Pulling takeaways from multiple interviews together > individual interviews.

I relearned a lesson recently that I thought might be worth sharing:

Interviews can be a valuable way to build your blog audience, but the most popular thing isn't interviews themselves, but the tips you pull from the interviews. People want quickly digestible information–and unless the people you're interviewing are celebrities, odds are people won't want to read their every word. And if you instead do the work and extract the most intersting things from each interview, and pull them all together in one article, then that article will be full of quotable bits, and it'll be more likely to be shared since so many people are mentioned in it.

So the trick to getting the most value out of interviews is to:

• Interview a bunch of people about the same topic, asking them each the same questions
• (optionally) Publish each interview as its own post, Tweet it and tag the interviewee—but don't expect too much from each interview post.
• Curate all of the answers from the interviews, and turn them into an article that shares everyone's best tips and quotes together (and, if you did publish each interview individually, link the quotes to their original source to make this article into a mini-hub).
• Tweet the roundup article, this time tagging everyone who was quoted in that article.

I'd stumbled upon this at Racket, where I'd do audio interviews with people and share the clips on Twitter. Each clip individually would get at best listeners from my audience and the interviewee's followers. But then when I wrote a blog post that shared the best tips from those interview clips, that got shared far more than the individual clips.

Then more recently, I started interviewing people about their proofreading tips for my new startup, Reproof. Again, the individual interviews mostly weren't that popular. But the roundup of everyone's best proofreading tips did well—and I was also able to get a second roundup article from extra tips from the interviews about what writers do with the things they cut.

Anyhow. Interviews work, and are a great way to build out a series on your blog. Just don't worry too much if each individual interview doesn't get much traffic—focus the most on the final roundup, and you'll likely have something of value.