Interview Best Practices for Freelance Writers

I used to hate the phone. I'd get sweaty palms, a dry throat, and cotton mouth; the trifecta. But now that I've done hundreds of interviews for everything from cover stories to case studies, it's one of my favorite things as a freelance writer. 

I've nailed down processes for magazine and corporate interviews that I'm sharing with you on Friday. If you've ever wondered how to get the best quotes from interviewees, what to ask and when, how to record and transcribe, and how to expand the interview when they give short answers, this is definitely for you.

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If you're like me and you really struggle with interviews, whether that's for your case studies or your white papers, or just interviews for magazines. This is for you. I used to struggle a lot with being nervous or how to do the best interview or how to get the quotes I needed. And now that I've done hundreds, maybe even thousands of interviews by this point, it's one of my favorite things that I do as a freelance writer. It's something that I look forward to. It's something that I seek out in all my projects. I really like to do a lot of interviews or workshops or ways that I can kind of ask people questions and hear what they're thinking. So if you've ever kind of been like nervous about interviews or you have a piece coming up that you're kind of wondering what you should do about it. This is for you. So, Hey Vicky. Welcome in. She says she's ready. All right, Vicky. Let's let's let's be ready together. So we have our prep date. We're gonna do a quick update first. Cause we have to readjust this cause we've had some moving. Hey Mary. All right, Charlotte, you have to go in your rabbit hole.

Oh, we lost the jet. Nope, no, no, no. We had a loss. We had a giant tree to loss. Charlotte, you have to go in your household back up. Okay. Can you back up job? Good girl.

All right. Everybody's kind of in their Hobbit holes, sort of you guys struggled to get on camera at the same time. It's okay. This is part of it. All right. So Vicky says that she is, I'm gonna pop this up here real quick. So because it says that she's still quite new at interviewing, so I'm not good yet. That's totally fine. Biggie. I was really nervous. I used to hate phone calls. I used to hate all the process of getting ready for the interviews, besides writing the questions. Like I just would get dry mouth and I was just like, I don't know what to do. And yeah. So it's, don't worry. That's what we're here for. So here's what we're going to talk about. We're going to talk about how to kind of set everything up and then go through the interview process. So I have new things that we can put on here, which is cool.

So number one, yay. Which I can move, which I think I might eventually end up. Anyways, I might end up changing these. So anyways, now we have numbers. All right. So number one, number one is when we're setting up our interview, we have to have a couple of things in place. So we need to have some tools. So one of the best interview practices is you need to have some way to record it. You need to have some way to take notes because sometimes recordings fail. I know that this is something that a lot of people think the recording, like you're like, oh, zoom always works. It does it. Doesn't it fails. Sometimes your internet goes out, the software tries to update or does something weird while you're doing the interview. It happens or use something like tape, a call or rev tape, rev, call recorder and something fails.

So you need to have some kind of way to record it, but it would always be great to have a backup method, which is manual type notes. The other thing that you're doing when you have an interview is you need some sort of scheduling tool. I, I spent so many years going through back and forth emails with people being like, well, how about Tuesday at five? And they're like, well, how about Tuesday at three? And it's just a big pain in the butt. So for me a scheduling tool is a must. So when we're doing this, our, our recording tools for interviews can be Temi or Tenex can be Tape-A-Call like, if you're doing them on your regular phone, you can do tape a call. You can do rev call recorder. And if you use rev call recorder and you can immediately load the transcript to rev or to Temi and get it to be transcribed.

So rev is people transcribing it. Tammy is a little AI robot. Over the years time he's gotten a lot better. So I usually, excuse me, I usually use Temi because I just it's accurate enough. Like I don't, I, it gets so close now that it's, I'm good with it. So I usually use that I use Temi or rev to transcribe it. And if you want to use it on your computer, a lot of people are now familiar with zoom. Like if I ever did it in an interview before the pandemic on zoom, people are like, what do I do? Do I have to download it? I don't get it. But now everybody has zoom. Everybody understands video conferencing or video calls. So now we can use zoom. And that's what I use a lot now, because it's easier than handing out my phone number to everybody or handing out a Google voice number.

