Mark Mason: I am prepared to ignite. 1165 is going to be off the chart.
John Lee Dumas: Mark is a regular guy balancing a full-time job with running late night internet marketing. A resource for helping people start and grow profitable part-time businesses online. He has shared his insight and experience with Cliff Ravenscraff, Mr. Podcast Answer Man, Pafflin, Mr. Smart Passive Income, and now with EO Fire and you Fire Nation, and Mark, take a minute and fill any gaps from this intro and give us just a little glimpse into your personal life.
Mark Mason: Back in 2007, John, I was doing the day job thing. I have a big day job. I’m a manager at a very very large Fortune 500 company here in Dallas, and we went through some layoffs, did some stuff. I wasn’t affected but people around me were and I thought, “You know, some people need a plan B, and maybe that includes me,” and I started looking into things that I was interested in and I landed in this internet world that is so fascinating, and here I am helping people do the same thing that I learned to do.
John Lee Dumas: What I love is I was recently at a conference called Thrive, and it was super cool. It was about make money matter, and the opening keynote was Gary Vanderchuck and he got up on stage and he talked long and hard about he’s tired of people just whining about how they don’t have a plan B or about how they don’t have the time to create a plan B or X Y and Z and he goes, “Hey guys, you’re the seven to two-ers. 7:00 p.m. to 2:00 a.m. get crap done.” Now of course it’s Gary Vanderchuck, so he didn’t use that exact language, but you get my drift. He was just like, “Guys, there’s no excuse. If you don’t want to go home and watch America’s Biggest Loser at night, yeah, you’re not going to be building a business on the side, yeah, you’re not going to be building your plan B.” So that’s why I’m excited to bring you on the show, Mark, and really talk to Fire Nation and really share with them the experience of a guy who’s been there, done that, who has the experience of growing and running a late night internet marketing company that’s profitable. I mean, this is exciting stuff. So Mark, today, let’s talk about right now for a second, because you are running a profitable business.
Fire Nation is looking to either amplify their current revenue or to start generating revenue, so how do you generate revenue today?
Mark Mason: Well in the context of the kinds of things that I teach, I basically have this kind of broken down into three things that fall all around helping people. The key for me John, and you do this so well with Fire Nation, is if you want to have a successful business, you’ve got to add value. If your point in business is to make money for yourself, you won’t be successful, especially with a business that you’re running in the margins. You’ve got to have a business that’s based on the principle of helping people. I do that in my business by talking about internet marketing, teaching people internet marketing, and actually doing internet marketing, so in addition to revenue that I generate from late night internet marketing, I actually do internet marketing. One of the things that I found out when I first started trying to learn how to do this stuff online is that there were a lot of people talking about the internet marketing that they were doing five or 10 years ago before they decided to start teaching it.
And one of the things that makes me different and sets me apart and I thought was critical is I keep doing it every day so I can talk to people about what’s working, what’s not working, and so forth.
John Lee Dumas: So what are the products, services, things that you do specifically that bring money in the door?
Mark Mason: Yeah, so I bet the weirdest thing that actually generates money every day –
John Lee Dumas: I love weird things. I could do a whole month on weird things that generate money, because it’s so fascinating.
Mark Mason: Let me ask you a question, because you’ve been around the world. You know what a corn sheller is? I have a website, corn sheller for the four Fire Nation listeners that don’t know what a corn sheller is. It’s kind of an antique farm instrument that farmers used to use to get corn off of the cob, and so I have a website, actually, that contains information, helpful information, about antique corn shellers and actually re-lists and redirects those users to EBay auctions, and when they buy those corn shellers off of EBay, I actually get a commission. That’s probably the most bizarre kind of affiliate marketing that I’m doing. I built that website on a dare one day. It doesn’t generate a ton of money John, but it just goes to show you that the big thing about business these days is matching buyers to offers, right? You’ve got people who have offers, you need to match those to buyers. That’s really what a lot of online internet marketing is all about.
