Transcripts
1. Class Introduction: Hello everybody. Welcome to class. Today, my name is Ben Haws. I will be your instructor. And today we are going to be
talking about how to craft your interview when it comes
to the art of podcasting. So you have a podcast, maybe you have some
type of talk show, YouTube show, and
you want to learn how to craft a really
great interview. Well, that's what this class is today and I'm so
excited to dive in. Let's do just that. So
today's agenda is actually really simple and
that's something that is true across
all of my classes, is that I want to
take what's really complicated and a really
big skill and take it down and teach you the
basics and teach you the fundamental things that will make the
biggest difference. So today's agenda we're
going to talk about before you even start to
write out your interview. What are your goals
for your interview? And we're gonna get
really clear on that so that we can move
forward into number two, which is crafting
your questions. And following that, we will go into how to make
live adjustments. A lot of times people think, Oh, I have to write it in our view and then I'm just going
to do it as planned. That's not the case
most of the time. And so we're going to talk about a lot about how to
craft your questions, but then how to be adaptable. So my name is Ben Haws. I am the host, the
life in bold podcast. You can find it wherever you get your podcast if you want to
see how I do my interviews. But I interview people all the time and I get compliments on the questions that I'm asking and the way that I've
crafted my interviews. And so I've come to be a
little bit of an expert on how to really craft
a great interview. I'm also a business
and social media coach on an Instagram and with
my one-on-one clients. And so you can find
me on Instagram or TikTok at hustle with Ben. And we can connect there
and I would love to chat. So if you're crafting an interview and
you have questions, feel free to DM me on Instagram. I'll be happy to chat
through it with you as a result of that
finishing this course. So with that, let's get into it. Let's move on to the first
portion of this class, which is all about
setting your goals. Join me.
2. Set Your Goals: Alright, welcome to the class. I'm glad you, I'm
glad you clicked in. I'm glad you're
here. I'm excited to be teaching this course. Like I said. There's gonna be three parts of this course and this
is the first part. So the first thing that you wanna do when you're
crafting an interview for a podcast or for any type of show is to set your goals. What are your goals for this interview or for this
episode of your podcast? The assignment here
is to understand what you want to get out of the person that
you're interviewing. And so I have some questions below here which will help you identify what you're looking to get out of the person
that you're interviewing. And what I would
encourage you to do, take out a piece of
paper, take out a pen, or go on your notes app on your phone or your computer and actually think about
these questions and write down the
answers to that. Because the more you
can do either as a journaling response
or as a bulleted list. The more you can write out
what you're hoping to get, the better off your interview
will ultimately be. The first question that I
want you to think through is, what do you want them
to walk away with, meaning the person that
you're interviewing. If you are interviewing somebody who gets
interviewed a lot, there's not that much in
it for the person you're interviewing to come onto your show and be
on your podcast. But if you think
about what you want them to get out of
being on your podcast, it will be a great interview
because as long as the person that you're
interviewing is happy and excited to be there, It's going to be a better
and better interview. The second thing
that I recommend doing some journaling on is to understand what do your listeners want to
get out of the episode? This is something
that I think you can actually text
them and ask them. I have this guest
coming on my podcast. This is what they do. What would you ask them? That's something that can
be really helpful to know. What would you want them
to know or what would you want to get out of there
listening to this episode? If you were to listen, thinking about what your
friends and family and other listeners
want to get out of the episode could be a really, really great way to think about what you
want out of the episode. Because obviously you
want your listeners to be satisfied with
the episode as well. The third thing
that I want you to think about is what can you do differently
than other podcasts? Because like I said,
some people who you're interviewing have done
1020 podcast interviews. And their fans can go and look at those podcasts
and listened to the podcasts. And if your podcast isn't, isn't bringing out new stories, news for new perspectives, then there's nothing,
there's no real reason for somebody to listen
to your version of the interview
with this person. So if you're gonna be
interviewing somebody who has been interviewed
on different podcasts, listened to the podcasts
and think about what can I on my podcast do differently? This will totally equip you
to give an interview that's different and exciting for
the person that you're interviewing and that can
make a really big difference. The pro tip here
is to think deeply with yourself and think about what do you actually
want to know? There's a reason you ask this person to be
on your podcast. What intrigues you
about this person? What do you think is the coolest
thing about this person? What do you think is the most surprising
thing about this person? What is the thing
that you want to know the most about this person? The more you can
think about you as the host and what you
specifically want to know, the better off you will be. So set your goals, really get clear on these questions and
do some journaling to figure it out before you go into crafting
your questions. Because if you're clear
on what your goals are, then you'll be clear on what
your question is should, should tie to and
how they should link up to your overall goals. And so with that, let's
go on to number two, which is crafting
your questions.