If you don't want to hand out your personal number, you can always get a Google voice number and hand that out so that people have your personal number. But you always want to have some way to record it some way that people can get in touch. I like zoom because I can just give them a zoom link and they show up and I tell them in my scheduling tool. So I use dub Sato. It says, when they get the confirmation email, Hey, this is going to be a voice call. So they don't have to sweat that they're going to be on video. And that way, you know, they already have the expectation. Like we're only getting on voice. You can call in if you want. And I used UB Sato for that. I used to use Calendly. But now that I have the Sato that runs my whole business, I don't need Calendly.

I don't need the expense. I just use step Sato. So you need kind of these things to work in tandem. So when you're first setting up the interview, you send your calendar blue link or your count, some kind of calendar scheduling tool link so that they can pick a time that works for them, but also works for your schedule because you're like, here's my schedule pick what works for you. And then you kind of like hop into the interview. So when you get in the interview, always, always, always. So before we ever press record on any tool you have to ask for permission. Do you mind if I record this? I always ask, do you mind if I record this to get accurate quotes? And I feel like that, I mean, I've never had anyone saying no that I couldn't record it. So there's that, but also the fact that like, when you present it to them, like, Hey, do you mind if I record this to get accurate quotes, I feel like that present it to them in a way that you're like, Hey, we're doing this for accuracy.

I'm not doing this to like embarrass you or catch you off guard or something. I'm doing this for accuracy. So that when I take material from the transcript, I know that it's right, because when we take our type notes, sometimes we make mistakes with type notes. Some people use shorthand and long hand. I use long hand just because sometimes I'll put in some shorthand, but I never really got good at shorthand. So I use kind of longhand for my notes, but always, always, always ask, do you mind if I record this to get accurate quotes before you press the record button, there are different recording rules in every single state, but the easiest way to just get past that where you're like, oh, this state says I don't have to just always ask if you can record it. It's really easy. Just ask second thing is, make sure you record it.

So when I did interviews on my phone I used to record both on tape, a call and rev tape recorder. So I would run tape a call, set that up, set it to recording. Then I would open rev call recorder, and then I would start the recording on there. So I'd have two recordings because sometimes rev would fail and sometimes Tape-A-Call would fail. So when I did it on my phone, I always had two recordings. It took me a long time to figure out I could even run those two apps at the same time recording the call, but it was a lifesaver. There was a whole bunch of times where one would fail and the other wouldn't. And I, I personally like having the recording. I like having the recording way more than my type notes. I know some people are like, yeah, I have my type notes.

I'm totally fine. I just, I like have the recording. I like it to be as accurate as possible. So now that we have that kind of set up and when you're doing zoom, same thing, zoom now announces it to everybody. It didn't use to do that, but it does now, right? It has to because the recording rules are different in every state. So before when you clicked record on zoom, it would just have that like little red dot. And now it says like this meeting is being recorded and it says it really loudly. So everybody knows it's being recorded, but always ask. So tape a call and rev well tape a call and rev call recorder. You can run them at the same time on your phone if you want and do a phone interview. My recommendation is to do zoom because it's really easy to just hop everybody on zoom record it.

Zoom is, as I've found so far more reliable in terms of getting the recording and saving it. So knock on wood. I haven't, that's been okay for me. But you always want to make sure you ask and then record it. So now that we're recording, those are all of our tools, right? We set up our interview with dub Sato. We set up our, our well dub sat or Calendly. We made sure we have our recording tools and then we want to make sure we have type notes. So when we're in our interview, we want to make sure we have type notes. This is something that you can put personal notes in there, like, as they talk, you're like, Hey, we're 15 minutes into the interview. This is a really good quote. Or Hey, we're this many minutes in, or this thing happened or he said this, but he actually meant this.

You know, like you can leave stuff in your type notes as you go along, but you always, always, always like, I know this is kind of old school, but you always want to have tight notes. I know that there have been journalists, and I know that there've been people doing case studies where they didn't have type notes and the person you couldn't get them back on the phone. It was someone who was a CEO of a global company. And like you based got one shot to get that interview. You couldn't get them back on. So always have a backup. If you want to, like, I don't know. Sometimes people can screen record so they can do zoom and then also screen record. So they get the recording two ways. You can try that, but always my recommendation is have typed notes, have something as a backup.

And that way, when you're having type notes, you can, I found that I do really well, listening to them talk and typing. And it makes me remember kind of like what they talked about when I roll into actually writing the piece. So it kind of helps solidify the information when you're typing what they said and listening and asking questions to always have type notes. So that's number one, we need all of those systems set up. All right, now we've got it. A new number. Now we've got number two. So I'm gonna move this guy over here. So number is we need to write our questions, so we need to make sure that our questions are really good. This is the difference between getting a interview and a really good interview. It's the questions. And it's the followup questions. So this was something I didn't really I didn't understand how the follow-up question part worked, but I've like one of my special skills as a writer is that I'm very good at asking questions.

