AIDAN

We are episode number 82 here today, and I'm joined with a special guest who I'm going to give you a bit of an introduction to right here, right now, because this is part of our decoding success series. This is in fact, the fourth episode where we've had a special guest come in and share a little bit about their story and about how they have cracked the code, as it were, to seeing success online.

Now, the person that I've got with us here today is someone who I've first met online, I want to say seven, eight years ago. I don't even remember at this point, but he's a guy who's been around the block many, many times in the online world and is someone who seems to have a track record where anything he's really set his mind to, he's been able to build an income around online.

We've got Mark Mason coming in today from Texas. I've really got to know Mark over the past few years as a member of our Blueprint Academy Mastermind, and we've hit golf balls together, we've had many different conversations in person and online as well. So, Mark, thanks for taking some time out of your day to be with us.

MARK

It's really great to be here. It's been more than seven years, certainly, maybe we met or had a face to face conversation that time ago, but gosh, man, I've been following you since you got together with Steve..

AIDAN

It must have been ten or 15 years.

MARK

I've learned so much from you over the last decade, so here's my opportunity to publicly say thank you. It's been amazing.

AIDAN

Oh, dude, let me thank you because you've been there and you've implemented and you've got a lot of results to show for it. So maybe you could start by giving a little bit of a background to your journey. Why did you want to get started with an online business in the first place, and what are some of the different things that you've done over the years online?

MARK

Yeah. So I have management position in an extremely large electronics company here in Dallas, and it's got a worldwide footprint, and I love that job. I'm different than a lot of the cubicle escape stories that you hear online. I love my day job, but back in 2007, 2009 time frame when the economy turned down, I was put in a position where I had to lay a bunch of people off, and it worked out for me. I actually got a promotion in that crazy time, but I realized that I really wanted to have a plan B.

And so I started looking at online business opportunities, what I could do, and I saw this story on CBS about a guy who was a plumber who wrote down everything he knew about plumbing on the Internet, and he started making money with AdSense. And I thought, you know, I know things I can write them down. I can make AdSense websites, and that's how it all started. And that was back in 2007.

AIDAN

It's crazy. AdSense is one of the things that we're still doing today. Talking about content creation, it's a little bit different today compared to 2007 when we were both getting started doing that kind of a thing because now you've got these AI tools where you can say, "Give me a 1000-word article about how to unblock a pipe," and voila, you'll get it. It's amazing how a lot of things have changed, but a lot of things have just stayed the same.

MARK

Yeah, it's exactly true. I think that's one of the great things about investing, and that's how I think about it in learning about Internet marketing and related businesses is really it's tools for a toolkit, and that toolkit is, for the most part, evergreen. Some details around the particular tools or the exact methodologies will evolve over time, but the fundamental concepts of matching offers with buyers, that's what marketing is really about. That fundamental concept and the way we can do that, that's evergreen and fundamental, and so you can just build on that as you learn about marketing. Really, that's the way to really build a business in the online space, in my opinion.

AIDAN

Was AdSense the first thing that really sort of started working for you? Or was there something else, affiliate marketing or something else, that you did early on that gave you proof of concept that "Oh yeah, this does actually work for me"?

MARK

Yeah. The first time I ever made a dime, I made $0.69 in AdSense revenue, $0.69. Okay. And that was the most exciting $0.69 I'd ever seen because I realized immediately if I could make sixty nine cents, I could make $6.90 or $69 or $600. And so that really uncorked it for me.

The first time I really made recurring revenue was with AdSense as well, where I put up a small website that talked about how to get into law school and I wrote some articles about that and that generated $5 a day for a couple of years, and that was amazing. But as far as something that really worked, I think the thing that always has worked for me, that I always have come back to has been affiliate marketing of various flavors. That is a thing that applies across so many different niches and in so many different businesses. Even for brick-and-mortar businesses, this can be a fantastic way.

As far as the thing that's really worked, a lot of things have worked, but I think affiliate marketing is the one that I point to as something that continues to work year in and year out for more than a decade.

AIDAN

Well, this is another one of the models that the more things change, the more they sort of stay the same because the affiliate marketing websites I'm building now are actually very similar to what we were doing almost a couple of decades ago. We use different tools and different technology and they're a lot more sophisticated than when we used to build things. I don't know about you, but I used to use Dreamweaver. What did you used to use to build your pages?

