Expert interviews

What an expert interview is

An expert interview is an article built from a recorded conversation with somebody credible who is not you: a supplier's engineer, a specialist inspector, a long-standing customer, an association officer, an academic who studies your trade. You lend their standing to your site, and they get a well-made piece with their name on it.

It is not a transcript. A transcript of an hour of talk is not an article and nobody finishes one. It is not a question-and-answer dump either, which is a transcript with bold text on it. The conversation is raw material. The two pieces of work that make it publishable are the questions asked beforehand and the editing done afterwards, and those are what you are buying.

When you need one

You need one when the credibility you want is not yours to give. If the question your buyers are stuck on is really a question for an engineer, a lawyer, a surveyor or a supplier, an article in which you tell them what that person would say is much weaker than an article in which that person says it.

It also suits a firm that wants the relationship as much as the article. Interviewing somebody properly, sending them a piece they are pleased to put their name on, is one of the more reliable ways to be remembered by a person who sends work to people.

You do not need one if the expertise is already inside your own building. Interviewing your own technical director is a slower, more awkward route to something ghostwriting under their name does better and with fewer approvals. And if you already have a recording that went well, turning that into a piece is rewriting an episode as an article, which is cheaper than starting again.

What I do

• The questions. Ten to fourteen of them, written from what your buyers actually need rather than from what is polite to ask, and ordered so the hardest question arrives once the person is warmed up. Three prepared follow-ups sit under each of the important ones, because the usable answer is almost always the second one.
• The interview. Thirty to forty-five minutes, recorded, run by me so you can sit in and listen rather than trying to host and take notes at once.
• The edit. An hour of speech becomes ten or twelve minutes of reading. Order changed so the best answer is near the top, repetition removed, half-finished sentences finished, and nothing added that the person did not say or agree to.
• The check. Every figure, date, standard and name confirmed before the piece goes anywhere near the interviewee, so their approval pass is about meaning and not about typing errors.

What you get

The article. One thousand to fifteen hundred words in a shared document you own, with a headline, a title and meta description, a short introduction explaining who this person is and why their view counts, and pull quotes marked for use elsewhere.

The recording and an edited transcript. Yours to keep. The transcript is tidied to be readable and can be published alongside the article if you want the full record available; that is the transcript service and it is often worth the small extra.

The approval trail. The permission to record and edit, and the interviewee's written approval of the final piece, kept in one place. If they are ever asked whether they said it, you have the answer.

A worked example

An illustration, not a client. A twelve-person window and door installer in New Brunswick keeps losing quotes to cheaper units and cannot persuade homeowners that the difference matters. The owner has a good relationship with a regional technical representative at one of his manufacturers, a man who has spent twenty years testing installations that failed.

The owner supplies the name and makes the introduction in two lines of email. Twelve questions are drafted and sent to the owner to approve, not to the representative, so the answers are not rehearsed. The interview runs thirty-eight minutes and produces one story worth the whole piece: three failures in the same subdivision traced to the same installation error rather than to the product. The article comes out at 1,300 words under the title of what actually makes a window fail, with the installer's firm named only in the introduction and the closing line. The representative asks for two changes, both about how a competitor's product is described, and approves it. The installer starts sending the link before quotes rather than after them.

How it runs

1. A half-hour call. Which question your buyers are stuck on, and who could answer it with more authority than you can. No charge.
2. A fixed price in writing. One interview or a run of them, with the revision rounds and the transcript option stated.
3. The name and the introduction. This is the part only you can do. I need a person who will say yes to you, a half-hour of their diary, and their written permission to record the conversation and edit it into an article.
4. The questions, approved by you. Drafted within three working days and sent to you, not to them.
5. The interview, booked at their convenience and recorded. You are welcome to listen and stay quiet.
6. The draft, seven working days later. You read it first for anything commercially awkward.
7. The interviewee approves. They can cut, correct or soften anything attributed to them, and the piece does not publish until they have said yes in writing.

That last step is worth stating plainly, because it surprises people. Final approval of an expert interview sits with the expert, not with you. That is the price of borrowing somebody else's standing, and a firm that will not accept it should buy an article in its own voice instead.

What it costs

Expert interviews are quoted as a fixed price after the half-hour call. The price depends on how much preparation the subject needs, whether the interview is one conversation or two, whether a published transcript is included, and whether you want a series with several people on one theme, which is cheaper per piece. Everything is in CAD and agreed in writing before any interview is booked. The pricing page explains how fixed pricing works.

What happens next

Three things usually follow a good interview. The same question set, pointed at your own clients instead, becomes conversations with the people who bought from you, which is the most persuasive material any business owns. The recording is worth cutting into short posts quoting the expert directly. And the person interviewed will often return the favour, which is where placing your articles on their site starts. None of it is assumed. One interview is a complete piece of work and can stand alone.