I ask very specific and detailed questions. That's just, you know, every writer has special skills. That's one of mine. So when I'm asking questions, I'm kind of working backwards from the assignment. So if I get an article I'm looking through it basically like, Hey, this article is about this. Well, what do I need to know to get to the answer? What do I need to ask them in order to flesh out all the different facets of this topic. And this is the cool thing when you're working from a pitch. So if you sent a pitch to them, you're basically working from your pitch that says, I'll tell readers how to do this. Why to do this, what to do step-by-step process. Then you just write those questions out. So that's one thing, Hey, Linda, welcome in Linda. You can't be late. Linda, you can't be late to the live stream.

You can just be here. That's all, don't worry. This is something that we talk about it. You don't have, you're not late. You can just join and be part of it. Welcome. And Linda. So when we're writing our questions, they have to be open-ended questions. If you find yourself asking questions that could easily be answered short, like short answers, like yes, of course. Or yeah, we always do that. Or no, I don't think that's the right fit us or something. That's super short, then we're not answering, we're not asking the right questions. So when we work backwards from a pitch or an assignment, that's our best thing. So this is what for doing reported articles. Are you laughing for some reason? Okay. so we have reported articles. There's different for case studies. So reported articles. You're going to be, you know, they could be anywhere from 15 minutes to 30 minutes for your interview.

And you want to ask questions like that start with what, how, why walk me through blah-blah-blah steps can, you know, explain to me the steps that you take to do blah, blah, blah. I always, always, always start out with what's the most important thing our readers or what's the most important thing, audience, whoever the audience is. So let's say I was writing for real estate agents. Let's say I'm writing for like for NAR or something. And I say, what's the most important thing realtors need to know about blah. And I just say that topic of the article, like what's the most important thing realtors need to know about doing home inspections during COVID that's the first question we want to open them up. We want them to start thinking about, well, there's a lot of important things. You're like, great pick one, and then we'll drop into the next ones.

Cause we want them to kind of percolate, want to warm them up. So what, what happens when people get on these interviews? A lot of times it's like they get on phone calls all the time, but an interview is different. We're mostly listening and they're mostly talking and they, it's not, it's not really a conversation all the time. It kind of is. But, well, I guess it is a conversation. So when you, you get on this interview, you want to start it by opening them up. Like think of them kind of as like, you just want to let them bloom a little bit during the interview. So we, I always have that question first. What's the most important thing, audience like restaurant owners, pizza, restaurant owners, realtors FinTech com SAS, you know, whatever it is audience needs to know about topic. Then I roll into more specific questions.

Like what would you do if blah, blah, blah, like walk me through why you do these things. Or if I was going to do the home inspector one, I'd say walk me through your top five specific steps that you take to do a home inspection during COVID. What are your specific, like detailed safety measures that you put in place to go into people's homes, right during COVID then the next one would be something like is there anything extra or are there any extra steps that you take beyond other home inspectors in your area that you find have really helped ease people into allowing you into their home? You want to ask things that, that are specific and they give you a bunch of information that you can put into the article. Remember if we're working from a P a pitch, like we have a bunch of questions already.

Cause we wrote pitch. If we're working from an assignment from an editor, well then we ended up having all of these different keys in there. Like, Hey, this topic should be about this. Like kind of cover these things. You want to ask questions that are like well-rounded to that topic, not just straight up on that topic, like, would you do anything differently or has there been any mistakes or like what happened? Like when you ask a question, you want to assume there's an answer to it. So you don't want to say like, have there been any mistakes and then they're like, yes. And then you're like, what are they? No, you want to say like, when you made a mistake, how did you fix that? Okay. So it's kind of like leading them a little bit, right? We're leading them to like, Hey, kind of tell me how that went.

You know, what's going on here. But I think that that gives you really good quotes and really good information because you're not going in there saying like, pretending you don't have any information, you have a lot of information. You have the pitch, you have the assignment, you know who these people are, you know, who you're interviewing, you researched the topic and you're writing these questions in ways that help get them to give you a specific answer. You're leading them to specific answers. You're not leading them. I hope don't write questions that lead them to the answer that you want. I never write questions that lead people to an answer that I want. I always ask them specific questions that are like, when you made a mistake, what happened? Like that kind of stuff? Not like I saw that you made this mistake on one a and like, no.

