Tips and Tricks for Making Money with Interviews

You’ll find Part 2 here. Andrew Warner is a guy I learn from every day. He is building an enormous archive of interviews that he monetizes with both memberships and sponsorships.

In this four-part interview, I talk with Andrew about how he uses interviews to get traffic to his site and how he gets interviewees to answer questions fully and without the typical public relations gloss-over.

4 ways to watch/listen/read:

1) Listen to the audio here (click on the triangle play button):

2) Download the mp3 file here
3) Read the transcript (below the video)
4) Watch the video:

Related Links:

- Mixergy.com

Transcript:

Tim Bourquin: Hello, everybody and welcome back to a MemberCon interview. I have a very special guest today, Andrew Warner. I’ve talked about him a few times on my blog already. His site is Mixergy.com. He’s one of the only other guys I know out there who is building an entire site, an entire content-based and archived-based on interviews. He’s got great ones. He interviews a ton of people, puts up a ton of content every day.

So I’m going to ask Andrew about how he gets these interviews, how he builds his audience with the interviews, how he gets the people to talk and dish the good stuff in those interviews, and why he decided to build that whole site based on that type of content? Because as you know, I’m a huge proponent of interviews. We talk about it here all the time and we have sites that we make the majority of our revenue on as paid content sites with interviews. So Andrew is an expert in that area after doing this for so long.

So Andrew, thank you very much for joining me on the phone today.

Andrew Warner: Thanks for having me on. And the other thing I want to make sure to tell people is how to use interviews to get traffic because you know what? There’s nothing worse than putting your heart and soul and hours of agony staring at that computer screen writing the perfect blog post and then nobody comes or maybe your mother or a friend of yours come, and then that’s even worse because then you feel bad that your friend is now doing you this favor and looking at this blog post that now you feel stinks. There’s nothing worse than doing all that work and not having anyone come. I’m going to tell people how they can use interviews to get traffic to get people over to their websites.

Tim Bourquin: Perfect. Well, let’s kind of start with that because I know that I’ve been tempted in the past to interview somebody who maybe isn’t the best person for it, but I know that they’re going to push it out to a ton of people and their audience. Typically, that’s not the case. If they have a big audience and they’re going to push it out there right for you. But have you ever been tempted to interview somebody just because you thought that they may not be a great interview, but you knew they’d bring people to your site?

Andrew Warner: There are enough people who would be great interviews and also would bring over traffic that I don’t worry too much about that. The other thing is I have a different philosophy from you. I believe that I can’t tell who’s going to be that great interview guest. I’ve had people on who I — just before the interview I said, “I don’t want to interview them.” I remember saying to my wife, “I got to stay and have a conversation with this idiot for an hour, and this guy hasn’t done anything, and he’s not going to be interesting.” And then in the interview, maybe five minutes in, the guy wins me over, and I have one of the best interviews ever, and people a year later will e-mail me to say that that person changed their lives. And mine too because the person who I though wouldn’t be helpful at all and wouldn’t be a good interview, ended up being not only a great interview but a personal friend and supporter. So I do as many interviews as I can, and then I kind of let the audience and the experience figure out who’s going to be the best guest.

Tim Bourquin: I like that strategy, except that you’re live. It’s almost like it has to be good for those people that are on live. For me if I record it and I don’t use it, that’s just my time. No big deal. But you’re live with an audience as you interview.

Andrew Warner: It’s true, and the audience will help me make it a little bit better, but it doesn’t really matter ultimately. The idea is just put it all out there, and the audience will find you. If there are some interviews that you’re especially proud of, I know there are some that I’m especially proud of, I signal to the audience that these are going to be the really good ones. And I do that by highlighting them on website, by putting their image up at the top so that they’re on every single page. I do that by giving it a really good title. I do that by e-mailing my audience and saying, “Hey, I just did an especially good interview. I know that you don’t have time to listen to the hours and hours and hours of interview. You may not have time for it. But if you don’t and you only have one hour this month, this is the one interview you should be listening to.” And that’s how I signal what’s really good.

