So, let me tell you about Late Night Internet Marketing with Mark Mason.
Let’s start with the obvious. My name is Mark Mason — that’s my real name, and I’m just a regular guy (just like you, I suppose). Of course, you might be a gal, in which case there are some significant differences – but none of them are important when it comes to Internet Marketing. If you want to see just how “regular” I am, here is a glimpse into my life.
This blog (LateNightIM.com) is my personal Internet Marketing blog of and serves as the home of the Late Night Internet Marketing Podcast. The blog and podcast are a labor of love for me and are mostly dedicated to my personal account of my Internet Marketing journey.
My goal for the blog is simple — to help people. It is true that the blog makes money, but that is not the main reason I do it. Sure, the money helps my motivation, but this blog and podcast are way too much work for that to be the only reason. I actually warn people all the time not to ever build any business “just for the money.” That sort of motivation just doesn’t last. Sometimes what I say when asked about my business is that “I help people profitably.”
The important thing is that the emphasis is on help. You can hear more about me and why I do what I do on Episode 8 of The Awesome Podcast.
What gets me excited is when I get feedback like this from people that I have never met. Just knowing that I have helped someone in a small way is very rewarding for me.
So What Is Internet Marketing?
Internet Marketing can mean almost anything these days. As it turns out, “Internet Marketing” in the way that I mean is just a fancy phrase for “making money on the internet.” To do it well, you need to create value and deliver it to your visitors. If you do that, your visitors will reward you with pageviews, clicks, and purchases.
I’m fascinated with the entire process of making money online (not so much the money itself), and this blog chronicles my experience figuring it all out. Now, I am not saying that money is bad. In fact, it’s interesting that Internet Marketing was the only hobby that I have ever had that was cash flow positive. I say “was” because I now consider this to be a business about helping people — not just a hobby.
In The Beginning, There Was MasonWorld.com
For years, MasonWorld.com served as my personal domain used primarily for redirecting email (I got tired of sending out those “my email address has changed” notices). Several times in the past, I have used the latenightim.com domain for static “Web 1.0” type sites. A self-proclaimed computer geek, I used to run my own Linux-based web host and router out of a closet in my study. This was in an era when you had to work for days just to get the video to work on a Linux install. At one point, I even had to add an extra air conditioning vent in that closet to fade the heat from the screaming fast 133 megahertz Pentium microprocessor and 256 Meg of RAM.
That home-made Apache server with a 1G hard drive, slow as it was, worked fine, but it was always hard to update the content. Static sites just weren’t very interesting. Plus, in the pre-blog era, there just wasn’t much to say (so I thought). On top of that, I had a real job in industry and a growing family, so time was always in short supply.
The Origin of Late Night Internet Marketing
Welcome to Web 2.0. In November of 2007, I saw a clip on the Today Show about this retired guy making $11,000 per month with a website on the internet. That really got my attention — not because of the money, but because of the way the guy made the money. Granted, $11,000 a month is nothing to sneeze at. However, this guy was making money selling advertising through Google Adsense. I later learned that this was a small part of something called “Internet Marketing.”
So, I started trying to understand Internet Marketing. At first, all I could find were the “free money” people telling me how I could make ZILLIONS of dollars at home if I only spent $97 on their report (previously DISCOUNTED from the introductory price of $76346.) These snake oil salesmen were just like the “make money at home stuffing envelopes” guys in the classifieds. It took me weeks and months to sort through all of the noise to find the legitimate business opportunities out there, understand the terminology, figure out how to set up a blog, know how to get traffic, etc. So, I thought a way to give back would be to chronicle my experiences to save those that come behind me some time. And so, Late Night Internet Marketing was born.
The Vision For Late Night Internet Marketing
As cheesy as it sounds, I actually have a vision and a mission statement written down for the Late Night Internet Marketing brand.
Late Night Internet Marketing Vision: To help as many people as possible realize the dream of owning their own profitable part-time internet business.
Late Night Internet Marketing Mission: Be the most helpful, trusted and respected resource on the internet for information about starting and growing a profitable part-time internet business. Create enormous value by generating outstanding content doing, teaching and talking about internet marketing.
So that’s about it. If you want to know more about me personally, check out my personal site at MarkMason.com. If you want to connect, you can look me up through the contact page. You can also check out a post I wrote a while about a typical day in the life of Mark Mason.
I’d love to hear from you. If you have thoughts about this about page, be sure to leave a comment below.
Best regards,
Mark
P.S. You can find Mark Mason on Google+. (this P.S. is here to help Google with their author tag stuff in case you are curious).