Interview Knight Project

Yesterday afternoon I did an experiment by sending 15k people on our email newsletter that I’m going to make myself available for 10 email-based interviews on September 7th… and they could ask me any questions regarding article writing or marketing as it applied to their niche.

The first 10 interview slots were taken up in 1 hour and 18 minutes. Many of the interview questions were very interesting…and you just never know how your market is thinking until you start asking them to ask you questions! :-)

Here are a few of the questions I’ll be answering:

Did you ever consider throwing in the towel?

Never. If I threw in the towel, then I’d have nothing to dry the sweat from my forehead and all of the foreheads of our team members…and then we’d be dripping all over the floor and it’d be messy.

Seriously, We’ve had web projects that were failures…by the dozens. Sometimes throwing in the towel saves you; but in this case, we knew from August 4th of 2004 on (when we destroyed the existing site and rebuilt it from the ground up) that our core competencies had just aligned with a market perfectly waiting for us to interact.

How long have you been writing Chris?

I think I discovered that I enjoyed creative writing in 7th or 8th grade… writing fiction was fun even though I don’t enjoy reading fiction. 100% of what I read is non-fiction, or at least that’s the attempt. Today, I enjoy writing non-fictional works.

What does it feel like to wake up every morning as YOU and get going on your day?! Are you energized? Are you passionate about what you do?

First, I like waking up as “ME” because if I didn’t, I’d be someone else and then that’d be an odd feeling. I like being me. I hope everyone likes being themselves. To thyn own self be true.
How much luckier can I get that I get to wake up each day and play for work.


I normally get up around 4:30-6am and I spend the first 90 seconds visualizing what I want for my day, my body, my life and how I want to respond to others.

Then, it’s full throttle by minute 2 of being awake because there are too many things not done yet in this lifetime that need to be done.

One of the things that keeps me energized is how I’ve been able to create a life that allows me to spend 1-3 hours every day in fitness activities. Last night I had a 30 minute session with my trainer and then an hour of intense racquetball. Other days I’ll run a 2.5-3.5 mile sprint or bike for 90 minutes at race speed or attend a Pilates core training class… and I enjoy swimming also. Without the strong fitness component to my days, I’d never be able to bring an intensity to my job. Since April when I re-committed to my fitness self, I’ve dropped 12.5 lbs of fat and added 3-5 lbs of lean muscle (I don’t measure my progress in body weight, but rather body fat percentage).

Another energizer at work is getting to work with a very talented team. They are my keys to freedom and often they execute their roles better than I could. I’m amazed at some of the stuff our dev guys pull off and our editorial team is innovating their way to improved efficiencies every day.

Am I passionate about what I do? Heck yeah. This is fun. If I can’t have fun doing something, then I know it’ll be doomed to failure.

There are activities that I don’t find as ‘fun’ and I have very little passion for daily operations, basic accounting, etc… but I’ve surrounded myself with smart people and excellent managers that allow me the entrepreneurial freedom to create more opportunity for every stakeholder attached to this business.

I’m energized about planning for the future and then seeing those plans realized. We have much ceiling in this lifetime to explore together.

—-

Many of the other hundred+ questions that came in were very specific to article writing & marketing mechanics… so I look forward to answering them all on September 7th.

Posted by on August 25, 2006 at 7:32 am | 4,333 views

11 Comments »


1
Ramon Greenwood writes:

Do services that distribute articles to multiple e-zines really work?

If so, which one(ones) do you recommend?

Many thanks…Ramon

Comment provided August 25, 2006 at 7:49 AM

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2
Christopher M. Knight writes:

Ramon,

Politically speaking, we don’t recommend any 3rd party article distribution service provider… because we accept submissions from a handful of them. And no, we don’t disclose who we accept 3rd party submissions from for fear of creating any kind of implied endorsement.

There are two types of those providers:

1) Human personalized service that matches your content with actual human ezine publishers in their personal network.

2) Automated blasters.