3. Craft Your Questions: Alright, so step number two here is to craft your questions. And this is the media as part of this course where
we're gonna be talking about how to actually come
up with good questions that your interviewer or that your interviewee will
enjoy answering. And that will make a
really great interview that you can share with
friends, family, and listeners. The assignment here
is to write out questions that will
guide the conversation. And there's a couple of things I think you should do as you're writing out these questions
now that you have your goals, now that you understand
what you want out of the interview, It's really important to think
back to these four things. The first thing is to
think back to your goals and remember what you want
to get out of the interview. The second thing is to split your questions into sections. So oftentimes when I'm
writing out an interview, what I will do is get
out my notes app. I will write the person's
name big at the top. And I will write out some intro questions
about the basics. Like, oh, maybe you were on a TV show and I want to
ask about the TV show, but in reality, I want to get deeper and learn more about
other parts of your life. So what I will do is I will split it out into
sections and I will say, okay, so introduction,
I'm going to have three or five
questions ready to go. Then there are maybe one or
two or three things that I want to really make sure we cover in the podcast interview. And so I will write those
out as sections first. So if I was interviewing
maybe a comedian, I would ask them about the
special they just released. I would ask them about their maybe their relationship
or the people around them. And maybe I would ask them about their future plans
for their career. And that would be three
different sections. And once I have the question, once I have the sections, I can actually write
specific questions underneath sections. I recommend to think about how many questions
you want to have versus how much time you
want the interview to be. So that's my pro tip
here at the bottom, is to always think about how long you want
the interview to be, because you're interviewing
interesting people you could probably talk about, talk to them forever. And it's really
important that as a show producer yourself, you're identifying for yourself, how long do I want this
actual interview to be? So my rule of thumb
is I tried to give about ten minutes for every
section of the interview. So a lot of times different people speak with different levels of concision. And you don't know how long someone's going to take to
answer all of your questions. I give about ten minutes
for every section. If you have a longer podcasts, maybe give it 20,
maybe give it 15. If you have a shorter podcasts, maybe give it five or seven. But my, when I do a podcast, I tend to do a
30-minute interview. And so I'm splitting
this sections. If I have three sections
into 10-minute sections, mark some questions that
you're going to write down. So once you have the sections, you can start to write
out your questions. And like I said in
the previous slide, think about what do you
really want to know? And think about what your
audience really wants to know. There's a kind of
an interesting, There's an interesting
relationship between those two things
because you are the co-host, you are producing the
show and you want to ask what you think is
really interesting. But at the same time you want
to make sure that there's a fit with what people
want to listen to. Write out questions
underneath your sections that will ultimately find
the right balance between those two things. When you're writing
your questions. I would say for every section, five to ten questions. And the reason is because when you're actually
doing the interview, you're going to
want some different questions to pull from. And we'll talk about that in the next slide about
making live adjustments. But write out ten
or so questions that you think will
be interesting. You think will be
interesting to yourself, to the audience and
to the interviewee. Because you want
to make sure that everybody is interested, everybody's engaged in,
everybody's having a good time. When you do that, mark
some other questions. Maybe you can bold them, maybe you can put a
star next to them, but mark some of
them as must ask, and some of them as optional. Because if you're in a conversation with someone
and you're looking at your notes and you're
trying to figure out which of these questions
am I going to answer Next? And you're trying to listen to the person and hear
what they say, then what you're going
to want to do is have it be really easy to understand what
are the questions I must ask in this interview. Because it just makes it a
little bit easier if you kinda tear out your questions and figure out which ones
are the most important. The next step with writing your questions is to
think of a question, but then go one level deeper
than you think you should. A lot of times these days, people ask very basic
level questions and podcast interviews. And if you can go a little
bit deeper and tug at the emotion that someone was feeling when they
did that cool thing. Or the fear that
they felt when they first became apparent
or anything like that. If you can dig a little bit deeper and ask a
question that's not so basic than your
podcast episode is gonna be a lot better. Like I said, make sure you're sticking to the
time that you have. Make sure that you're planning
ahead for how long you think each question should take in each section
should take. And that will really set you
up for success while you build your questions for
your podcast interview. Let's move on to making
live adjustments.