But you know what? Sometimes the audience will surprise me. They’ll say, “You weren’t interested in how to raise money because you’re not looking to raise money, but we are. And that guy over there who you interviewed last week, who you didn’t give a good headline to, who you didn’t do anything to attract us over to that interview, we still discovered that interview. And you know what? That interview was important to us.” So I go back to the e-mail list and I say, “Hey, I didn’t even realize this was important. I think you should check it out because apparently it’s very useful.” So that’s the way that I — I don’t stress too much who’s going to be a great guest. I don’t stress too much about whether they’ll have anything interesting to say. I worry about it. I spend time making sure that the interview will be good, but I can’t overstress about it.

Tim Bourquin: Are most of your interviews coming to you today and —

Andrew Warner: Yeah.

Tim Bourquin: – in the beginning, how did you decide who you were going to reach out to, to get an interview with?

Andrew Warner: In the beginning, what I did was I interviewed the people who I was really curious about who happen to be in my life who are supportive of me. So there’s a woman who once made me an offer of like $75 million for an internet company that I started years ago. We did a lot of business together. She ended up buying a big chunk of my company. And I knew her, and I knew her company, and I knew her experience, and I knew it was inspiring, but it’s kind of odd to sit down at coffee with a friend and say, “Hey, tell me how you got here.” But when I did my interviews I said, “Now I’ve got the excuse. Now I can go back to this woman, Rosalind Resnick, and say, ‘Rosalind, how did you get here? Let’s go back to the beginning. What was your first idea? All right. And how did that work out?’” “Well, it failed.” “Okay. What was your second idea?” “That failed too.”

Then you go through her story, and you find out how she ended up a company from her kitchen table to the public markets to Nasdaq, and it becomes an inspiring story for me even though I kind of lived through part of that story as a friend of hers. I remember seeing the investment bankers at her office crunching the numbers and getting her ready to go public. I still learned so much more and I still got more inspired by digging into her stories. So that’s how I got her as an interview and that’s how I started out. The other thing that I did and if people go back and listen to my old interviews, they’ll hear it, is I did what salespeople do. I always ask for referrals.

So you’ll hear in the interview I’ll say, “Hey, this was a great interview. My mission here is to interview other successful entrepreneurs. Who do you think I should interview?” And when I did it that way, I made a mistake so then I had to add one little thing. The mistake that I made, some people pick up on it others won’t, is by just saying, “Who do you think is a great entrepreneur who I should interview?” People started giving me names like, “You should go talk to Donald Trump” or “You should go talk to Richard Branson.” People who they admired but had no connection to. I had to add one other thing to that. I had to say, “Who do you know who’s a great entrepreneur who I should interview and you could introduce me to?” By just adding that, I tapped into their Rolodex, into their databases, into the people in their lives who are like Rosalind Resnick is to me. People who they admired, wanted to find out more about, and were willing to make the introductions. Then I said, “Will you make the introduction after this interview?” And sure enough they would and that’s what helped me grow my interviewees.

Tim Bourquin: That is a great tip, Andrew. To act like a salesperson, I love that analogy that you cannot get off the phone without asking for referrals. Every salesperson does it and you should too. And I like the fact that you commit them to making that introduction right then, because I guess if you just say, “Can you introduce me to people?” “Sure. I’ll think about it and get back to you.” Of course, they never do, right?

Andrew Warner: Yeah.

Tim Bourquin: So that’s a great idea. All right. Now that you have people coming to you — first of all, for how many interviews have you done, do you think, so far?

Andrew Warner: I haven’t counted them but I think it’s over 300 easily, and that’s in the last — over the last year I did an interview every single weekday, and that’s what helped get my numbers up, but I think I might have started maybe two years ago or two and a half years ago. And back then I did maybe a couple of interviews a month.

Tim Bourquin: So this was a question that we talked about on my blog too is that because you do something every day, that’s a lot of work, it’s a lot of scheduling, it’s a lot of — making sure you can connect to these people and do the interview and do the editing and get it up there. I initially said something about the fact that you don’t have to do something every day and you said, “Look, Tim, all I can tell you is that I get a ton more traffic when I do more.” So is that really the secret? Is it to do something every single day?

Andrew Warner: I interviewed the founder of I Can Has Cheezburger? This guy has a network of blogs of funny pictures, cat funny pictures. He owns FAILBlog.org and so on. I asked him, “When you bought it, what’s one of the first changes that you made?” He said, “Well, I didn’t want to adjust anything once I bought the company because I didn’t want to disrupt it.” But the one big change that he said he made was he published more consistently. I said, “Why does that matter?” He said, “Well, when people know that every time they come in for lunch and look at ICanHasCheezburger.com there’ll be a new funny cat video, they’re much more likely to come back and keep coming back. That’s one reason why I think it makes sense to do it every day.

