Best Practices for a Pre-Interview
Confession time. Are you a podcast cowboy who just wings it with every guest? Is every interview you do the podcast equivalent of a blind date. Not cool.
I don’t care if you can pull it off nine times out of ten. By taking that chance you’re potentially wasting your time, your guests time and, most likely not getting the most out of your guest on behalf of you listener. Ahem, remember your audience? You know, the whole reason you do this show?
Every podcaster who has guests on their show, needs to do a pre-interview. If you want to get the most out of them during the recording session, you need to know that 1) they’re a good fit for the show, 2) your listener is going to get huge value out of them and, 3) you are both on the same page in terms of what you’ll cover (and offer to your audience) in the interview.
That’s a lot of stuff to leave to chance!
So, quit being lazy just because you can get by. It’s time to act more like a pro and conduct a pre-interview. It’s your show. It’s your audience. And, it’s your responsibility to get the most out of your guest. Everyone wins.
In this episode, I go over everything that you should be including in your pre-interview. I tell you what to cover, what to listen for, and how to troubleshoot issues. Plus, I’ll tell you what NOT to do in the pre-interview – and this is a mistake a LOT of podcasters make.
I’ll also explain how the pre-interview is a lot like an audition and why you need to be very choosy about who you cast as ‘podcast guest’.
So, pop me in your earholes and give me 5 minutes to help you act more like a pro, get more out of your guest and keep your hard-earned audience loving what you do.
In this episode, I also mention that the pre-interview is different from the warm up. Warming up your guest is also key to getting a great performance out of your guest. And, the warm up is much easier when you’ve done a good pre-interview. I cover The Warm-up in Episode 60 of Just the Tip.
By the way, doing the pre-interview is something you can outsource to a producer but I highly recommend that you don’t. Part of the benefit of the pre-interview is that it establishes a rapport between you and your guest and it may give you new ideas of where to take the interview. It’s much better to make time for the pre-interview by outsourcing back-end tasks like editing. By the way – did you know that I do that? Oh, well, let me just leave this link right here.
