Interviews and podcasts for YouTube: from idea to implementation

YouTube is one of the most popular video hosting sites today, attracting the attention of millions of people around the world. Today, this platform includes a huge variety of materials, formats, ideas, and in different niches and directions. Standing out here and finding your audience is becoming more and more difficult every day due to the presence of quite serious competition. And this means that it is necessary to approach the preparation of content for the YouTube platform as professionally as possible. This also applies to the correct choice of format. And one of the quite popular options here is conversational. This includes interviews and podcasts. But how to implement it correctly?

At first glance, the conversational format may seem one of the easiest to implement. What could be difficult about it? It's just filming two people talking to each other. It turns out that it's enough to simply record such a conversation on camera and upload it to the site, ultimately receiving millions of views. But, alas, this opinion is too far from the truth. If you've already tried working with the conversational format when preparing content for video hosting sites, then you probably know how much time and effort is spent on preparing the material. In addition, it often turns out that neither you nor the audience likes the final result. That is, there were interlocutors, there was communication, but to convey the desired idea and interest viewers to watch the entire video on YouTube, or even subsequent interaction, you still did not succeed.

As part of today's review, we will dwell in detail on what the conversational format for video hosting is and who it may interest. We will talk about what results can be achieved with the help of a well-recorded podcast or interview. We will tell you in detail how to prepare the relevant material that will be so interesting to users that the viewing rates, including depth, will be very high. We will provide a number of practical recommendations that will allow you to film as efficiently as possible and make sure that the filmed content can be used more than once. We will also touch on the issue of the cost of conversational video format. The information provided will allow you to get a more detailed understanding of this issue, to understand the feasibility of using interview podcasts to develop your own business. So, first things first.

When is it worth using the conversational video format on YouTube

Video formats for YouTube, such as podcasts or interviews, are quite specific. They are not suitable for every company or at least situation. But still, there are situations when an interview or podcast will be an ideal solution. It is worth using the conversational format when preparing content for posting on a video hosting service if:

1. You have a person at your disposal who can rightfully be called an expert in his niche. This is someone who can answer questions from subscribers and viewers in the most professional and detailed way, will reveal the topic in more depth, will be able to touch on related issues and related areas. Thanks to this, in one conversation it will be possible to consider different opinions, which will ultimately allow the audience to deeply delve into this issue and draw appropriate conclusions for themselves. It is important to understand that viewers will be attracted not only by the expertise of your guest, but also by the topic itself. That is, the issues that really interest people today should be considered. Only then can you count on good viewing figures, as well as feedback from the audience, which will allow you to fully cover the topic.
2. You are working with a specialist who is really well versed in his niche, but his speech is quite complex, the conversation contains specific terms, incomprehensible formulations. Another content format for YouTube in this case may be too difficult for the audience to perceive. In such a situation, a carefully thought-out interview allows you to create a more relaxed atmosphere. The expert will be able to answer your clarifying questions, explaining complex terms, dwelling more deeply on uncertain points. That is, you, as the host, can make the communication as comfortable and unobtrusive as possible, as a result of which the material will be presented more clearly and accessible to a wide audience.
3. You want to show your wide circle of contacts, consider the same issue from different points of view, listen to opposing opinions and corresponding arguments, identify existing problems and work through them as deeply as possible directly during the broadcast, and also draw appropriate conclusions for the future. Let's assume that a podcast is being recorded by a brand that specializes in the production of women's clothing. You can invite the head of the company directly to the shooting, who can talk about the values and goals that he sets for himself, a designer who can effectively present the general idea of the collections being developed, suppliers who will talk about the features and quality of the materials used, as well as buyers who have personally evaluated the clothes produced. As a result, it will be possible to touch on all issues in the context of this business. Each of the participants will be able to demonstrate their expertise, and potential customers will receive the full amount of information they need and will be able to become interested in the clothes produced.