The other reason is I stunk as an interviewer, and I wanted more experience. I realized that when I do something every single day, I’ll get better at it. It’s not that if I did it once a week I would think, “Ah, I should have asked that other question” or “I should have been a little bit more forceful here” or “I should have just adjusted the mike a little bit over there.” I can act on that tomorrow. If I did an interview a week, I might forget what was so painfully bad about that previous interview that I had to fix it. I’d forget that maybe I should have just relaxed and accepted that my first two questions stunk, but my third one was going to be good. So it helped me get better and better and better, and that’s one of the reasons why I do it.

Then also the system starts to have a momentum of its own. It takes less and less work now to do an interview. In fact, I now have somebody who edits the interviews for me. I can edit the interviews myself and post them all within a half hour. It doesn’t take me nearly as long to do that work as I think it would take me if I were to write a new blog post on my own. So that’s why I believe in going daily. Now, at some point in the future I might say, “Let’s go once a week.” Maybe I should do one interview a week and then break it up into five pieces. I don’t know. But I’m saying that I now feel comfortable talking to you on mike and I’m not sweating the way that I did when I started and I’m not sitting here saying, “Well, why did you interrupt Tim in the beginning of the interview and say that you also want to talk about traffic?” I’m not saying to myself, “Are you saying I’m too much?” I’m not questioning myself. I’m feeling comfortable expressing myself because I do this now, and I do this every day.

Speaking of traffic, let me just say this about how to get traffic. You write a blog post, nobody comes, you have to hustle like crazy to get people to come over to your site. When you do an interview, your guests do a lot of the heavy lifting. By that I mean, they come up with a great content, and we’ll talk about that, but they also can help you get traffic to it, to the interview. I did an interview with a marketer once and I asked him afterwards, I said, “Look, can you please tell me what I can do to market myself?” And he gave me a list of suggestions, and the one big suggestion that worked easily and gave me the most impact was this, he said, “After an interview is done, e-mail the guest and ask the guest to promote the interview. People have Twitter accounts. They have Facebook accounts. They have e-mail accounts. They have press pages on their websites. They don’t remember to promote your interview, but they have the ability to. They might be nervous about promoting the interview because they’re worried about how they came across, but if you ask, they’re much more likely to.”

So now what I do is after — not every interview, but after most interviews, I just send an e-mail afterwards saying, “If there are any mistakes with the interview, if I put the wrong picture, or if I had the text wrong, let me know. By the way, I’m going to be promoting this interview. Would you mind promoting it to your followers too?” And that helped me get a lot of traffic to the site because every guest now becomes a cheerleader for my site and when — who was it? Gary — lots of people but I’ll pick Gary Vaynerchuk. When Gary Vaynerchuk came to do an interview on my site, I got thousands of people who were his fans, who were passionate about what Gary is doing to come in and watch his interview. Many of them stuck around and started becoming fans of my other interviews and of my work in general, and then they helped bring their friends over. So the person who you’re interviewing is going to bring over the right target audience for your future interviews too, and that helps a lot.

Finally, actually there are lots of different ways to use interviews to get guests. Let me come up with one last one. One last one is there are certain people today who have followers, who have fans. It used to be that only musicians, only actors would have fans. Today, businesses have fans, and that’s kind of in that jokey Facebookey way but also in a very real way. Certain businesses have fans, and if you interview people who have fans, you’re going to be able to bring their fan base over to your site. Gary Vaynerchuk is a great example but so is Jason Fried, the founder of 37Signals. In our world, the internet entrepreneur world, Jason Fried has got a lot of fans and he’s a celebrity and those fans come over to my site and become active on my site.

So that’s just a couple of ways to use interviews to bring traffic and to bring people over to your site. There are lots of different ways, and it’s way easier than if you would just sit there with a blank screen and try to type out your ultimate wisdom and then go out and try to promote your site all on your own.

Tim Bourquin: Yeah, definitely one of the beauties of interviews is instantly having somebody else with an audience to promote to. That’s one of the other reasons why I love interviews as content so much.

You’ll find Part 2 here.

creating content, online entrepreneurs Andrew Warner, creating content for sale, Mixergy