The best material for a specialist article usually lives in the head of someone who has no time to write it. A founder who's explained the same pricing trade-off on dozens of sales calls. An engineer who knows exactly why a certain integration breaks. A senior technician who can tell a good install from a bad one before the cover's off.
You won't get them to write a draft. You can usually get 45 minutes on a call. That's enough, if the minutes are planned.
Why 45
Thirty is too short. The first ten go to warming up, and the good material tends to arrive late, once the expert stops giving the polished answer. An hour is hard to get on a busy calendar, and the last fifteen minutes tend to circle back. Forty-five gets you past the rehearsed version and is short enough that people say yes.
Before the call
Send the questions at least two business days ahead. Experts answer better when they've had a moment to think, and some will dig out an example or a figure they wouldn't remember on the spot. Nobody needs to prepare notes. Reading the list once is enough.
Ask for stories, not definitions. "What is X?" gets a paragraph the reader could find anywhere. "Tell me about the last time X went wrong" gets something only this person can say.
The question bank we start from, adjusted per topic:
- What do customers usually get wrong about this before they talk to you?
- Walk me through the last time you saw this done badly. What happened next?
- What's the question you answer most often on sales calls, job sites or onboarding calls?
- What would you tell a friend in this situation that you'd never put in a brochure?
- Where do you disagree with the usual advice?
- What does a good outcome look like? What would you check to judge it?
- Which small detail do people skip that ends up costing them?
- If a reader only gets through one paragraph, what should it say?
Eight is plenty. You won't get through all of them, and you shouldn't try. The follow-ups are where the article comes from.
The call, minute by minute
| Minutes | What happens |
|---|---|
| 0–3 | Confirm they're happy to be recorded. Explain where the recording goes and that every quote comes back to them for approval. |
| 3–8 | One easy warm-up question, something they've answered a hundred times. |
| 8–30 | The core questions. Listen for stories, examples from their own work and opinions that cut against the usual advice. Ask "why?" and "for example?" more than feels polite. |
| 30–40 | Go back to the best moment and dig. "You mentioned the second install earlier. Say more about that." This is usually the strongest ten minutes of the call. |
| 40–45 | "Is there anything I should have asked?" Then agree who approves quotes, and by when. |
Two rules for the interviewer. Don't argue or correct on the call; note it and check later. And let silences sit. The answer after a pause is often better than the first one.
After the call
- Transcribe it in full and keep the timestamps, so any quote can be traced back to the recording.
- Mark the lines worth quoting. A good call gives you more than you'll use.
- Draft in the expert's voice. Their phrasing, their examples, their opinions. Smooth the grammar, not the personality.
- Send every quote back for approval. Direct quotes and any claim attributed to the expert go to them before anything is published. They can soften a line, fix a figure or pull something they said off the cuff. We'd rather lose a sharp quote than publish one the expert regrets.
- Check the facts. If the expert mentions a figure, we ask where it comes from and either link the source or cut it. No invented numbers, and no invented quotes.
- Hand over the transcript. It's yours to keep and reuse.
One transcript, three pieces
| Piece | Built from | Roughly |
|---|---|---|
| The main article | The core questions plus the dig-deeper section | 1,500–2,200 words in the expert's voice |
| A second, shorter article | The best tangent: the story or disagreement that didn't fit the main argument | Up to 1,800 words |
| An FAQ block or a newsletter edition | The quick, direct answers to customer questions | 4–6 questions added to a service page, or one newsletter edition |
Three is realistic for a good call. It isn't automatic. Some interviews give you one strong article and a handful of FAQ answers, which is still a fair return on 45 minutes of someone's time.
One caution: each piece needs its own angle. Three versions of the same argument will compete with each other in search, and you'll be back to refresh, merge or delete within a year.
What can go wrong
- The expert stays vague. Ask for an example. Then ask for a specific one. "Last month" gets better answers than "usually."
- They mention something you can't publish. A client's name, an internal number. Note it, leave it out, and don't make a thing of it on the call.
- Quote approval drags on for weeks. Agree the turnaround before the call and name a backup approver.
- Legal or compliance has to see it. Find that out before you schedule, not after you've drafted.
How we run it
Our expert-led content is built on this process. A single expert-interview article is $950: the 45-minute recorded interview with questions sent ahead, 1,500–2,200 words in your expert's voice, quotes approved by them, two revision rounds, and the transcript handed over. It's delivered 10 business days after the interview.
On a plan, an expert-interview article counts as 1½ slots. Cadence 8 ($3,900/mo) includes one a month and Cadence 14 ($6,400/mo) includes two, and those included articles count as 1 slot each instead of 1½.
We may use AI tools to help with research and outlines. A person writes, edits and fact-checks every piece, and nothing attributed to your expert goes live without their sign-off.
Good expert content can't promise a ranking, and we won't pretend it can. It gives you pages built from what your people know, not from whatever already sits on page one of Google. That part you control.
