Inside Small Business | Small Business & Home Business Marketing

How To Get Industry Experts To Contribute To Your Blog

Chris McCombs, KickBackLife.com

One of the best ways to not only get content for your blog, but to also build your Rolodex and get you established as an expert in your niche is to get industry experts and celebrities to contribute to your blog.

Whenever someone starts a new blog, one of the first things I tell them to do is go interview a whole bunch of people and post those interviews on your blog.

It’s actually amazingly easy to get a ton of people who have a lot of authority and are already established experts within your niche or industry to help you out. All you need to do is send them an e-mail that says something like this.

“Hey, I think you’re awesome and I think that your product (or website) is awesome. I have a blog over at www.mysite.com. I would love to interview you on ‘xyz subject’. The interview should get you plenty of exposure in the industry, more traffic to your site and help to get you more customers or clients. I have already interviewed X, X and X. The interview will take less than an hour. It will be quick, painless and fun. Will you do it?”

When I send out e-mails like that to just about anybody who has written a book or has a popular website, or has info products out in my niche, I usually get well over an 80% positive response. Now sometimes the e-mail might not get through to the person. In that case, you can try to call them or get a hold of their assistant or something else. But if you can get that e-mail through, most people who have a product or popular website or book out want to get their name out there more and will happily do an interview. You do want to let them know though to please not make this a pitch… but they can plug their product and/or services. You just don’t want them to do any heavy pitches for it.

This process will help establish you as an equal authority in the eyes of your audience, because hey, there you are talking to this person, interviewing them, so you must be on the same level with them. But what it will also do is build your Rolodex and create great relationships that you can use in the future. This process will also help you come up with a lot of contacts.

On top of publishing the audio to your blog, you can also have it transcribed and make pieces of it into individual posts. For example, if you cover five topics, you could take the transcriptions and break that down into five individual posts. Just make sure you always give the person giving the interview credit and a link back to their site.

I followed this process before one of my product launches, and in just a few months, I became one of the biggest experts in my industry and got tons of traffic and built tons of great relationships with well respected people in my industry. Many of them ended up promoting my product based on the relationship that all started with an interview for my blog.

Interview industry experts, celebrity and some out-of-the-box experts who might not be an expert in your industry, but who might know something applicable to your industry. Like, I am in the health fitness marketing industry, but I go out of my way to find other marketers and possible bloggers and things like that who have nothing to do with the health and fitness industry that can offer a fresh, out-of-the-box perspective for my readers.

Just make sure that when you contact the person you want to interview that you show them what is in it for them. Don’t try to convince them about how amazing your own website is going to be and that is why they should get on board. Convince them based on the facts of what it is going to do for them and how it can help them. And always throw in a few compliments because we all love to hear compliments. It is really pretty easy to get these people on board.

If you do one of these interviews a week, that will be 52 of them in a year. You will have expanded your Rolodex with 52 new possible future partners and people to promote your products or services and other experts who will possibly link back to you and interview you for their blogs, etc. And you will be getting an extra blog post a week just from the audio for the interviews. Not to mention if you chunk down the transcriptions and use them to make multiple posts.

Posted on Tuesday, December 9th, 2008 at 5:26 pm and is filed under Business, Computers, Marketing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.