And I also don't ask them questions like well, you know, like me, like other people are very scared of this thing. And like, what about this? Like, I don't ask them questions about my own personal opinion. I don't ask them questions that lead them to where I think the article should go. I always have some questions that are like the bones of the article of like, I need a lot of different perspectives here and I need to ask them questions that are specific enough. And they're what, you know, how, why walk me through these things, steps of this, explain to me this, what are the pros? What are the cons mistakes? Anything that you would do differently, like walk me through what you would do differently. That kind of stuff. And then of course there's different interviews, right? There's different interviews.

Like if I was doing a profile, I'm asking them different questions and I usually ask them about some personal stuff. I usually open them up with a question that is a little bit kind of the same way. It's not, what's the most important thing, but if I'm writing a profile, it's like a specific question about their experience or their history or why they do things a certain way kind of, you know, get them to bloom during the interview. And then I end the interview on more personal stuff and hopefully that kind of like rounds it out. So when we're trying to write our questions for our interview, you should be always thinking about how can I get the most amount of information here and how can I make it rounded out how I not lean one way or another. And I give them questions that fit the topic that would make logical sense for how someone would go through the article.

So let's say it's a step-by-step guide or a listicle like go through those things, make sure you go down the list. If you're writing something where it's like you know, like how do you be more productive in the restaurant business? Well, you need to go through the steps of like, what's your day by day routine. Do you do any reviews? Like go, go through the natural flow of what that article would probably look like, the bare bones. And that's when I found you get the best questions, you really think about the experience that these people are bringing to the table in terms of interviewees, you're thinking about what the topic needs to cover in terms of rounding it out, where you have maybe opposing thoughts, or maybe you have different people who have different techniques that are really valuable. And you're also thinking about how can I ask them things that would help give information to people who are at multiple different areas of the spectrum, right?

They're either beginners or they're, they've been in the business for 25 years. How can I kind of cover all of those people at once? Sometimes that's not what the article is, right? It's not always newbies and people with tons of experience seasoned veterans. But sometimes like we kind of have to mishmash that. So when you're thinking about questions, make sure you get very specific and detailed with them and that you that you give them a chance to bloom during the interview. Then when we're talking about follow-up questions, follow-up questions should be from you listening. This was something I didn't understand. When I first started interviewing, I was just like, all right, my job is to ask the question, write it down, ask the question, write down. But what you do is as you get more used to interviews, as you get more used to the process of asking the question and then typing and listening at the same time, not just being like, all right, I need to type this accurately, whatever you listen.

And you're like, oh, that's really interesting. You know, you're typing away. You're like, oh, that's interesting that they said that your followup question comes from that. Your follow up question is like, I, you know, you just said that there were five different things that you did. And they've changed over the years. Why did you change them over the years? You need to follow up with questions of like, curiosity, why did you do this? Or how did you end up doing that? Or I noticed you mentioned this and then this, can you walk me through why those are different? You need to ask them questions in your followup based on listening to their actual responses in real time, this is something that I didn't get. I was just like, all right, just write it down. And if I have follow-up questions, I'll just email them later.

It's way better to catch them after they've just said that and say like, oh, wait a minute. Let's talk about that a little bit more because they're already in that frame of mind to ask them that later, it's like, they're in a different place, different frame of mind, they're doing different stuff. They're paying attention to different things. But when they're in the interview, they just talked and they're like, whoa, wait a minute. How does that work? Or why is that that way? Or you know, I noticed that you mentioned newbies really struggled with this. Why do they struggle? Or what advice would you give them to get over that hump? We want to make sure those up questions make sense. So that's that piece. The other piece that we're going to talk about, our case study questions are white paper questions. So for me, it usually went into a case study or a white paper interview.

It's like an hour, it's like double the amount of time that I would do for for a reported article because the case study is based on basically one interview from one person reported articles are like three to eight people. Like it could be a huge article and you'd have to interview all these different people. So when you have your case study interview, you need to make sure you kind of lead them through the different sections of your case study, right? Like the challenge, like what was going on, what did you use? There's a whole huge list of questions. Oh, we got all switch a roo on the peds. So there's a whole list of questions where we're like walking them through the challenge. Like, how did you, what were you struggling with? Why were you using this product? What, what kind of things were going on?