MARK

It's a thing called FrontPage or something, Microsoft FrontPage, the competing software to Dreamweaver.
 

AIDAN

And we had this little FTP uploading system, and even uploading pages in the time of dial up for a while there where you'd have a tiny page and it'd take a little bit of time to upload. We're past that now. We can get things published very quickly, but the foundations of the model really haven't changed all that much.

What were some of the biggest challenges that you saw when you were dipping your toes in the water and starting to get established as an online marketer?

MARK

Yeah, I'll tell you, by far, I mean I distinctly remember deciding I wanted to do this and starting to search on the internet just like everyone does. This was really before YouTube was the massive thing that it is now, and so just reading, and I couldn't even make sense of the words. I remember now I understand that there are people like you that offer plans that you can follow, that are vetted and are shown to work, that are based on experience, but then I remember this sort of feeling of drowning in a sea of information, and frankly, a lot of it ended up being misinformation and having to wade through all that.

That is a journey that I would not ever repeat, not just in marketing, but just in general. I would never try to just completely figure out things on my own from scratch ever again. I understand the value of proven systems from proven instructors, and so that's a big lesson learned for me that goes all the way back to 2007, 2009.

AIDAN

That was the same for me between 2005 to 2007 where, to your point, there really weren't the same types of online courses and blueprints available back then. In fact, I remember going to offline seminars where people would come in and they would give you an overview and they'd do their pitch and I'd buy these offline books, like printouts, folders with information and then take it home and try to do it. Or even, I remember buying an online course, I can't remember who did it, but it was a pack of CDs, and I took the CDs home, put them in my computer and it was actually about affiliate marketing. Fair to say we've advanced a fair bit since then.

What about mistakes that you made either way back at the beginning? Obviously, you mentioned trying to sort of using trial and error to learn everything yourself. That was one. Any other mistakes that you made early on in your online marketing career, or even recently, that you would share with folks?

MARK

Yeah, I think one of the biggest mistakes that new entrepreneurs make and I certainly made and I still have to fight against today, is just this shiny object syndrome. The truth is, there's no substitute for time over target and hard work in building businesses. And by hard work, I don't really mean it's truly hard. I just mean that you need to do some work. You need to create value to get value.

I think it's easy to fall in this trap of working on something that sounds exciting, encountering a difficulty, and then jumping to the next thing rather than sorting out what's happening and staying the course. Most people that I've interacted with that fail in online business, as you know very well, they fail because they quit too soon. I'm not different than that. I had that same issue where I didn't stay the course, and so that's a big mistake that I made and that I continue to guard against even today, more than a decade later.

AIDAN

And how have you been able to learn to sort of balance building your online business with holding down a day job and the family and everything else that life throws at you? Because I think this is one of the tricky areas, challenges. It's not necessarily a mistake, but certainly a challenge that people face when they realize, "Oh, I'm trying to start this online business, but I've also got my family," and in a lot of cases, a day job as well. How have you managed that? Do you set time aside? What's your sort of idea around that?

MARK

Yeah, I have two simple things that I keep at the top of the list when I'm answering that kind of question. One is it's really critical that even for me, after doing this for so long, that I stay completely crystal clear about why I'm doing what I'm doing. That needs to be a really good reason. If you know exactly why you're doing what you're doing, that really helps you decide what you should be doing, if you know why you're doing the things that you're doing.

That includes hard questions like "Should I go to my son's baseball game or listen to a webinar?" I mean, I need to know why how that fits in. The reality is, a lot of people will tell you, "Well, you just got to knuckle down and hustle," and I think that's great if you can do that, knuckling down and hustling and skipping sleep and all these things are at least short-term options. They're not very good long-term options.

The one thing I would say is make sure that you do something, even if it's just five minutes or ten minutes, make sure that you do something to move your business forward each and every day without fail, and I mean something that's actually intentional and productive, not checking Facebook. I'm talking about actually taking an action, a small action that will move your business forward. What happens is sometimes, by accident, those five minute sessions turn into 30 minutes sessions or an hour. Sometimes that small thing that you did snowballs into something much bigger, and what happens is when you aggregate those small, consistent steps over a year or a couple of years or a decade, you're going to like the results, because you've got intentional, focused progress that's continuous. It builds on itself.

