How to Conduct an Audio Interview

This is simple enough to do. I’ll detail the steps here:

1. Pick a topic and an expert.

2. If possible, survey people about the topic area. If you don’t have any friends and family at all (unlikely), (a) go to Google, place an ad and solicit information from there, (b) go to any open forum and get questions from there (you can obviously visit the IMS.com forum), (c) hire freelancers to answer survey questions at www.elance.com or someplace like that.

3. List all the questions you have, and present it to your expert. If there is any cleaning up to do, it should be done WAY before the questions are answered.

4. Be prepared to do the interview once, but spend about 30 minutes ahead of time making the interviewee (and yourself) comfortable. Banter and humor are preferred on audio interviews. Make sure you set up your equipment properly. Usually this is two microphones to a dual-input jack on your computer, or if you want a higher end product, you can get two condenser mics (I use Rhodes NT-1 and Shure) hooked up to a mixer which is then hooked to your laptop. You will probably need an audio recording software but if you have a small budget, go to audacity.sourceforge.net to get a free audio recording software.

5. Ensure that there is energy in your conversation.

6. Send the recording for transcription or transcribe it yourself.

7. Give your interviewee a copy, and ensure you have agreed on whatever terms there are for usage. Generally, the interviewee will not mind you using this. If it is a money-making venture, a joint venture proposal will be useful. However, most internet experts do not mind being interviewed to allow you to make money. It simply increases their profile.

Once you’re done with this, you should go to the next stage of buliding a sales site to push your products! That’s it!