This is a question I am sometimes asked by people who want to profile their teams.

You'll know yourself that visiting websites' team pages is a bland undertaking.

Hi, my name is Jim. I am a CPA, like football and my favourite food is vanilla slice.

Or:

Hi, I'm Selena. I love property law, have three children, and one thing people don't know about me is that sometimes I don't wear stilettos.

Uuurrrrrggghhhhhhh

What you want to know is, Who is Jim? Why would I work with him? How do I know that his personality and my personality are a good fit? What is it about him that makes him a perfect fit for this company? What was the toughest thing he ever worked on and why? Who's been his biggest influence and why? What's inside his head??

There are so many more questions.

If you're approaching a creative business, it's even more important to get a feel for personality.

Imagine, you're attempting to find an illustrator for a killer keynote you've got coming up.

You disembark from your Internet Surfboard onto the sand, into a girly, curly-text, pink site with some glossy portfolio shots and some stylised Typical Female Entrepreneur photographs.

If you're a bloke, you immediately feel that this chick is not for you. But you know what, she might be if you could learn more about her, right? Her illustration style might be bang-on.

The trouble is, her About Page talks about her career and not much about who she is, how she works, or why it's important that YOU, yes YOU, work with her.

My advice to you is that writing good articles about people can be a goldmine for your sales opportunities.

You can link to them from team bios, splash banners about on your site and third-party sites, use them in social media, pitch them to editors when your lawyers win awards... there are SO many ways that they're useful.

So the question is: How do you do it?

Here's how: By asking great questions.

Great articles are rooted in great questions.

And those questions are used by someone who knows how to obtain the conversation they want to have.

That's just a fact.

All great feature articles have their bases in outstanding interviews. And the only way to achieve an outstanding interview is:

1. Great research into your subject (yes even if you work with them), because it'll give you an insight into what lights this person up.

2. The ability to interrogate them without them feeling interrogated. This is truly the basis of all good conversational arts. Don't do this until you're great at conversation. (The definition of "great at conversation" is saying nothing while the other person spends the entire time talking, by the way.) If you're not great at conversation, go read Dale Carnegie. And if you haven't heard of Dale Carnegie, then you've got a long way to go, Sunshine.

3. Sitting with the outcome of your interview and understanding what story you want to tell.

People often make the mistake of thinking that a feature article is a simple retelling.

It isn't.

It's primary research, with a perspective applied, and a storyteller's approach.

So what story are you wanting to tell about this person?

Find that perspective. Then write.

And finally, the thing to remember is that it isn't about you, the writer.

It's about your subject. You want other people to see that light shining from you subject, to get a feeling about them that they're drawn to.

Allow your team members' profiles to draw people in.

Most people recommend that you create professional biographies, but I teach the exact opposite.

Create personal biographies.

They're interesting. They're powerful. They work.

This entire perspective underpins the interviews that I do that form part of all case studies I create. 

Discover more about them at https://brutalpixie.com/case-studies

~ Leticia Mooney