I have had success with both. Well known is great, well known is really good for traffic, for prestige 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. A lot of people know who Obama is, don’t they? Many people want to know more about that well-known person, 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 will be very valuable to you, especially with search engine terms.
Look, the whole purpose of my website is twofold: 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 my team of virtual assistants. It can be expensive at the level I’m doing it.
So you have to sell something to keep it going. A great interview with President Obama, you could put that interview on the website, you could take that interview and put it on YouTube, Michael Senoff interviews President Obama, you could put it on Facebook, you could make the announcement on Twitter, and you could put it as a podcast on iTunes. I guarantee that people are going to want to hear that and it’s going to draw people to the site and if it’s their first time visiting the site they’re going to see a popup asking for a name and email address. So I have them on that list and I get a chance to wow them, I get a chance to drip on them with a series of autoresponders. I have like 87 different autoresponders just in that autoresponder sequence which 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 is not very well known, it could also 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 on desktop publishing. And site visitors can identify with that. They may 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.
He’s full of all kinds of ideas from an unknown guy, but I was able to get all the information out of him by asking him good questions. I just wrote down your story.
But ask yourself; What is the further 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 15 minutes of him is over, but everyone still knows who they are. Right, and they had real marketing value. A lot of people who were on national television, a lot of people know his name, Dave Dutton interviews this very well known TV star, even though they’re not that famous now, that can go a long way in building your credibility. And that could be your strategy. His strategy may be nothing more than getting five or six interviews with important people just to boost his credibility so that he can use that social proof to switch 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.