And then you're like, well, why did you make the switch to this product? Why, why did this make sense? What kind of gains did you see or KPIs where you, like, what kind of KPIs, you know, we're we're on the deck that you were paying attention to or what kind of things we're hoping to improve or like, you know where do you see the most value or what surprised you? And then you kind of go into the results like, well, all right, now that we've kind of figured out what you were struggling with, why you made a switch. Now we need to go in through what happened when you made the switch, walk me through all these things of what specific results did you see what happened with your team? Why are you changing your processes? How did you see that 57% increase in blah, blah, blah, or a 30% decrease in this?

Y walk them through all those different things. But your case study interviews and your reported article interviews will be totally, totally different, but they still have the same underlying thing. You need to have curious questions that get to the specifics. You need to walk them through kind of the bones of the article or the bones of the case study. And be curious, ask them, follow up questions, really listen to them and, and key into important things that they're talking about that have to do with your topic. So that's number two. All right. We might have to make a second video for this, cause we're going a little long day, but we are going to do a cup date real quick. If we can get our little other friend in there, I shot like, can you,

Can you come over here to your high level? Good. Or you have a hole? I know it's so hard being a smell. There you go. Good job. Okay. All right, Barry. Let's see if I can reach you all the way over there. Oh, so you're so far away. You look great today. You look great today. There's a little bit there you have a little bit. All right, Barry. You're like only part of the way on camera buddy. There you go. You're so far away.

All right. We did our quick pup date. Everybody got treated those and then want to make sure that oh, goodness gracious. So one of the things I wanted to make sure I asked was how do you guys feel about doing interviews? Do you still feel nervous? I want to make sure I hear your comments on this and that, you know, we kind of walked through this. So when you're doing your interview process, how do you come up with questions? Like, tell me in the comments below, how do you come up with questions? How do you kind of walk through the process? How do you get really great quotes? You know, for me really great quotes has been from follow up questions or being very granular in the questions that I ask and really paying attention to rounding out that topic. But I'm interested to hear, like, what do you, what do you think, tell me in the comments below, if you're watching this on the replay what you kind of think about the interview process, how you come up with questions how do you get good quotes?

You know, I'm always, I'm always someone who likes to learn. So we'd love to hear that. All right. Number three here. We're going to go into number three. Oh. And if you're here, live, if you're here on the live stream with me, there we go. You can pop those comments in the little comment section. So if you have questions or comments about either interviewing or you have questions or comments about anything about freelance writing, you can pop them in the comment section, feel like this has been useful and helpful so far. Make sure to give it a thumbs up or subscribe below to get more stuff about building a profitable, sustainable freelance writing biz. Cool. They're more color-coded and they're Haba hosts today, I guess. So I try to change out their blankets and stuff every once in a while, but it's really hard because they are, they're like mud puppies. They love to go outside and get dirty and do all this stuff. And even if I like wash the blanket and put it back in here, there's still specific blankets. They like, so even if we have other blankets, they're just like, Ooh, no, we don't want that. We want these other blankets. So I w is like, you know, they're they're divas. Is that true? Are you a diva dog? Are you mud puppy diva, dog. She's like, I don't care. She's like, just give me that tree though. I'm a good girl.

You are a good girl. There you go. There, you went meet. Come on, bear. Come on, bear. There. There we go. Good job, buddy.

You're just so far away over there. All right. All right. So number three here. So we talked about getting quotes, make sure we ask the right questions. We talked about digging deep on the topic, make sure you do your research ahead of time before you write your questions or at least some research. So like if you're coming into a topic that you're really unfamiliar with, do a bunch of research to write good questions. We talked about magazines and we talked, or we've talked about reporting articles and case studies and white papers. Redirecting your interviewee if they don't answer the question. Okay, cool. So let's talk about this. What to do. This has happened to me. I don't know, hundreds of times where I asked someone a question and they don't answer the question, they answer their own question and I have to redirect them back to the original question.

So yeah, Linda, that's what I kind of do too. I just do more like for, yeah. Kind of the audience, but also I think about the, the what, why and how that's kind of like, or the steps or the explanation or how we're kind of mooching these things together to make something that's well-rounded and makes sense. Okay. So number three, here, we're going to talk about redirecting again, this has happened to me, hundreds of times I ask a question and they answer a different question and I'm like, that's not what I was asking. But that's not what you say them. So when someone, and I'm sure I've done this many times, I'm sure as a human being, someone asks me a question and I'm like, yeah, dah, dah, dah, dah. And they're like, that's not what I asked you at all. And I'm sure that happens to me all the time.

