Rosalind Gardner Tells All about How To Get An Interview–With Her!
Rosalind Gardner is an esteemed affiliate marketer and she’s always giving great tips in her blog NetProfitsToday.com. Her post about “How To Get Expert Content for Free” is a wonderful how-to about scoring an interview with an “Expert”.
Rosalind has many great tips, but one I would like to stress is how human even an “Expert” is. Rosalind has been in this business from the early days and her success is well known. Still, she expresses pleasure at being asked to be interviewed. She is helpful for the newbie interviewer. And she reveals her own worries about not giving good interviews.
So the lesson for anyone looking for an interview is to not assume that someone is unapproachable.
I understand the intimidation. Frankly I would never have had the guts to ask Rosalind for an interview. But as I read this I asked myself “why not?”
If going to an Expert is just too intimidating, then I suggest starting with your peers. Interview each other. Find a friend who is also starting out and create content with each other.
An Easy First Interview Tip: Use a Script
I recommend writing a script which covers all the points you would like to make for your content. The interviewer will introduce the “expert” as if starting a newscast. She will give an outline of some of the expert’s achievements and how the expert could help the viewer.
The questions and answers should be planned ahead of time. You should do dress rehearsals for practice. When you do the interview, you should know what you want to cover, but it should remain a real interview–in other words, it must still be spontaneous and interesting.
Once you get a few interviews under your belt this way, you can begin to be a little more unplanned. Practice interviewing a friend when you don’t have a pre-planned script. Gradually you will feel accomplished enough to take on a real “expert”.
Tips for Unscripted Interviews
In the interviews I have done, there are a couple of key points to make it flow:
- You must listen but also guide the conversation. It takes a knack to learn how to allow the expert to answer in their own words, but also keep the pace and flow of the interview going.
- You must add your own comments but not take over. It is nice to hear the personality of the interviewer. Oprah is a master at this. But too much and it’s all about the interviewer and not about the expert.
- You must learn to ask questions which lead to interesting answers. Limit the yes or no questions. And practice questions which will gently guide to an answer that flows with the rest of the interview.
- Be ready to be off the cuff. In an interview, you never know where the answers will take you. Be ready to improvise when your expert reveals an interesting tidbit. Follow up on it and you may get an unexpected surprise.
- Learn how to use audio or video editing software so if things go really awry, you can edit the video and it will look great. Sneeze in the middle of a question? Restate the question and later you can take the sneeze out.
Rosalind Gardner gives great tips on getting an interview with an expert. With her advice, you don’t need to feel intimidated asking for an interview.
Study Rosalind’s Affiliate Writing Style
There is one final thing you can learn from Rosalind Gardner’s excellent post.
If you want to do affiliate marketing, then observe the beautiful skill Rosalind used to write this article. She gives great advice; she tells a personal story; she builds trust in what she has to say and then at the end–she gracefully ties it to a product which may help you if you would like to do interviews.
Her writing style is honest, clear and elegant.
The flow of the article is superb.
If you want to recommend affiliate products in your blog, study this post. In fact, you should hand write it. By hand writing exactly what Rosalind wrote, you will learn the structure and see how she sells. Rosalind is an expert affiliate marketer and you can’t learn from anyone better than her.