One often overlooked thing in your question is this question: How could you achieve more of the results you’re looking for from article marketing without doing all of the work yourself? Hire a low cost college intern… ding ding ding, YES!

Comment provided August 25, 2006 at 7:56 AM

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3
Ed Howes writes:

Hey Chris,

No doubt in my mind this promotion is a stroke of genius. Glad to see you have lost no time in putting it to good use.

Comment provided August 25, 2006 at 8:20 AM

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4
Michael Werner writes:

One of the funniest men, in my opinion, to have graced this planet, is Bob Newhart, and he once said something like this:

If you’re not enjoying your work, you’re probably not doing it very well. And if you’re not doing it very well, you’re likely not having any fun. And, if you’re not having any fun, what in the hell are you doing here?

Priceless words, don’t you think?

And, Chris, it sounds like you’ve hit that sweet spot yourself.

Keep up the good work.

Comment provided August 25, 2006 at 9:34 AM

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5
Dina writes:

So magnetic, you are!

;)

Comment provided August 25, 2006 at 9:35 AM

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6
Michael Werner writes:

Chris,

Great idea, by the way. I think I’m going to try something similar on my own blog at http://www.DreamJobsDialog.com.

I’ll let you know how it goes.

Michael

Comment provided August 25, 2006 at 9:35 AM

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7
Christopher M. Knight writes:

Michael,

Best way to hit the sweet spot in life is to swing with a bigger racquet.

Only the fools swing with small 1970’s racquets.

Ok, I suppose that was a bit of my racquetball nerdyness..

Yeah, I loved Bob Newhart also! He had a dry sense of humor that was always funny…not to mention Darryl and his other brother Darryl.

Comment provided August 25, 2006 at 9:42 AM

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8
Ed Howes writes:

Had a coversation with a phone company worker who called me to check on my service satisfaction and possible sale. I asked her if she had any fun at work. “Well, yeah – NO! Then today is your lucky day. We chatted about my recent service problem and she told me the solution. But for ten minutes we were just two strangers having a conversation and I made a few funnies. I told her that she did a great job of helping me with a problem, that could and should have been handled by someone a month ago. I asked to speak to her supervisor and told her how this worked had helped me and was worthy of some praise for a job well done. The supervisor was pleased. Because I was determined to have some fun, I got to brighten the day for two people who can only hate what they are doing.Wouldn’t it be wonderful if such folks were a tiny minority?

Comment provided August 25, 2006 at 10:22 AM

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9
Michael Werner writes:

Ed, wow! Love that story.

Just can’t understand how people work in jobs they deplore. Don’t get it, for all the excuses in the world.

Makes ZERO sense to me.

So much so, that a few years ago, when I was in a hiatus with my earlier computer-training-software passion at InfoSource, Inc., I started a company to create and sells books about dream jobs, Dream Jobs To Go; and today run (as my “other job”) a blog at http://www.DreamJobsDialog.com.

Michael “Lovin’ My Dream Job” Werner

Comment provided August 25, 2006 at 11:36 AM

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10
Rascal writes:

Early Evening Chris :)
Is it possible to post automaticly my “Rascal’s Blog” which I create via MySpace and post magacilly to my http://Milesbooks.com and http://Jesus4You.ws websites? If so how? When I find time, which is rarely, I change the emoticons which are not compatible ~ to my yahoo 360 blog.
I do’t care if “Smilies” are included or not…

Also, I just noticed an RSS Feed option for your blog. Later this nite, I’ll attempt to link it to the “Write EzineArticles” section of my websites.

Thank you for all of your helps, visionary buddy :)

~Rub-it “Another Question Appears”~

Rascal :))

Comment provided August 26, 2006 at 1:39 AM

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11
Christopher M. Knight writes:

Rascal,

There are a few ways to do it, but it all depends on what type of CMS you are running (Content Management System). Some CMS’s have this ability built-in where others allow you to plug in a module to do RSS to .HTML.

RSS is a beautiful thing. : – )

Comment provided September 26, 2006 at 8:19 PM

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