If you want to solve at least one of the above problems in your professional activities, you should definitely use podcasts or interviews. They can be a great addition to your overall brand promotion strategy on the market, will increase engagement rates, emphasize your professionalism and authority, will be able to cause feedback from viewers, and promote interaction.

Options for conversational formats that can be used on YouTube

The interviews and podcasts themselves, which are recorded specifically for posting on the YouTube video hosting service, can be presented in different forms. Here, everything depends on what information you want to convey to the audience and what effect you expect to receive at the end. In particular, the following options for conversational formats are very popular today:

• Classic interview. It is recorded as a regular video, taking into account all the specifics that are relevant today on the YouTube video hosting service. It is supposed to be a casual conversation, in which at least 2 people will be involved. In this case, one of them asks questions, and the second one answers them, demonstrating their knowledge on the matter, expressing ideas, thoughts, showing emotions and feelings. Most classic interviews focus on one issue or event, a specific time period or a specific news item. But this format also often presents information about a particular person, often historical, revealing the features of different periods of life.
• Podcasts with experts. In this case, we are talking about you, as a business representative or your employee, inviting opinion leaders in your niche to record a video. During the conversation, answers to questions of interest to the target audience will be provided, problems relevant to a certain niche will be identified, and potential solutions will be offered. As a result, the specifics of your business will also be revealed and it will be indicated that you have a solution to all these difficulties at your disposal. In parallel with this, the expert's experience will also be demonstrated, his personal position will be revealed. Such videos are very often used as a basis for subsequent launch on other platforms in the format of an audio podcast. In this case, the soundtrack is extracted from them. It can be launched directly without any additional processing.
• Lessons and other educational videos. In this case, the interview format is also used. To record such content, it is necessary to invite a person who specializes in a specific issue and then ask him the most popular questions in the context of the training module. Very often, questions that will come from the audience in the comments are also added here. To implement this idea, it will be necessary to launch information about the planned event in advance through social networks or any other platform and ask the audience to write the questions that interest them most.
• Cases. This is a kind of business success story, namely projects that were implemented in the most effective, high-quality, and efficient way. In this case, the invited guest will be a business representative who is well versed in the completed project. The presenter will ask leading questions, and the expert will reveal the features of the completed work, talk about the extraordinary strategies and approaches that allowed them to achieve the maximum result. Cases are often recorded in the “Before and After” format. Here, the existing problem is initially described, and then it is told about the tools, methods, products used to solve it and what the achieved results were.
• Analyses. Often also presented in the form of interviews. There is some similarity with cases, but the emphasis is not on a specific project, but directly on the specifics of the business, on the processes that occur within it daily and in the niche itself as a whole. Based on such information, an outsider will be able to understand how everything is arranged and works in a certain market segment. Today, interviews are actively gaining popularity in the infobusiness.

As you can see, there are many options for preparing a video in a conversational format for launching on YouTube. It is optimal to combine them with each other, alternate them. This is what will allow you to maintain the interest of the audience at a fairly high level, ensuring high rates of views and subsequent target actions.

Results of launching interviews and podcasts on YouTube

Using conversational videos on the YouTube video hosting is what will contribute to the development of almost any business. In particular, with its help you will be able to implement a number of key tasks facing any company, namely:

1. Attracting new customers. With the help of interviews, you will be able to show your audience your expertise, answer questions that interest the audience, and explain a number of complex issues. Thanks to this, you will be able to form the image of a solid and reliable brand. This in itself will attract customers. If desired, you can involve your regular or new customers in interviews or record podcasts, which will also help increase engagement and present your company in the most favorable light.
2. Demonstration of your own status. This is ensured by involving well-known opinion leaders and experts in your niche in interviews or podcasts. Thanks to this, you become on the same level with them, confirming your own authority, solidity, reliability. This is what will allow you to form an appropriate image, interest new buyers of goods or services.
3. Launch of monetization. Professional podcasts and interviews are what will become a source of additional income. In this case, there may be several monetization options, but still, advertising sales are most often used on video hosting sites. You can add logos of a particular brand to your podcasts, write the advertisement itself into the description text directly under the video, or insert the advertising block itself into the video.

