I have had success with both. Well known is great, well known is really good for traffic, for prestige that you were able to interview this guy.
I mean imagine if I can get an interview with President Obama? Wow, wouldn’t that be amazing? I interviewed Obama. Lots of people know who Obama is, don’t they? Many people want to know more about that person they know, especially in a good interview. So if you have a well-known interview that you’ve gotten and you want to promote other things on your website, that’s going to be very valuable to you, especially with search engine terms.
Look, the whole goal of my website is two-fold: It’s to provide incredible value that no one else provides, but I’m also there to sell products. It’s a business and I have a lot of expenses that I pay to keep this going, from transcriptions to editing for my team of virtual assistants. It can be expensive at the level I’m doing.
So you have to sell something to keep it going. A great interview with President Obama, I could put that interview on the website, I could take that interview and put it on YouTube, Michael Senoff interviews President Obama, I could put it on Facebook, I could make the announcement on Twitter, and I could put it as a podcasts on iTunes. I guarantee people are going to want to hear that and it will bring people to the site and if this is your first time visiting the site you will see a pop up asking for a name and email address. So I have them on that list and I have the opportunity to wow them, I have the opportunity to drip on them with a series of automatic responses. I have like 87 different autoresponders just in that one autoresponder sequence that does nothing but give valuable information for new interviews.
Here are some of the methods I would use and have had success with.
If it’s not well known, it might as well be good. Mike Semonic, the guy who published the special effects cookbook, wasn’t very well known at all, but it’s been a really successful interview because he’s like a nobody who made a million dollars self-publishing. And site visitors can relate to that. They can see themselves as a nobody and say, “Well, if this nobody can do it, maybe I can do it too.” So people like to hear that and if you do a good job as an interviewer, you’ll have a lot of play and you’ll get people to hear that and they’ll remember that interview.
It’s full of all kinds of ideas of an unknown kind, but I was able to get all the information out of it by asking good questions. I just jotted down your story.
But ask yourself; What is the subsequent motive, what is the purpose of the interview? Is it to get traffic to your site? And that is very, very important. Is it to provide great content? That’s very important, too. Is it to create additional content for existing products so you can increase the value and sell them for more money? That is also important. You have to ask yourself; What is my purpose and what am I trying to do with all this?
Another option is to meet David Dutton; he has a nice little system for doing this. He goes after people who were once celebrities and his 15 minutes are up, but everyone still knows who they are. Right and they had real marketing value. A lot of people who were on national TV, a lot of people know his name, Dave Dutton interviews this very well known TV star, even though they’re not as famous now, that can go a long way in building their credibility. And that could be your strategy. His strategy may be nothing more than getting five or six interviews with important people just to increase his credibility so that he can use that social proof to move on to higher level interviews.
But the biggest names can be really valuable for social proof and driving traffic to your site, a very important strategy if you’re selling products and services.