I'm sure you can attest to that. But so when you redirect them, you don't want to say like, no, you did it wrong, or that's not what I asked or like, you know, you don't want to treat your interviewee as if they made a mistake because they might be nervous or they might get defensive or it might be a situation where it just becomes very awkward. I find that being encouraging works like it's just like, honey. It works so well. Just encourage them. No, that was a great answer. I also wanted to follow up with this other question and then rephrase your original question. They may answer it like differently. I know this sounds silly to just rephrase the question, but it's like, it goes in their brain a different way and they, they answer your question that you need to get answered.

So always be encouraging to them. There's a lot of people who are nervous about being recorded. There's a lot of people who like, they're doing other things and they're not paying attention. So always say like, oh, that was great. Like, you know, and they're like, oh, I don't know if I answered your question. You're like, oh, that was great. You know, I think that was really helpful. I also wanted to follow up with this, rephrase the question. If they still don't answer it, then what you end up doing is saying you got to get more granular with them, whatever you're saying, like in the original question, in the rephrase, it's not hitting. Right. So you're like, all right, how can I kind of figure this out? How can I ask them something to get to the meat of the issue? Right. So that means if you ask them kind of a question that was too broad for them say like you asked them like, well, how did you do X, Y, Z?

And they tell you a bunch of stuff that wasn't pertinent you rephrase. And you're like, yeah, you know what? I'm curious if there's a number of steps that took you to get to XYZ, or if you hired extra help for XYZ, or maybe if you did this thing to get XYZ. And if that doesn't work, then you roll into like something even more granular. When you're thinking about XYZ, was it a, B or C or was it something different? So you kind of get them in this place where you're like, all right, we've already tried twice. We need to get to the point where we were like, was it this thing, this thing or this thing? And once they hit on a, B or C, then you can say, all right, let's walk through that. Explain part to me. Because sometimes, like I said, people like they're humans, they may not have heard the question.

Right? They may not understand the question. You may need to rephrase it, resay it. But anytime someone doesn't answer a question, just encourage them, be nice to them. I have like interviewed a ton of people, high grumpy. I'm getting the, I'm getting the grumpy Gill stares right now. So anytime that someone, hi anytime that someone doesn't answer your question, be nice to them and encourage them to answer it and make sure that when you are, oh goodness, you're so far away and make sure that that you treat them like someone to be respected and listened to. I think a lot of times people treat CEOs very differently than someone who runs like one shop in a franchise. They treat them like someone who owns Jimmy, John's different than someone who owns one location of a Jimmy John's franchise, right. That should not happen.

They need to be respected at the same level. You need to treat them with the same amount. They have great information to give you. They have a lot of stuff that I have been surprised at the amount of information gaps, sometimes between high level and low level, low level people do the stuff every day, high level people like they're not in the grind, they're not in the every day. And, and sometimes you get way better information from someone who's moving all the pieces around everyday, rather than someone's like, oh yes, we have this new marketing objective. It's this. But you need to treat them with the same amount of respect and the more respect and the more like encouragement and the more positive you are with them, the better quotes you get, the better it's the easier it is to redirect them.

And they're more open and honest with you. Like I think that for me, one of the biggest compliments I ever get is when someone said like, wow, you made that so easy. Or when someone said like, wow, that was a great interview. You ask great questions. Or when someone said like, man, I was nervous, but talking to you, it was, it was super simple. Yeah. Because you want to encourage them. You want to make it nice for them. People get on interviews all the time where they're asked questions like a robot. Well, what would you do about this? How about this? Okay, well, like there's no response. You don't treat it like a back and forth and sometimes you don't need to treat it like a back and forth. Sometimes people have gone through so many interviews that like, they'll ride the bus on their own and you don't have to, you know, direct them very much.

But sometimes like, it really helps to, to like get on the bus with them and be like, yeah, like treat it like a conversation that you're very interested in what they have to say. And for me I guess I might be weird in this, but I'm always interested in what they have to say because they're getting on an interview to tell me cool stuff. Most of the time, when you interview people, you end up getting people where they're excited about the thing that they work in. You're not interviewing people that just like hate their job. Most of the time, you're like, oh my gosh, let me tell you about this cool thing. Yes. I took these steps. It worked out really well. They like working in that field. That's why they're doing interviews. They're like the positive representation of their company, their brand.