4. Make Live Adjustments: Alright, so this is the
third and final step of writing out your interview and
actually conducting your interview on
your podcast episode. So what I love to
say here is to make live adjustments as you're
doing your interview. A lot of times, what you see in interviews
when they're bad is somebody will just ask a question and then
the personal answer. And then they'll personal ask another question and then
the personal answer. And then the person
will ask another question and the
person will answer. And that ends up
being very boring because there's no charisma. There's no banter,
there's no personality. And it's very important that as you are doing your interview, that you're bantering with the person that you're
interviewing with. It's just very
important to do and you don't want to end up
having a boring interview. The assignment
here is to make it conversational and
go with the flow. The go with the flow piece is extremely hard
for some people to do because they have a plan and they want to
execute on the plan. And what I will say here is, when you make the plan, that is a rough plan, that is not a sure thing plan. And so what you'll
wanna do is be able to go forward and make
changes as you go. So get comfortable with
the fact that whatever you write out might not actually
be the ultimate interview. Things change, people
will bring things up. And it's really important that you are able to
go with the flow. Now, if there's something
that back to your goals, if there's something that
you need to make sure happens in the
interview because it's your goal or because it's the guest wants to
make sure that they're plugging something that
they're working on, then it's important
to go with the plan. But conversationally, don't
want to just get into a situation where
it's just a Q&A and there's no conversation. You want it to go
back and forth. You want there to be laughter or inspiration between
the two of you. And so what I always say here is be willing to ask
new questions if you have them and leave
out questions if they're no longer relevant or if there's
not enough time. And it's really important as you're going through your
interview to be able to have that skill of listening to the person and
hearing what they're saying. Scanning your notes to see
what do you want to ask next and figuring out what is the right balance
between those two things. Because oftentimes you can
tell if someone's leading a podcast interview
and they're just not listening and they're
just thinking about what they
want to say next. That's really the skill of being a great interviewer
is being able to listen to what
the person is saying while also leading
the conversation. The thing that I'll say here, this is my pro tip is to
try to avoid perfectionism. Perfectionism is something that gets in the way of a lot of people's success
when it comes to creative projects
and initiatives. If you are trying to
make everything perfect, it might slow you down and
it might make you nervous as you are doing your
podcast interview. And so it's really
important to make sure you are going
with the flow, that you are able to make
adjustments as you go, and that you're not focused
on making it perfect. You're just focused
on making it good and being engaging and being
exciting to listen to. It's never gonna be perfect. And so drop the idea
of perfectionism. Make live adjustments as you are doing your
interviews and you will be totally
good to go with that. Let's go to the class
project and the conclusion.
5. Class Projects and Next Steps: Alright, so the class project today is something
that I'm actually really excited about of all
my other Skillshare classes. This is something that I think is my favorite class project
that I've ever created. And it's basically to choose a celebrity that you
would love to interview. Who is a celebrity
that you would love to have on your podcast
if they said yes, and you would have them
on your podcast and write out three to five
questions that you would ask them and be sure to go through this process of
setting out your goals. What do you want to add to
accomplish in this interview? What questions do you
want to add to ask? As you do the interview? It's really going to
be a fun project. I would love for everybody to write down your three
to five questions and then give feedback to the
other people who have done the project as well
and share with the class. Because we all want to see who
your favorite celebrity is that you want to interview
and what you would ask them. I think it's a really
fun idea to think about. I want to thank you so much
for taking this course. I do have other Skillshare
classes all around podcasting, social media, side hustles,
and public speaking. I would love for
you to follow me, follow along with
my other classes and follow me here
on Skillshare. I'm also on Instagram and
TikTok at hustle with Ben. And like I said,
I have a podcast, it's called life in bold where I do my
podcast interviews. And that is with me than Haws. And I would love for
you to stay connected. So the best place to probably connect with me is
over on Instagram. You can send me a
message on Instagram at hustle with Ben if
you need any advice, any help, I'm happy to
connect with you there. With that, I hope you have a great day and
even better week. And don't forget to
live your life in bold. Thank you.
Ben Hawes, Creative Project Consultant & Podcaster
