The Secrets to Making Your Industry Expert Interviews Popular

One of the best ways to generate content that is useful and interesting for your audience is to conduct interviews with experts in your niche. Whether that is a celebrity, a book author, a popular blogger or a speaker, such interviews typically attract a wide audience.

In a nutshell, expert interviews allow you to:

• Create topical content for your audience
• Create unique content that your audience may not have access to
• Establish visibility for your brand and your own content
• Access opportunities to form long-term relationships with industry experts

There is more to popularizing your interviews than just getting it right with the equipment. At the heart of a popular interview series is the ability to promote and make the content visible to the right audience.

Here are some tips for smart marketers to attract traction and traffic to their expert interview series:

Interviewing unique people

Although well-known individuals would likely attract more interest, people also want to hear the stories and insights of lesser-known, ordinary people who have succeeded in their field. The fact that these stories are not so easily available makes them even more interesting.

It might require extra efforts to identify these lesser-known experts, but you might find it much easier to access them once you identify those who are a good fit for your interview series.

Networking and keeping up to date with industry trends is a great way to come across emerging experts in your field. Always watch out for individuals who appear to be gaining traction and are potential rising stars in your niche.

Optimize for iTunes

Presently, there are an estimated 800 million active users on iTunes. Evidently, this is a large marketplace for audio downloads and it can be difficult to stand out from the crowd. Optimizing your interview series is invaluable in helping to improve visibility for your content.

A great place to start is using relevant keywords to describe your audio.

It is worthwhile noting that unlike typical search engine users who utilize long-tail keywords, iTune users normally just use a single keyword to search for particular content.

iTunes ranks audio content based on the number of subscribers and reviews a podcast receives. To increase your contents’ ranking, ask your social media followers and web visitors to subscribe to your podcast so they can automatically receive new interviews through the iTunes app. You also want to ask as many of your followers to write honest reviews of their favourite interviews on iTunes.

This kind of social proof is important in compelling more people to download and listen to your series of interviews.

Creating visibility with social media

An effective way to grow your social media following is to create useful audio content and share this consistently across your social media platforms.

In addition, sharing your content on social media can help to popularize your interviews, especially if you are interviewing people who are of interest to your followers. It is also a good idea to engage your social media audience to find out the type of content they would like to see featured in your series of interviews.

All in all, social media offers a wide opportunity to not only share your content, and gain visibility; it also serves as an idea-generation space that allows you to continue creating content that is in demand.

Partnering with other podcasters

In online marketing, no one would discount the importance of joint ventures and collaborations. The same applies for promoting your interviews far and wide.

Partnering with someone who  has a wide audience, great access to experts and who is experienced in conducting these interviews sets you one step ahead in giving your own content the visibility you desire.

Generally, partnering provides an economy of scale that allows both of you to gain exposure, build credibility and form meaningful connections with experts who also promote your content within their own networks

Successful Expert Interviews

Whether done as a podcast or in video format, high quality expert interviews will always be in demand. It’s not always necessary to seek out leading experts as all individuals have a story to tell about their journey so far. It is important to strategically think of creative ways to promote and make your content visible to the relevant target audience.