This will be Blogosis’ first short series of posts I will be doing. I’m doing this, because it is easy on my super busy schedule. I’ve got to make $500 dollars in the next 12 days so I can give out over $100 dollars in the Monthly Blogosis Contest. Hehe. Anyways, this series is about giving and receiving interviews, and is relevant as at the end of the series, I will post interviews I received from other bloggers experimenting with ‘the process of an interview.’
Making that initial contact with an interviewee is the most critical part of whether or not you will be successful in obtaining a proper interview with the blogger of your choice. Following in this series are some steps I have implemented to get more answers from bigger bloggers when attempting to get answers for my questions.
Get Personal
Whether or not you are interviewing 1 or 100 bloggers, you will want to be as personable as possible. This means no massive emailing plans with your interview questions. Don’t send out 100 emails with the others emails hidden in the CC address. None of that “Hello, and To Whom It May Concern” crap. This immediately lets your “interviewee” know that you know absolutely nothing about him/her, or that you weren’t interested enough in them to care to send an individual email.
Instead, send those emails out 1 by 1. Know the blogger you are sending questions to, their background, their age, their recent posts, and other miscellaneous facts. This will help you tune your question to the person you would like to interview. If you are writing to 13 year old Carl Ocab, you obviously wouldn’t write with the same verbatim as you would with some 60+ year old blogger that studies linguistics. Are you writing for a friend, or a very big and busy money blog? Changing your attitude towards different personalities is essential to get a good response.
The more effort you put into getting personal with them, the more likely they are to give you a response. You are generally looking for any kind of response, otherwise you know you are doing something wrong. Even a definite “NO! I will not answer this question,” is better than a “…”, although I think that means you may need a new question. Think of it like this. You see that hot girl/guy across the club floor. You can show interest, but until you get up in their face, you won’t get any answers (I know well how this feels. Haha).
If anyone wants to be a part of my interview, just make sure you have a blog (which you really should if you are here), and post a comment here. I’m sorry if I didn’t send it to you on my own already. I don’t read that many blogs anymore.
