When it comes to preparing for my interviews, it all depends on the type of interview. The easiest, and my favorite, is to send an email to my list that says, “Hey, I’m going to interview Ben Settle on copywriting. If you have any questions for Ben, send them over and we’ll cover everything you want to know.” about copywriting”. That’s the easiest.

The way I did this last campaign is the easiest to prepare because your questions are already coming from your students.

Another simple way, a history interview, there is a gentleman named Stan Balut. He was an expert in sales training, and the way we did his interview, I said, “Stan, okay, this is how we’re going to do the interview. You’re going to think about your career and you’re going to present fifteen of your amazing sales stories, and I want you to email them to me.”

So, he emailed me fifteen of all these stories, and then we did the interview, and all I said was, “Okay, Stan, you’ve given me fifteen of your best sales stories. Let’s start with number one.” Just like what I’m doing with you, Ben. You have all the questions, and we’re taking them one at a time, and I would ask the question and he would just tell the story. That’s a very easy interview format.

People love stories. They love to listen to stories. They are very powerful. Case histories, success stories, failure stories, stories sell for sure.

If you’re doing an interview and someone has a book published, you can look at their table of contents, or you can look at the back of their index, and you can pull all your questions from that. They’ve already had an editor lay out the entire format of the book so he can look at that table of contents and organize and create his entire interview that way. You can look at the books of competitors in the same market and see how they did it.

There are simple things to prepare for the interview that have nothing to do with it. In the digital recorder, I make sure we have fresh batteries. I made sure he was on a landline. I make sure there are no interruptions or background noise. I make sure I have some water to drink. These are some things that you can also practice in a small rehearsal the day before.

I figured it all out, and I’m ready. So I’ll be transparent. I have prepared a lot for my interviews or teleseminars. They don’t just improvise. I have in my hand a printout, twenty pages of my questions, and I have bullet points of everything I’m going to say.

That is why I say that if you are interviewed, it is difficult. I have put days of work into this teleseminar. You have a lot of preparation. Then, it is easier to interview the expert. It’s easier to be the guy who asks the questions.

So those are the things I would normally do to prepare for each of my interviews.