prove to be a valuable contact in the future.
The alternative is to do an e-mail interview. That can sound a bit like cheating, especially to journalists used to picking up the phone whenever they need a quote. But when you’re building a web site, e-mail interviews can make your life very, very easy. When you prepare for an interview, you’re going to be making a list of 10 to 12 questions anyway (more than that and you’ll receive short answers in an e-mail), so the work will already be done. People you’re interviewing will be able to research their answers and frame them in a way that they believe will make them look good, and they’ll be able to do it all in a time frame that suits them. Many of the people you contact will specifically ask for an e-mail interview. Best of all, the interview will be already typed up and almost ready to publish. If you want to run the article in a question-and-answer format, you won’t have to do more than a little light editing and ask the subject of the interview for a picture.
The preceding tips apply if you’re interviewing someone you don’t know. But there’s no reason you can’t interview someone you do know. An interview with a colleague, a friend, a supplier, or a partner can all provide useful, exclusive content, and it’s the kind of fun that will make you feel as though you’re not working at all.
Interview posts do take a little time to organize, but
