SEO is partly about getting quality backlinks. I mentioned partly because there’s a lot more to SEO than just backlinks. After all, Google pays attention to over two hundred different signals in how high it should rank a particular website. Backlinks form just one of those signals. Let’s keep this in mind. Let’s keep backlinks and perspective. With that said, one of the most powerful ways you can generate backlinks for your website and boost your website’s overall SEO power is the tried and proven content format of the interview. That’s right. By simply conducting interviews with influential people in your niche, you can gain a tremendous SEO advantage. Let me break this down to you. Keep reading below and you will see why it’s so powerful and what you need to do to conduct an effective interview. The last thing you want to do is to compile and publish interviews in such a way that it doesn’t appeal to your target audience. By appealing to your target audience, you get more traffic from search engines and you build authority in your niche. Just like with anything else in life, there is the right way and the wrong way. It’s too easy to screw up on online interviews. However, if you do them right, you dramatically increase getting a lot more love from Google.

It’s all about ME ME ME – Use this to your advantage.

People are egotistic animals. Seriously, we’re all self-absorbed at some level or other. We like talking about ourselves. We like bragging about our accomplishments. We like pursuing things that benefit us. It’s too easy for human beings to think that the world revolves around them. This explains why there are so many relationships. This explains all sorts of interpersonal conflicts. This explains all sorts of human problems. All across the board, if you really are honest and get down to the basics, a lot of our problems as a species can be reduced to our selfishness. With that said, you can use this to your advantage. You can use this fact to gain serious SEO traction. When you conduct an interview, you are appealing to somebody’s ego. You are giving them an opportunity to talk about themselves. You are giving them an opportunity to talk about their number one favorite subject. You can take advantage of this because influential people tend to have bigger egos. You have to remember, these people built influence because there’s something in it for them. Obviously, ego plays a big role. You can take advantage of this self-seeking and self-absorb behavior and mindset by offering to do an interview of them. Most would have no problem with this. Most people would instantly look at this as yet another golden opportunity to talk about their number one favorite subject – themselves.

Ego Surf Your Niche’s Authority Figures To Get Sweet Backlinks

The reason you are getting backlinks from interviews with authority figures in your niche is simple. These authority figures have a lot of influence. They have a huge following with people that matter in your niche. Their moves online, their latest developments attract a lot of attention. When you interview them, you get on the radar of people who are following these people. The people following these influential people are bloggers, website owners, advertising agency heads, press release people, so on and so forth. When you ego surf your niche’s authority figures by interviewing them, these fans and followers will automatically be drawn to your website. If you do the interview right, they might link to you. This is the holy grill. This is your objective. You don’t really care if the authority figure will turn around and link back to you. That’s a nice bonus. However, if you select your authority figures properly, their followers, fans or even critics will link to your interview. Every single link is valuable, especially if it comes from an authority site. The good news is that the chances of your links coming from high authority sites in your niche is very high. Why? Because you are interviewing an authority figure. Authority figures attract other people who are authorities in your niche. The chances of just random fan who operates a blog that is focused on something completely irrelevant to your niche is quite low. More likely than not, you will attract backlinks from people who are operating blogs or websites that are targeting your niche.

Interviews Build Your Site’s Authority

If you interview the right people and your interviews draw the right fans, chances are good that your interviews will build your site’s authority. Why? Your website becomes a repository of targeted interviews of people in a certain niche. One of the best ways to drive authority is to specialize in a particular category of knowledge. By focusing your interviews only with certain people in a certain niche, you increase your level of authority. Moreover, the information contained in your interviews must be so specific to your niche. That its specialization boosts your level of authority. To recap, you turbocharge your website’s level of authority by focusing on a specific topic and focusing on experts within that specific topic. To take matters to an even higher level, you can tighten the interview questions in such a way that they focus on subtopics within your niche. That’s how authorities can really push your online brand’s authority levels sky high.

Ask Hard Questions That Provoke Controversy

One of the most common ways to screw up the interview is to dish up softball questions. Make no mistake about it, if you’re going to ask the same questions everybody else is asking, there’s really no point for you to post interview blog posts. Why? They probably won’t help your website because they are not distinctive from that stuff that’s been published out there. If Google is looking for authoritative’s content based on interviews, it doesn’t really have much of an incentive to rank you higher when somebody has done those questions before. Understand? Instead, you should focus on asking hard questions that other people don’t really ask. To take matters to a higher level, you should ask questions that provoke controversy. The more controversial your questions, the more fans of these influential people you will pull in. If your questions are very insightful and can generate controversy, people will have a lot more incentive to visit your blog or website that published generic interviews. Focus on controversy. Regardless of how seemingly “boring” your niche is, there will always be a controversial point there. Why? We are all human beings. We have disagreements. We have many different ways of doing things and some of these techniques draw a lot heat, focus on these.

Let Your Personality Drive The Interview

You have to remember that while the interview is all about the ego of the person they were interviewing, your personality must still drive the interview. Why? Your personality is the unifying factor among all the interviews you published on your blog. If your personality can’t be seen or you conduct the interview in a robotic way, you are really not putting a distinctive stamp on all your interviews. In other words, you’re missing an opportunity. You have to turn the interview into a branding vehicle for your blog. The more you brand, the more valuable you become in the eyes of your visitors. Why? They subconsciously associate your personality and your writing style a certain level of quality. If you keep doing this, you build loyalty. If you build loyalty, you build trust. If you build trust, you can basically write your own paychecks. That’s how it works. So make your personality shine through. Their interview shouldn’t be conducted in such a way that almost anybody can conduct them. You have to write them in such a way that it is clear that only one person on this planet can conduct that interview and that is you. Don’t miss a powerful branding opportunity by leaving your personality out of your interviews.

If You Find It Hard To Get Started, Remember, You Only Need To Start With One

It’s very hard to get a hold of truly authoritative figure in any niche. Really good interviews with the right people are actually quite rare. Why? These people are busy. These people are primadonnas. These people are too busy being the center of attention in your niche. Most of the time, if they haven’t heard of you, they are pretty dismissive. Why would they waste their time on you. This is why you need to really put in the effort and the time to chase down these influential people in your niche and get them to interview. The good news is that you only need to interview one. Once you get a renowned name in your niche, you only need to mention and link to your interview with that person when emailing other influential people in your niche. Those people, once they that their competitor or their fellow influencer is featured at your blog, you gain instant credibility. All of a sudden, you are a person that is worth interviewing with. Why? You’ve proven yourself because you interviewed somebody that they consider their equal or their superior. They want to get on the bandwagon. There’s an avalanche affect here. All you need to get is just one solid authority figure and everything else will follow from there.

If you are not using the interview format in your backlink building initiatives, you are missing out. Conducting interviews with authority figures in your niche is one of the easiest and most powerful ways to draw high quality backlinks. Keep the tips above in mind so you can do it the right way.