Meryl's Notes Blog

The E-View discusses how to conduct a good interview by e-mail, something I rely on most of the time. The article also shows a Q&A sample interview. The article focuses on the entire process from finding experts to contacting them.

I explained my point of view on why I conduct e-mail interviews. When I write e-mail interview questions, I keep the following things in mind:

• Ask no more than five questions. Too many and you’ll overwhelm the interviewee. Of course, there are exceptions. For instance, I used to have an interview column with AbsoluteWrite and Digital Web. In these cases, I asked more than 10 questions and the interviewee knew this ahead of time.

• Ask open-ended questions. A yes/no or limited response question like “What’s your favorite color?” won’t elicit much of an answer.

• Ask if you can do follow up questions when you send the questions. Sometimes the interviewee will make an interesting point that you’d like to see expanded.

• Let interviewees know what’s in it for them. This improves your chances of getting a response, quicker and thorough. For example, I told the editors I interviewed that it will help them receive better queries since the writers would know exactly what they like and don’t like. Others, I let them know I’ll include a bio with links to their sites, which helps promote their business and improve their site’s findability with search engines.

In the seven or so years of writing and interviewing, I can only recall two interviews where the interviewee provide terse and useless responses that we didn’t run the interview.