Day 18 | Making Money From Blogging Duel

It’s Day 18 of the Making Money From Blogging Duel and I’m over the halfway hump now, so there is no giving up or going back. But first a quick update…

In spite of a flurry of last minute bids, and some serious chats on Skype with interested parties, that the auction flushed out of the woodwork, the website I had listed on Flippa didn’t sell, didn’t even reach one fifth of what I wanted for it, or one tenth of the “buy now” price, which apparently you shouldn’t even list, according to “website flipping” expert @DannyBatelic who @SarahCairncross put me onto.

I perhaps should also have waded through the “How To Sell Your Website” resource page at Flippa.com – well, I’ll do that now, as I’m planning to sell all the miscellaneous domains I’ve had sitting around for years, all those good ideas that never got worked up into anything. I’m going to work through Michael Dunlop’s 30 Day Blogging plan for each of them and then sell them!

@GuyLevine, my old buddy who taught me most of the basics in the early days, suggested I do a site:NicolaCairncross.com / site:www.NicolaCairncross.com search on Google to see if I’ve been de-indexed and it turned up a “Your search – site:www.nicolacairncross.com – did not match any documents.” result which looks fairly serious to me, but then I did a site:NicolaCairncross.com and 1600 odd documents came up – I’ve asked Guy Levine, who is an incredibly sharp and bright guy, who runs his own digital marketing agency in Manchester, what it all means and he says, that proves it’s not a Google issue, but could be a loss of pages or backlinks. Hmmmmm, methinks I might be getting closer to solving that mystery.

Back to Day 18 of the Blogging Duel – what does Michael Dunlop tell us to do today? (As well as blogging, that is!)

Oh, this is a nice one – he’s saying to start asking for interviews (ideally video or audio which you can transcribe and even podcast) and I love doing interviews. This step alone will make your blog stand head and shoulders above the others, especially if you leverage the content. For example, I could approach a local radio station and ask them if they want to feature the interviews. They could be used for PR too. I’ll need my interviewees to sign a waiver form though, but I’m sure they will agree in return for being featured on the blog.

OK, as my blog is all about Digital Marketing in Brighton, for Brighton businesses, I need to interview successful Brighton business people. Hey, this should be fun! Not sure they will be up to a video or skype interview, but I could actually turn up and interview them in person, but that’s a bit scary (techie-wise) and time consuming! Let’s stick with telephone interviews first. Easier for them and me, no travelling involved and less to go wrong.

I can think of one person I’d like to interview already, and his name is Peter Crown – the ironic thing is that I used to work in Peter’s Crown Hair Salon in Worthing, as a Junior, when I was a wee whippersnapper just out of school. And another is Dermot O’Leary – he’s just opened a fish restaurant in Brighton but I imagine he’ll be going on holiday now that the X-Factor has finished.

Obviously, I’ll have to tailor the questions around digital marketing, and I’d quite like to combine that with success thinking and strategies because it will kill two birds with one stone, as I can use some of the interview content for my new book too.

What questions am I going to ask? I’d welcome your suggestions here as I’d like to get to 20 Questions ideally…what would YOU like me to ask any successful business person I interview? Here’s my initial list:

Warm Up / Quick Interview Questions:

What one business tool couldn’t you live without?
What’s the view from your office window / where you work?
What inspires you to go to work every day?
If you had to name one, what’s your favourite business website?

Main Interview Questions:

Do you come from an entrepreneurial background? What did your parents or family do?
When did you first know that you wanted to be a business person, instead of working for someone else?
What did you do about that?
What were your biggest challenges in the beginning?
What went well?
Did you have a plan or did it all grow organically?
Did you have any mentors?
If you were starting again, knowing what you know now, what would you do differently?
Is there a secret to success?
Is there a special quality that you have observed in successful people?
Do you use digital / internet marketing in your business?
When did you first realise that you needed to use the internet in your business?
Do you just market your business online, or do you sell stuff online?
Do you do it yourself or outsource it?
How did you decide what to do / who to use?
How’s it working out for you, marketing online, overall / bottom line?
What One Thing Worked Brilliantly Last Year?
What one thing didn’t work for you last year?
What are you going to do differently this year?
What would you do differently if you were starting again from scratch?
Bonus Questions : What do you think I should have asked you?