Better Blogging, Part 6: Other types

Because social media is such a cultural centerpiece, social media content is critical to how a business fares. Blogging is a major piece of the social media content pie, and so, in improving business blog content, businesses improve business. Business bloggers knows the interview is an integral part of improving their content. Good bloggers will understand the different types of interviews and utilize them effectively. After mastering the basics (like all good writers must do as a prerequisite), bloggers will incorporate resource and personal types of interviews in creating their content.

There are yet more ways to conduct interviews and format information from them for compelling content. In addition to asking your interviewee for her or his personal list of resources they have gathered over the years concerning the topic at hand, an interesting angle would be to ask about a particular piece of material. It could be an official resource such as a published book or endorsed article. What might be more relevant - and thus, catchy - in this culture, though, might be a blog article or other piece of social media reading. The chances that your readers will have read it are higher if "it" can be found online somewhere, especially if it is in any way linked to the major social media sites. Ask your interviewee his instinctive reactions to this article, provided that they have read it (or include its reading in your interview) and use their reflections as fodder for a blog post.

Another way to capture readers, is through the discussion of potential failure. Perhaps it is "in the air" to be afraid to fail, or perhaps we genuinely do want to excel at everything we put our hands to, but there is no better way to find common pitfalls of a particular industry or area of business than to ask a person who has been involved long enough to have made mistakes personally. To probe their experiential knowledge and gain your own "takeaways" that you can then report to your readers who are no doubt wondering how to avoid as many mistakes as possible, ask a long-timer in a relevant field about his own personal mistakes. Another way to go about gathering lessons so that people don't make the same mistakes is to ask your interviewee what they might think common mistakes are in the field, even if they haven't made them personally.

Speaking of expert, you could formulate the interview questions and then a blog post as a sort of "guide" or "how-to" in your field. Instead of asking the generic "what tips do you have" questions, ask if they have any tips they'd only tell a close friend. Of course, they may not tell you since you're not a close friend, but it can't hurt to ask. The better business blog content you could get out of it is worth it!

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