And I love listening to them talk about things they get excited about. It makes me excited. The more we can foster that, the more that we can make them excited and make them incur it, make them feel like build them up, you know, like there's nothing to be gained from a negative interview where you make them feel about their answers, where you're like, no, that wasn't like it was this. No, no. Even if they're totally off the mark, even if it turns out that that interview you did with them wasn't super great. It doesn't mean that you won't interview them again in a few years and they'll bam, bam, bam. Knock it out of the park, but you have to encourage them. If you get a bad interview, which happens to me, it's happened to everybody where you're like, oh, it wasn't quite right.

Like, even if I redirected them, even if I try to lead them kind of back on topic, even if I try to do other stuff, it just, wasn't great. Those people like that you interview may come back around and you need to have a good relationship with them that they felt comfortable with you. So that the next time you roll up in their inbox and say, I need to interview you. They're like, yes. I love that last experience. The experience of interviewing you was great. Yeah. I didn't get a ton of quotes in the article, but I still had a good time. Let's talk. Right. So that's way more important to me. That's the, the ability to email people and have them say yes to interviews real quick. That's really great. It's really good. When you have short timelines, it's really good when you're trying to like mush everything together.

Like if you have a week to do this article and you need to get a bunch of interviews like before, you know, and you need to write it, all that stuff. Having people where you're like, Hey, I need an interview. Can you help me out? They're like, yep. I'm down. Like, let's do it today. That kind of stuff is, is really valuable. So encouragement and don't treat people differently based on where they are in a company, don't treat people differently, like period. But I find that people are like, oh, well, a CEO is like, like I have to have a different, no, no. I have the same interview process with people like I've interviewed people who run global brands. Like they're the CEO of like a multinational brand. I treat them the exact same way as I treat the person who only does clean up.

Like they, they work on sanitary stuff in a restaurant. Like their whole job is to keep the restaurant sanitary. They don't cook the food, they don't do anything. They, their whole job is sanitation. And, and some people like there's two totally different ways. They treat them don't you need to treat them the same way. They deserve the same amount of respect. They're taking time out of their day to talk to you. Okay. So this leads me to my last point. All right. We might have to make a second video for this because here we go. What point were we on three? Is this for, okay. This is where I am our last point today. We're a little bit over on time, but that's okay. So our last point today is, are you sure it was three

Now we're on four. Okay,

Cool. So we're on for the last thing that I want to go over here and I think we'll may end up making another one is how we end the interview and how we follow up. So when we're doing our interview, always, always, always end your interview with asking them. Is there anything else that you would like to add or any questions you thought I'd asked that I didn't. Okay. Is there anything that you would like to add or any questions you thought I'd asked that it didn't, this gets me a lot of good information. Oh yeah. You know what? I wrote this down in my notes. Let me, let me tell you about this. And you're like, great. And it was a really important point, but they just forgot in the course of the interview. And because you said, is there anything else you wanted to add?

They're like, oh yeah, blah, blah, blah. And they give you all this great information. The other part is that they're like, yeah, I actually thought that you would ask me more about how I do this. And I'm like, great talk about that. And sometimes people think it's like leaving me a review on Yelp. They're like, no, you did a great job. This interview was fantastic. I'm like, no, this isn't a review. Like I'm asking if there's any questions you thought I'd ask that. I didn't that like, you know what you thought I'd asked about this, but I didn't, you know, that kind of stuff. So sometimes you're going to get these funny answers where they're like, you did a great job. This was the best interview ever, you know? And you're like, no, no, no, this is not Yelp. That sometimes that happens.

But a lot of times what you're searching for here are the nuggets. Anything else you want to add? Did you write anything down? Did, did something spark in your mind when I asked another question that you wanted to add is there anything that you feel like is really important to this topic that we didn't talk about? Is there any question that you thought I'd ask, right. Like you came into the interview thinking that I would ask about this piece, but I actually asked about this piece and you're like, oh, let's talk about that. I always ask that. Your next question. Your very last question is is it okay if I follow up as I'm writing the piece, you need to get a yes. On here, because if you need email, like you need to follow up and say like, Hey can you clarify this for me?

