I just got back from a weekend in New York City for my family reunion… it happens every two years, and usually it’s at one of my aunts’ or uncles’ houses, and now that we’ve passed the torch to the next generation, at one of my cousins’ houses.

But for once, it was hosted by one of my generation who only has a small apartment in a big city… nowhere to park mobile homes or camp on the lawn, as some of the family have traditionally done.

Yup, that’s right… times are a-changin’, and my family descended from Minnesota, Kansas, Virginia, Saskatchewan and Ontario (that’s me) onto the Big Apple… Manhattan.

Start spreading the news,
I’m leaving today,
I want to be a part of it…
New York, New York…

As a souvenir, I bought myself a NY Yankees cap…

Here I am in the La Guardia airport going home with it on; the picture was taken with my camera phone.

Barry’s got a NY Yankees cap too (a little older than mine), and I’m going to be seeing him on the next trip coming up, so we thought it might be interesting to see people’s reactions… two people wearing NY hats, everywhere but NY.

The most fun I had was on the first night, Saturday night, when my cousin Jim (the native New Yorker who grew up in Kansas City then lived in Chicago during the University years) took a few of us out for a night on the town. I was the instigator… my point was, it was Saturday night in New York city… why would we want to turn in with all our parents, right after the jazz show we all attended, when we were in the city that never sleeps?

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This weekend I was at Ken McArthur’s JVAlert Live Seminar in Philadelphia… it was actually my first JVAlert, and much more intimate than I expected.

I was supposed to spend the weekend interviewing as many speakers and experts as possible on video for a project Ken and I are working on, but there was a mixup in communication and I only could get three of them.

Lesson 1: Always confirm that things are in place as much as you can before taking action on them, to avoid miscommunications and breakdowns in the process.

Lesson 2: Keeping Lesson 1 in mind, don’t neglect to take action simply because you’re spending too much time trying to get it all right; nothing will ever go exactly according to plan, so jump in and be ready to adapt, overcome and improvise along the way.

And by the way, if you’re ever planning to do on-camera interviews (and you should consider that if you’re trying to do interviews for online info-products or traffic generators), here are a few tips to keep it professional looking.

These are assuming you want to be on-camera with the guest, rather than off-camera like a documentary:

1. On-Camera Positioning: Make sure you’re both facing towards the camera, but not looking at it; so you don’t want to be in profile to the viewers, you want them to see 3/4 of your face at least, but at the same time the conversation is with your guest, not the audience.

2. Interview Notes: Try not to work with notes, unless you’re doing a lot of editing and can cut out the parts with you looking at them; it’s best to listen and respond to the answers with another question.

But if you do have a list of topics you’d like to cover, consider making a list of one-word bullet points that you can place off to the side and glance at occasionally from where you’re sitting.

3. Mic Technique: If it’s a short interview, you can use a hand-held mic; don’t forget to point it towards the guest’s mouth when they’re speaking, and to yourself when you’re speaking. Practice with a hairbrush if you have to.

But if it’s a longer interview, you’ll need to use lavs or a boom mic; you’ll never be able to hold up the hand-held mic for that long.

Barry and Jody, my partners at Masters of the Secret, also came to this one. Jody spends most of his time behind the computer, so it’s great to get him out mingling with people.

And Barry and I just love meeting others face to face that we’ve worked with over the internet, so it was a perfect opportunity to expand our circle of influence, meet some new contacts, and for me, some new interviewees.

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I just got back from my first event speaking in the internet marketing arena.

And I have to say, it was a blast!

It was Ken McArthur’s Get Your Product Done workshop in Atlanta, Georgia, and it was HOT!

Actually the event was quite intimate — not your average big seminar, but about 30 to 40 participants working with us one-on-one between the speeches.

I shared the stage with Harris Fellman, Jason Oman, Matt Bacak, Simon Leung, Alex Nghiem, Frank Sousa, Glenn Dietzel, Ben Mack, and more.

The picture above some of us on the expert panel, listening to Jason Oman make a point.

The whole event was about product creation… so of course I spoke about interviewing, and had my new product for sale: Interviewing Unwrapped.

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I just got back from a weekend trip to Chicago… where Barry Goss and I attended the System Seminar.

Apparently Barry has been wanting to attend it for years… but it was actually the first I had heard of it. Coincidentally, Brad Callen wanted me to interview Ken McCarthy for him — the founder of System Seminar — so it was one of those small world “coincidental” stories (except that there’s no such thing as coincidences).

Anyhow, I was able to work a deal with Ken for tickets in exchange for some work — and Barry paid for the hotel and airfare as an exchange for his ticket, so it didn’t cost me anything but some time.

The seminar itself didn’t deliver the type of advanced info I was hoping for — there’s a choice of sessions to take, and the ones I chose all seemed kind of basic for me. But I did get a chance to meet Perry Marshall, Tim Knox, Sherman Hu and Gary Ambrose face-to-face for the first time, after interviewing both of them on the phone.

I also met Charles Amith, who had been an affiliate for ClickBank Affiliate Confessions (that’s him on the left in the picture), as well as Ari Galper and John Carlton, among others.

But probably the most fun was connecting with Barry, face to face for the first time.

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