That's the biggest advice that I always give people that are just starting out, is to make sure you're making consistent progress. And the reverse of that, the terrible thing is "Oh, I didn't do anything yesterday, and now I didn't do anything this week," and suddenly a month has gone by and you haven't made progress on anything. What do you do at that point? You just give up. And so that daily progress, not only is it a catalyst for something much, much bigger, it also puts you in the right mindset to be successful because you're keeping what's important top of mind.

AIDAN

Couldn't agree more to that. I think key thing to add to that, and you mentioned it a moment ago, was that you need to have a plan that you're sort of working towards because you could be taking action every single day, but if it's not deliberate action, if it's not action that's aligned with where you want to get to one day in the future, then you're just making progress in any old direction, and that's not going to get you to the finish line.

So how do you fit that in? Do you get up early in the morning? Do you tinker on things during lunchtime? Have you got a flexible work schedule? How do you actually manage to do that with a family and a day job?

MARK

Yeah, all of the above, and sometimes creatively. Early in the morning works sometimes, depending on what's going on. Driving in the car, for example, I listen to this podcast in my car and what am I really doing there? I'm learning. I'm sharpening the saw, as Stephen Covey would say. But more than that, sometimes I've gotten creative, like involving my children in my business. So, as you well know, my, at the time, 14 year old son and I, we sold $50,000 worth of stuff online following one of your programs. That was something that we did together, and so I was able to check two checkboxes. One was I was able to validate that business model and incorporate that into my business, but two, I got to spend time with my son. And we still talk about that summer today when we did that. He's constantly asking me, "When's Aidan coming out with something new? I'm ready to do the next thing."

You can be creative and do that. The other thing is it's good to communicate with the people in your life that you're balancing with, so that they understand when you're not in there watching the 47th episode of Survivor with them, it's because you're doing a thing, and it has this why behind it. A lot of times, they're going to be part of that why, and they're going to understand and support you, and so open communication in those situations is incredibly valuable.

AIDAN

Yeah, I think managing expectations is always a key thing in any kind of relationship, be it business, be it personal, be it with kids. It's an easy way to avoid breakdown in communication and issues that come with that.

You spoke about getting help from your son. How about getting help from other people, like virtual assistants, outsourcing? Do you do any outsourcing or hire any online services or anything?

MARK

Yeah, I've used virtual assistants, both sort of in the small way, like from something simple like Fiverr, I've hired people off of Upwork or similar sites like that over the years, and I have one virtual assistant that's been with me since 2009. She still works with me today. And I've had virtual assistants come and go, depending on the need. For example, when I was heavy in e-commerce, I hired someone that my virtual assistant knew to write product listings for me when I was doing massive numbers of listings per day. So depending on what the needs are absolutely.

I've had people tell me, "Well, you shouldn't be hiring people from offshore and using virtual assistants like that." One virtual assistant that I hired left her job as a nurse to come work for me because I was paying her more than she was making as a nurse. So not only am I able to get help that I need at a cost that I can afford, I feel like I'm making a lot of people's lives better when I work around the world.

AIDAN

Oh, totally. It's a win-win both ways. You get to tap into some great knowledge, oftentimes knowledge that's very qualified, talent that's qualified, but yeah, for sure. I mean, the opportunity for someone in a developing country, and we often use the Philippines as one of our big sources, we use India, China, Pakistan, South America as well, and paying in US Dollars goes a long way in these places. I live in Argentina, and I can tell you down here, if someone makes US$1,000 a month, that's a pretty good salary down here for a lot of people. Money can go a long, long way when you're outsourcing offshore.

Now, the last thing I really want to sort of dive into here, and this has already been an absolute honeypot gold mine of ideas here, but how has your mindset changed? Because when you started your online business, you were dipping your toes in the water. You were trying out different things to figure out what worked. Nowadays, you've been around the block. It's probably an easier question to explain the things you haven't done online versus the things that you have done because you've tried basically everything. How's your mindset changed and developed over the past 15+ years that you've been doing this?

MARK

Yeah, I think I have built several small businesses over the years inside of this umbrella of Internet marketing. Many, many have been successful, and by success, I mean have been profitable. The challenge is I built a couple of businesses that weren't any fun to run at all. I mean, they were terrible and they had terrible customer service burdens or other things that just didn't light my fire.

