Interview marketing is more than a self-branding tool used by the likes of Barbara Walters. It is a powerful strategy that gives you free quality content and free quality links. If done right it, might place your site into top rankings without much effort. Interview marketing is clear-cut: You interview people, place these interviews on your site, and get link-backs from the interviewed individuals’ sites.

However, this strategy isn’t for everyone. It is only possible if interviews would be natural for your type of site—one good idea is to have some sort of  “resource” feature there. Interviews can be organically placed on blogs, article sites, reference lists, informational portals, etc. If your site is corporate or strictly commercial selling your services or products, this probably wouldn’t work for you. Still, almost all commercial sites have blogs or resourceful pages (best practices, white papers, etc.) where you can put the interview.

The interview marketing process is as follows:

- Decide who to interview. Search the Web for individuals with accomplishments in your field or related fields and study their personal and professional information.
- Send an email introducing yourself, your resource feature (mention all the best things about it), and ask to conduct the interview with this person. Explain the benefits they’ll get from the exposure, and add a “call-to-action” at the end of your letter;
- If the person agrees, prepare unique interview questions for him or for her. It is also a good idea to ask for a photo of the person to run with the written interview.
- When publishing the interview, don’t hesitate to include links to their sites if they ask.
- Let the person know when the interview is live, and give her/him a direct URL if he/she wants to let the world know.
- The linkback is not always guaranteed, so don’t push it. In most cases people would love to link to a page that is totally devoted to them.
- Thank them for the interview, and establish a connection through a social network like LinkedIn or Facebook.

Now, what have you got? (more…)