Or can you you know, answer this question again, or, you know, whatever you need permission to follow up with them via email. Well, you don't need it, but I like to have it. So I always ask if it's okay to have follow up, they always say yes. And then you can either grow. Like if you don't have their email, you can grab their emails. Sometimes it gives you their phone number. That's always great stuff. And then when you're kind of wrapping up the interview, thank them for their time, tell them always that it was a great interview. Remember we build them up, we encourage them. And these people are taking time out to help you with your work. Like they're getting out of their schedule. They made an appointment with you. And of course, yes. The other side of that is they're getting pressed.

They're getting smart stuff put in in print, but, but it's always really valuable to just thank people for giving great answers or thank people for like giving you their time or allowing you to just, you know, have this conversation with them. I think that that's really, really important. And every once in a while I get an interview that is just like choice. It is just like USDA prime steak. I love it. And I will tell them that I will tell them that, Hey, I don't say this very often, but this was a really great interview. Like you answered these questions really well. You gave me tons of detail. Thank you so much. I very much appreciate it. I, I very rarely get an interview this good. Right? And I will tell them that if it's the truth, right? Every once in a while, I'll get an interview where I'm like, dude, you knocked it out of the park.

This is fantastic. Tell them that because they need to know they may be doing other interviews. They may be unsure of how well they did. They'd be maybe unsure of getting out in the press. They may be feeling like I don't know, maybe having a hard day or maybe having a hard week or a month or a year. And maybe you just telling them, like you knocked it out of the park, you did a great job, will be a nice thing for them to hear. So always thank them for their time. Always, you know, thank them for their answers and stuff. And if you have an interview that just like knocked it out of the park, tell them, build them up, tell them that this is good stuff. Because then not only does it help that person and it helps your article, but it helps the next journalist who interviews them or helps you later on when you interview them six months down the road or a year down the road.

Those things are really important when we do our follow-up stuff. Anytime you need to follow up, you need to give them like, you need to space it out from your deadline. So if you need to get some follow-up answers for them, those follow-up answers need to be due at least 48 hours before your deadline. So if you find out that you need to follow up on questions, ask them immediately and say, they're due by X date. And that date needs to be two days before your real due date. So anytime you have follow up questions, anytime you have anything that you need to get done for your interview more often full for the piece, then make sure that you follow up, but you give a gap. They need to get it to you before a date. Cause sometimes they turn it in the next morning or they forget, you need to have space between that and your deadline. All right. So I hope that this was helpful. I hope that there we go. Okay. I hope this was helpful. We're going to do a quick update. I know it was a little long too, but you guys are saying, I don't know why you guys can't get on the same thing like you guys are like, maybe it's cause you're oh, we only have one little bit left. We're gonna have to get a, an x-ray. We're gonna have to get an extra tree though. Alright.

Have for you have for you. Good job guys. Doing great. You're doing great.

Well, I would pet you, but you're really far away. All right. So interviewing doesn't have to be stressful. We just have to make sure we ask the right questions. Make sure we're prepared. We have our notes. We have like a word doc or a notes app or a Google doc where we're going to take type notes. We have some way to record it. You know, some way to record it with zoom or Tammy or I mean rev call recorder, or tape a call. We have some way to schedule it with dub Sato or Calendly, or however you schedule your calendar appointments. We make sure we have some research ahead of time. We know about the topic. We make sure we asked very specific questions that are granular. We know how to redirect them. We know how to re-ask questions. Make sure we build up our interviewees, make sure we treat them with respect no matter where they are in the spectrum of jobs.

Make sure you treat them like everybody's the same, treat them like the quality of their stuff is really valuable to you because it is and then make sure Hey, grumpy and then make sure that you know, you tell them if they did a really fantastic job, tell them make sure you ask them if there's anything else they want to add at the end, or if you can follow up and make sure you follow up, like before, at least 48 hours before your deadline. So hope this was helpful. I hope you guys wishing everybody really great interviews and whether that's a case study or a white paper, or you're doing a bunch of reported articles, or you're doing a blog post with a subject matter expert from the company or something like that, it should be good to go out. And last thing, if you have comments about this, like if you want to add like say, Hey, I thought this tip would be really great for adding interviews or you know, I'm interested to hear like, what you think about that. What do you think about doing interviews or asking questions or crafting questions or following up or building up interviewees, like comment below and let me know. I wanna, I want to hear your thoughts, so yeah. All right. Well, good job everybody. I'm glad you were here, Linda. Thank you for showing up and Vicki. Thank you for popping in and I will see you next Friday at noon central time. Bye.

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