I you have a blog or website about niche topics and you're wondering what content to add next, what about you start doing interviews of people working in the same niche as your website? You could start a series of weekly or monthly interviews. What you need to do is create a list of questions, and choose people in your niche, then contact them about doing an interview by email. If they agree, then send the questions (and a few personnalized ones dpeending on the person) After that, you simply have to publish it, make a link to the person's site and promote your interview on social bookmarking services as well as other bloggers in your niche. Most probably, the person being interviewed will make a link to "his" interview from his site and/or will tweet about it. Maybe other people will link to this interview if there are some interesting points of view developed. You will have created totally original content, and targeted in your niche, which is good for your website/blog. You will have started a relationship with someone in the same niche as yourself, and this person can probably help you out in the future, perhaps simply by making a link to your next interview. But maybe for much more, you don't know yet. Good luck with interviews, it's a good way to create traffic!
How do you recommend getting notable people to actually take the time to grant an interview to a new site?
Yeah, but surely you need a little bit more time since your blog is new. People tend to ignore you. Anyway, this should be work fine.
Make a list of people to interview, send the requests, but target as well people like you, simple bloggers, they too have things to say, and it will make an interview too, the important things is to get more and more interviews so you can make it a regular thing. Keep this list somewhere, and after a month or so, write another email to all those who didn't reply and for those who declined, ask again in 3 months. You need to keep your list tidy, with dates on which you sent the requests and what they answered if anything. Also, on each interview you'll publish, have some text for people to request being interviewed, you never know. Something like: "Would you like to be our next interviewee? Contact us!"
You know I love new ideas good or bad not saying yours is either. Though this seems kinda close to having a guest poster. Good job thinking outside the box.
yes it's like a guest poster, except you make the questions so you control the topic (focused on your niche) and also when you publish the interview, for each answer of the interviewee you can insert your own commentary (with a different font color) so you can have dialogue with the reader as well, and explain things better, make them clearer at least. So at the end, the content you have is totally original and on-topic.
Thanks for the comments, I have rewritten this post as an article on my site, I'd be glad if you could digg it (the Digg widget is at the end of the article) and perhaps tell me if there are things you'd like to see added to it: http://shetoldme.com/blog/build-backlinks-content-relationships-with-interviews Cheers, James
great idea it really does kill two birds with one stone. this can be applied to so many different niches and industries as well and will help keep you looking like a true expert and mingle r of the elite in your niche
Here's the direct link to Digg my article, thanks: http://digg.com/educational/Interviews_for_SEO_Backlinks_Content_and_Relationships