This is all that you can count on when launching conversational videos on YouTube. These strategies are currently showing themselves to be excellent in practice, fully justifying both expectations and investments. But we would like to draw your attention to the fact that the constant use of the same format can lead to the fact that your interview or podcast will become boring and uninteresting for the audience. Therefore, in order to ensure high efficiency of your videos, it is worth combining different solutions, adding entertaining, educational content to the informational one. This way, you will make the material more diverse, interesting for the audience, and will be able to ensure consistently high viewing rates.

We shoot fascinating interviews for YouTube

The fact that the audience will interact with your video content, will watch it to the end and eagerly await the release of new interviews or podcasts is the result of competent planning and professional implementation. Practice shows that watching a conversation is not always as exciting as taking part in it directly. Therefore, even the highest quality and expert interviews very often literally put viewers to sleep. This is especially true for conversations where there are no emotions, interactive elements and other moments that can attract attention. An interview in which the interlocutors go into too much detail, repeating the same thing over and over again, or, conversely, are distracted from the main topic and move on to side issues will also look boring. As a result, the video becomes boring, too long.

Will people watch such content to the end? Most likely not, since interest will simply be lost. As a result, one of the main indicators of the quality of content posted on video hosting sites suffers - viewing depth. If viewers watch the video for only a few minutes, YouTube will determine that it is uninteresting and will no longer offer it in recommendations. Is it possible to avoid this? It is possible if a number of key aspects are taken into account during the preparation and recording of a podcast or interview. In particular, to make your videos interesting to the audience, it is important to:

1. Think through the script down to the last detail and choose a topic that will be interesting to the mass audience.
2. Use special directorial techniques during filming that can attract the audience's attention.
3. Edit the video in such a way that the audience's attention is managed.

Now let's look at all these 3 points in more detail so that you can understand what we are talking about and apply the corresponding recommendations in practice.

Selecting a topic and preparing a script

You should definitely not count on your interview being held in the most relaxed atmosphere, that questions will arise literally out of nowhere, that they will be relevant, and that your interlocutor's answers will be accurate, expert and fascinating. In practice, this happens extremely rarely. Therefore, it is still optimal to think in advance about what topic might interest your audience and write a script.

A catchy topic is something that will arouse the interest of the audience, and along with it the desire to delve deeper into it, to understand all the nuances and aspects. In this case, you should clearly understand who your target audience is, realize what issues will be most pressing for them and select an opinion leader or expert who is well versed in this issue and is well known to the people around them.

Now you can proceed directly to developing the script. Here it is important to prepare a list of questions, as well as build their sequence so that in the end you get a full-fledged smooth conversation, and not a banal "question-answer" quiz. It is optimal to find out as much information about your guest in advance from other interviews and publications, open sources, including social networks. In some cases, it would be a good idea to conduct a preliminary interview in order to get to know the opinion leader in advance, which will ultimately become the key to a more trusting and friendly conversation in the future. In addition, such an acquaintance will help you choose the most correct and interesting questions. Do not forget to provide them to your interlocutor in advance so that he can conduct preliminary preparation.

To prevent your interview from looking too boring, you should avoid trivial and monotonous questions. Think about what moments could attract the attention of your audience, hook them. Even slight compromising, unobtrusive humor will be appropriate here. But again, we repeat that everything should be agreed upon with your interlocutor in advance, so as not to put him in an awkward position during filming and not to touch on topics that he would not like to disclose in public.

Using original directorial techniques

Unusual directorial techniques are what will also help to hold the audience's attention. In particular, it is very important to think through the beginning of an interview or podcast, as well as its ending, to add moments that will attract the audience's attention directly during the video, eliminating monotony. Today, in practice, special format-forming elements are actively used to achieve these goals. With their help, the main video is diversified, the overall picture changes, which in itself will attract attention. As an option, this could be:

• informal communication;
• additional stories prepared in parallel;
• video business card of the interlocutor, recorded in another location;
• reference information, expert opinions;
• small talk style blocks, filmed in a third-party location, etc.

