Here’s a truth; I wanted to be famous. I wanted to be well known. And I want to make money from it. I don’t want to be infamous; I don’t want to have to do something illegal or be outed for something bad to get that fame; I’d like to think my integrity is higher than that. 😀

Yeah, I was a wedding singer!

Mu business life has changed a lot over the last 4 or 5 years. I had to take care of my mother, who had dementia. I had to deal with her passing away, leaving me by myself. I started working on a project that I thought was going to make me enough money to survive nicely for at least 5 or 6 years, and then one day it crashed; no idea how that happened, but everything was gone. I applied for lots of jobs over 2 years and only had 3 interviews; ageism is a horrible thing to try to overcome.

What I forgot was my own business as an independent consultant and professional speaker. I also forgot that I’d not only done a lot of interviews of others, but I’ve been interviewed a lot over the years. The last interview I gave was early in 2024; I enjoyed that, but I didn’t follow through on trying to find others to interview me.

But… I’ve given this a lot of thought and come to this conclusion. The best way to get positive publicity, whether you want to increase your business presence, your blogs, or anything else you might think about doing now or forver is through doing interviews. This, of course, presupposes that you’ve done something that’s worth getting interviewed about. However, if you have this part covered, it’s the best way to go.

To get interviewed, you just might have to contact someone and make a pitch about why you would make a good candidate. If you’re lucky to have done something already, someone else might ask you for an interview. When this happens, you at least know that someone knows about you, which helps make things go easier later on.

Being interviewed is also a big part of marketing. It’s the reason movie stars go on talk shows when they have a new film coming out. It’s the reason musicians show up in places they wouldn’t want anyone to ever see them, because they want to promote their new album (heck, do people still call it that?). I’ve talked about marketing often on this blog; this is one of those most positive things anyone can have the privilege of doing to help promote themselves.

Basically, there are three different types of interviews, and they help you, or hurt you, in different ways. Let’s look at these three below; there’s plenty more. 🙂

The first type of interview is as a part of a written piece that will have other people’s opinions at the same time. The best part about an interview like this is that you have the chance to not only focus your message in a short period of time, but if the interview goes well you might also get your business name mentioned. The bad thing about an interview like this is that you never know which line the interviewer will use of yours, so it’s possible that they’ll use your line to highlight something negative. An example of this type of this interview I was a part of, which I found while writing my article on searching for your own name on search engines.

The second type of interview is a written interview only about you. This can be in a magazine, blog, or newspaper article. With most of these, you may have the same problem as with the first type of interview, that being that you could say a lot of things that you felt makes you look good, only to find that the interviewer decided against using most of it.

The best part, of course, is that it’s all about you, and if the interview is positive, you look good and, hopefully, your business and reputation gets a nice boost. An interview that could help highlight this is doing an interview on another person’s blog. The last interview I did was with and about Lisa Sicard in 2019, on this blog; look how many people responded to it.

The third type of interview is the best, that being a live interview. This can either be on live radio, television, YouTube, Zoom… take your pick. If you’re confident enough to be in front of a live audience, you can be an instant hit if you come across well, and your message will be unfiltered. The downside, of course, is if you’re uncomfortable, or look uncomfortable, and give one or two word responses instead of coming across as easy going and someone people might like to work or talk with. This type of interview can make or break your career.

Best of all, you can always download these files, leaving them in video form if you want to go that route, or convert them all to MP3 files so you can listen to them whenever you’re in the mood. I’ve downloaded almost all of the interviews I did with others, converted them to audio files, and at least twice a year I go back and listen to them, whether I was the interviewer or interviewee… even though I’ve moved to a different direction, I still listen to those interviews, just in case… 🙂

An example of that is an interview I did with Beverly Mahone, who’s become famous as Auntie Bev on TikTok and Instagram (she’s also on Facebook; y’all can find her there, where back in 2009 we did a live audio interview of me on one of those online sites (I don’t remember the name). If you’re interested, it’s still online on my business site, and you can listen to it as I talked about the concept of reinventing oneself; this is an MP3 file.

Sometimes the person doing the live interview isn’t all that good, so you take risks with your reputation in those instances; that’s happened a couple of times to me when doing a live interview in front of an audience, and the interviewer gets nervous. Still, most of the time people will understand if you were good and the other person wasn’t up to snuff. If you handled it all well, your message will still come across properly and you’ll be better off in the end.

Getting interviewed means you’ve at least made some kind of dent into the consciousness of another person. If you handle it properly, you could be on your way to great things happening in your life and career. I love being interviewed, just as I like getting other people to allow me to post interviews with them here. I think everyone can learn something from an interview, and some of us can gain something from being interviewed as well.

And yes, I’m still doing interviews from time to time. One of my latest videos was health care related, where I was interviewed by Rackelle Alston of AdvancedNursing, and trust me when I say that anyone can listen to it (it’s a live interview but the image was frozen via Zoom) here. After all, I’m not close to famous anymore, but I was close, and if I’m asked I’ll keep doing and giving interviews until it happens.

So… does anyone wants to interview me? Are you ready to be interviewed by someone else? Think about it; what do you have to lose? 😉
 

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