I like to do things like we're doing now. I like to help people. I like to solve interesting marketing problems and win at marketing, but I'm not really very interested in filling things in boxes and so forth. And so one of the big mindset shifts for me is making sure that as I build a business out, that I make sure that I'm doing the things that I really want to do, and I'm making sure that I can find people that want to do the things that I don't want to do.

The classic example is accounting. I'm terrible at accounting. Can I do it? Sure. I have 1000 hours of math in college as a result of engineering. Do I want to? Absolutely not. And so one big mind shift has been this idea of making sure that I work on things that I really enjoy because that makes it not like work. And then the second thing I would say is that I'm starting to move more from a person who's interested in a lot of things and trying a lot of things and doing different things to building a sustainable business that can take me into retirement.

Because at this time I've been at my current day job for 30 years, so pretty soon might be a good time for me to do something new full time, and that might be Internet marketing. And so I'm looking for moving, I think, transitioning from side hustle mode, which is what I'd call what I've been in for the last decade, to "full time" entrepreneur mode where that's really the only thing that I worked on day to day.

AIDAN

Yeah, I think when you decide and make that firm decision and say "From here on forward, this is what I'm going to be focusing on," you've already spoken multiple times here about the why and how that's the fire that keeps you going, when you combine those two things and if you find a recipe that can kind of guide you there, it's then just a case of waking up each morning and taking those small steps forward, to your point, that small amount of deliberate action each day. I feel like for people who do that, it's only a question of time until they're absolutely crushing it.

Now, the last question I've got for you here, for the person that's listening to this podcast who hasn't seen that success online yet or is not at the point where they've earned hundreds of thousands of dollars online, what advice would you give them as they're starting out or pursuing this journey of online business?

MARK

Yeah, four simple and quick pieces of advice. One is know exactly why you're doing it. What are you trying to accomplish? And try to be running towards something instead of away from something. That's maybe another whole podcast episode we could talk about, about understanding your why, but don't be just trying to avoid a job you don't like. Try and build something you love. Know why you're doing what you're doing.

The second thing is, I already mentioned, make steps towards your goal every day. Even if it's a tiny little baby step. Make continuous forward progress that will integrate over time, and amazing things will happen if you're able to accomplish that. And then the third thing that I would say is avoid being the person who quits just before the magic happens. I see that mistake all the time.

The fourth thing I'll say before I give you the bonus tip is make sure you have a great plan. I mean, you've got to have a solid plan. Don't just wander around in the desert for 25 years and expect magic to happen. Have a plan, and what goes with that, and this would be the bonus tip, is be responsible financially, but don't be afraid to invest. I think one of the things that I see a lot of times is people say, "I want to make six figures a month, but I don't want to spend a dime." That doesn't make a lot of sense. The barrier to entry in marketing and Internet marketing space is super low, way lower than buying a McDonald's. It's really small, but it's not zero, and you shouldn't expect it to be.

Invest in yourself, invest in people that you trust, and you'll get that investment back tenfold or hundredfold or thousandfold over time.

AIDAN

That's brilliant. I think it's a great way to sum everything here that we've spoken about up. We're going to make sure that you can get a transcript and all the notes and everything else as always, over at episode number 82 of The Growth Booth.

Mark, I know that you've got a podcast as well. I'd love for you to share how people can find that and listen to some of the different episodes that you've put out. I know you've got some great episodes there. How can people find out about what your podcast is?

MARK

Well, thank you very much. My podcast is called Late Night Internet Marketing, for obvious reasons, because I work on my Internet business late at night and I come at Internet marketing from the perspective of a side hustler. Just look me up in Apple Music and you'll find me. I'm also at latenightinternetmarketing.com.

AIDAN

Perfect. Easy-peasy. We'll make sure we get that link, the transcript and everything else in the show notes, which you'll get over at episode number 82 of The Growth Booth. Thank you once again, Mark. Real pleasure to have you here. As always, it's fantastic to catch up with you and hopefully next time we are in person, catching up.

To everyone else listening to the show, thanks for tuning in. Make sure you tune in next week for the next episode of The Growth Booth. Bye for now.