There are quite a few options here. You just need to choose something that will allow you to get away from a monotonous picture or monotonous speech, will help focus the audience's attention on truly interesting and useful things. Do not forget also that viewers will always pay attention to the emotions of people hosting a podcast or participating in an interview. Therefore, it is advisable to arrange cameras so that the direction of views is maintained. In this case, you will be able to show the audience facial expressions, emotions. Here you can change the close-up of plans, shooting points. The only thing is, never change the position of the characters in the frames, because this can disorient the audience. That is, the presenter should always be on one side, and the interlocutor - on the other.

If you are recording a video for YouTube with 2 people, then it would be optimal for you to use 3 cameras. One should be directed at the presenter, the second - at the interlocutor, the third - to shoot a general plan. The more people, the more cameras you will need, as well as the amount of space where the shooting will take place. This way you will be able to get a deep and airy picture. This is something that the user audience will definitely appreciate.

Control the attention of viewers with high-quality editing

If you use the recommendations given in the previous block, you will get a sufficient amount of material for subsequent processing. Thus, during editing, you will be able to play with frames to your heart's content, shift the attention of viewers from one participant to another, and pick up on the emotions of other interview participants. Moreover, you can change the order of questions and answers already when editing the finished video if you think that this will make the conversation look more natural and relaxed.

It is also important to increase the emotionality of the interview from time to time during editing. If there are disputes, if there are humorous elements, as well as everything that can attract the attention of the audience, then it is better to distribute all this evenly throughout the video, rather than concentrate it in one part. Thanks to this, the interest of the viewers will remain high throughout the viewing and will lead to the fact that people will watch your material to the end.

Several practical recommendations directly on filming conversational videos for YouTube

Preparing for the interview or podcast shooting day is one of the mandatory elements. This is also something that is important to plan in advance. And here we would like to give a number of recommendations that will allow you to perform these works most correctly:

• If you need to regularly release interviews, which is relevant when working with certain bloggers or YouTube channels, it is important to think over a strategy for several filmings in advance to avoid repetitions and ambiguities. It is also worth choosing the right guests, collecting the necessary information, and thinking over questions for the interview. For the most part, these are the tasks that the organizer should solve, not the host. That is, you will need to attract an additional specialist who will take on the implementation of all these works.
• In the case when the interview is one-time, that is, regular release is not required, then in principle you can do without the organizer and do all the preparatory work yourself. In some cases, you can entrust the preparation of the question to your guest, as he or she understands perfectly well what nuances should be revealed during the conversation, knows how to interest the audience and how to convey information in the most accessible, but interesting way. In this case, you need to involve specialists to shoot and edit the video.
• Choose the most suitable interview or podcast format. We have already given the most common and popular options above. Think about the director's moves that could be implemented within the framework of this shooting. Plan in advance the techniques that can be used to dilute the interview, make it more exciting and hold the attention of the audience.
• Do not neglect the makeup of the host and guests. Plan in advance the arrangement of lighting and cameras. This is what will make the people in the frame look natural and attractive. A beautiful picture is what the audience always appreciates. Moreover, such preparation will emphasize your professionalism and indicate that you are very meticulous about your work.
• When recording an interview, think carefully about the time frame. All the footage should be on average 2 times longer than what you plan to post on YouTube. During the editing process, individual blocks are often thrown out, low-quality footage is removed. If you do not provide for such a reserve, it may turn out that the planned hour-long video will eventually turn into a 30-minute one. In addition, you cannot exclude the possibility of recording takes. The latter aspect is especially relevant for those who are just starting to work in this niche. This applies to both the host and the guest, the cameraman. After the main material has been filmed, additional fragments are recorded, which will dilute the main video according to a pre-prepared script.

