Heading into my final week of the 3-Week Buzz Marketing Challenge and I’m doing OK, but not good enough. There’s more buzz to generate!

One of the most underrated ways of generating buzz is through doing interviews.

And they’re easy to do! Everyone wants to be interviewed – from A-listers to small business owners to people just starting out. You might not have access to the biggest CEOs in your industry or worldwide leaders, but you won’t know until you try. And you’d be surprised how willing people are to be interviewed (people you think are unreachable.)

Interviews work to generate buzz because:

1. The person you’re interviewing has a vested interest in getting the word out, so you’ve instantly created at least one big-time evangelist.
2. You’re presenting the views of someone who is hopefully of significant interest to others. Interviewing your cat might be fun, but it won’t generate buzz. Josh Hinds is a master at this. His blog Business Networking Advice is a collection of interviews he does with a range of bloggers, business people and entrepreneurs. His latest interview is with Anna Farmery, and he even interviewed me!
3. When you promote an interview to your audience, community and others, you’re not just promoting yourself. This makes it easier to promote and generate buzz.
4. The public likes interviews, particularly if you can ask some pointed and instigating questions. Get the interviewee to reveal something interesting, break some news, or debate a hot issue and people will flock to the interview.

The best thing about doing interviews is building relationships with the people after. It might not always work, but if you can develop relationships beyond the interviews you’ll be creating lifetime buzz agents and supporters.

Ron McDaniel smartly points out that you could do an interview per week and that would exponentially increase your contact list, networking capabilities and buzz marketing. He’s 100% correct.

On Startup Spark, my blog focused exclusively on entrepreneurship, I’ve been doing interviews since the beginning. Last week I interviewed Ian Landsman who runs his own software company, UserScape. Some previous interviewees include Paul English, CTO of Kayak.com and Jim Estill, CEO of SYNNEX, a billion-dollar computer company.

I use email to connect with people, and we exchange questions and answers back and forth. The process is easy and fun, and I’ve stayed in regular contact with most of the people I’ve interviewed.

Finding people to interview is easy too! Use your existing network to ask for suggestions, or to target specific interviewees. Or, just go to the person directly and ask. Do so politely, explain the reasoning for the interview, and do something creative with it (some people get interviewed a lot!) and you’ll get your chance.

Interviews are great for generating buzz. Give ‘Em a try.