Free KaChing: How to Run an Online Business that Pays and Pays by Mark Victor Hansen, Joel Comm Page B

chance that you’ll get an agreement.
     
    At that point, you can usually conduct the interview in one of two ways. The first is to set up a time to call. The advantage is that you’re in control of the timing. As soon as the interview ends, you have the material you need, and it’s just a matter of putting it together and publishing it. The interview will also be flexible. While you’ll want to prepare a dozen or so questions in advance, in a telephone interview you can let the conversation wander. That can turn up all sorts of interesting things. Writers often find that they go into a phone interview with one idea for a story they want to write and come out with something completely different—and much better. You’ll be able to ask follow-up questions and really dig around.
     
    The downside to a telephone interview is the extra effort. If the person you’re calling is in a different time zone, you can find yourself working in the middle of the night. You’ll also have to take notes while you’re talking, type up a recorded transcript of the conversation (there are tools available that automatically record Skype calls), or possibly both. On the other hand, you’ll have built a much closer connection with someone who could prove to be a valuable contact in the future.
     
    The alternative is to do an e-mail interview. That can sound a bit like cheating, especially to journalists used to picking up the phone whenever they need a quote. But when you’re building a web site, e-mail interviews can make your life very, very easy. When you prepare for an interview, you’re going to be making a list of 10 to 12 questions anyway (more than that and you’ll receive short answers in an e-mail), so the work will already be done. People you’re interviewing will be able to research their answers and frame them in a way that they believe will make them look good, and they’ll be able to do it all in a time frame that suits them. Many of the people you contact will specifically ask for an e-mail interview. Best of all, the interview will be already typed up and almost ready to publish. If you want to run the article in a question-and-answer format, you won’t have to do more than a little light editing and ask the subject of the interview for a picture.
     
    The preceding tips apply if you’re interviewing someone you don’t know. But there’s no reason you can’t interview someone you do know. An interview with a colleague, a friend, a supplier, or a partner can all provide useful, exclusive content, and it’s the kind of fun that will make you feel as though you’re not working at all.
     
    Interview posts do take a little time to organize, but they really do add a lot of weight to a blog.
     

It’s Not Just What You Say, It’s How You Say It
     
    So you can put information on your site in lots of different ways. That information will always be the most important aspect of your site, the reason that it will bring in users and succeed—or be ignored and fail. But style plays a role, too.
     
    I’m not going to make too big a thing about this, because the easiest way to destroy any business is to be someone you’re not. Whether someone sees me on stage at a conference, tweets me on Twitter, reads my blog, or meets me face-to-face, they’re getting me. This is the way I am. Not everyone likes it. Some people think I’m too forthright in my views. That’s their opinion. I have mine, and I’m not going to try to be something I’m not just to please everyone. That’s the surest way to please no one.
     
    When you’re creating content for your web site, give it your voice. Don’t try to write as though you’re creating an article for Fox News or hoping to sell it to Cosmopolitan. Picture your best friend in the room with you, and write as though you’re explaining what you want to say to him or her. Informality might look strange in the New York Times , but it works great on the Web.
     
    That doesn’t