The last recommendation regarding editing. All the material that you want to add to the video must be of high quality. In addition, it is important to ensure the consistency of the dialogue, a combination of additional elements, thereby maintaining the audience's attention throughout the viewing of your video.

Is it possible to shoot a video for YouTube so that it can be used repeatedly?

If you already have experience in preparing video content, if you have all the necessary equipment and premises at your disposal, then there is nothing difficult in regularly recording new materials. But in any case, all this will require time and material resources. And if you simultaneously manage several social networks, if you are engaged in additional activities, then you simply may not have enough time to do such work. We must not forget about emotional burnout, which is associated with the need to constantly select new topics, develop questions, and search for relevant experts. As a result, a situation often arises when your hands simply drop and promotion through YouTube is simply abandoned.

Therefore, it is quite natural to want to record content that could be used in the future. Today, reuse of material or as it is also called distribution is used quite actively in practice. And here there are several options:

1. Cutting short vertical videos from interviews and then posting them on various social networks, YouTube Shorts. This can be done as a kind of advertising for the main material if you add a corresponding link to the main video. You can also insert the most interesting elements into other videos, thereby stimulating the audience to watch this content as well.
2. Extracting the audio track to launch audio podcasts. Surely, you have platforms at your disposal where such content will be most appropriate and will find its audience.
3. Transform the video material into other content options. This can be an article, story, post, etc. It turns out that you can use the same material more than once. Most interviews can be easily transformed into one article, and then prepare several copies for posting on different platforms, and then form a series of posts from them for the same social networks or channels in the messenger Telegram.

Thanks to all this, you will be able to extract maximum benefit from one interview for the development of your business, its promotion through different channels, increase the number of touchpoints with your target audience and, as a result, maximum coverage. You must understand that people will study your material where it is most convenient for them. For some, this is YouTube, for others - social networks, instant messengers, for others - news portals, thematic communities, etc. But the main thing here is not to forget that all the material must be unique. This means that you will have to think through the interview transformation in detail.

How much will it cost to record a podcast or interview for YouTube?

Now that you understand what the conversational video content format for YouTube is, you know for what purposes it should be used, you understand how to perform the upcoming work as efficiently and correctly as possible, it's time to discuss another very important question - how much will it cost to implement such an idea. We would like to immediately draw your attention to the fact that in order to save money, you should record several interviews or podcasts in one shooting day. Practice shows that preparing the site takes too much time and requires serious material resources.

As an example, we can say that recording one 2-hour interview will cost you an average of about $2,500 today, while filming 2 interviews on the same day will require about $3,000. Accordingly, the cost of one video here will already be $1,500. If you spend the entire working day on the site, you can easily record 4 or even 5 full-length interviews or podcasts, paying about $4,000 for this, that is, each option will cost you about $800.

Above, we have given the only decent way to save on the preparation of this content. But in practice, other solutions are often resorted to, such as using only one camera for filming, performing all work through Zoom or other similar platforms. Also, in order to save money, inexperienced freelancers can be hired, rather than professional directors and editors. But these are the situations when the quality of the finished video will suffer greatly, all possible deadlines will be violated.

Which method of saving should be used by you - decide for yourself, based on your own budget, as well as the desired result. But you must understand that the audience will be interested only in high-quality material. Even the most expert opinion will not be listened to if it is recorded unprofessionally.

Summing up

Is it worth recording interviews and podcasts if today the Internet and YouTube, in particular, offer a huge variety of content in different formats and genres? Definitely worth it, since they can solve a number of key tasks facing any developing business, namely attracting new clients, demonstrating your own status, and increasing recognition. But here you should also consider the characteristics of your target audience. A full-fledged interview with a deep, thorough disclosure of the topic is the format that is most popular with people aged 35+, while young people rely on shorter, but at the same time dynamic videos.

We would like to draw your attention once again to the fact that the success of such an idea as conversational videos depends on comprehensive, professional preparation and implementation. How to do this work correctly, we told in today's review. You just need to take the provided material into service.

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