John Lee Dumas: Okay, that was just gold, Fire Nation. That is a critical part. That’s what we can play as roles in the online internet marketing world, and just as entrepreneurs in general. And Mark, it may not be a ton of money, like you were saying, but when you go out to dinner and you’re paying with your credit card and the bill comes, you go, “I actually paid for this meal with proceeds from my corn shelling thing that I set up here,” and that’s pretty darned cool, Fire Nation, and that’s the off the wall type of things in this world that you can do that are so exciting, and that was done off a dare. Mark was dared to do that, next thing you know he’s putting money in his pocket, he’s feeding his family, he’s doing his thing, so that’s really cool. So Mark, just kind of break it down now in more broad terms. What are some other ways that you actually get revenue coming in the doors?
Mark Mason: Yeah, so I think in general if you start with this idea that you’re going to help people, then I think the thing that I usually teach people to do first, the people who are getting started with internet marketing, trying to find a way to get a toe-hold is to create information online that actually helps people. And usually that’s going to lead to legitimate helpful product recommendations and, by the way, also recommendations for products not to buy. These kind of affiliate websites that take something that maybe you’re interested in and tell people, you know, cut through all the bologna, cut through all the stuff online and say, “Look, these are the five most important things about this thing that you’re interested in. Here are the five best products, here’s what we think about them, here are the reviews,” you can do that kind of thing, it’s very helpful to people, and that results usually in commission sales. That’s kind of the baseline idea of affiliate marketing, and as long as you do it in a helpful way, a way that really helps people find solutions to the problems that they have, you can build a sustainable business around that.
John Lee Dumas: Okay, so someone was asking me this question, I would say, listen, pretty much in order, Podcaster’s Paradise, Webinar On Fire, Fire Nation Elite, podcast sponsorships actually is way up there because now I’m over six figures a month in podcast sponsorship revenue alone. Those are the main ways that I’m generating revenue and bringing it in the door. What are yours, Mark?
Mark Mason: Yeah, so the main ways that I generate revenue are with revenue from these affiliate marketing websites, of which I have many, and then revenue from affiliate sales from late night internet marketing when I talk about products online that help internet marketers, they buy those products and I make commissions.
John Lee Dumas: I feel like affiliate paradise is in your future here.
Mark Mason: There you go.
John Lee Dumas: A lot of Fire Nation is going to want to figure out how exactly you’ve become the corn sheller man of the world here. But Mark, I appreciate you kind of letting me pry into that and sharing with Fire Nation the ways you generate revenue, because that’s the hardest thing is getting to that first dollar. Even if those first dollars aren’t that many, it makes it real, and then you just find ways to amplify and to grow and to get into new markets, open up new revenue streams. Before you know it, you have a well-diversified business like Mark and myself and other great entrepreneurs out there. But Mark, it wasn’t always this way, you weren’t always getting money coming in left and right, and it’s tough. The life of an entrepreneur has its ups and downs. I know that, you know that, and I want you to take us to what you consider the worst entrepreneurial moment to date that you’ve had. So Mark, tell us that story, as painful as it is, take us to that moment, relive that, and share it with Fire Nation.
Mark Mason: There have been many. So I think one of the things, you hear all these things, John, about how well Thomas Edison had to fail 10,000 times before he got the light bulb, and you hear all these other stories, but what’s put in front of you is all these successful people, the John Lee Dumases, the Pat Flynns, and what you see is the success. You don’t see all the failures. So I’ve had many. If I had to talk about what the absolute worst entrepreneurial crisis that I’ve had to deal with, that’s a very real kind of crisis that you deal with in this kind of business, is total server meltdown due to attack.
John Lee Dumas: Oh, that’s terrifying.
Mark Mason: And in this, this goes to this kind of business planning, business readiness thing, that I know so much about in my day job, contingency planning, but when you’re working in the margins and you’re just trying to bootstrap, sometimes you don’t think these things through, and so when you’ve got 10 or 20 or 30 websites and they’re all on the same server, John, I’m going to tell you that’s a bad idea. Yeah, so and if your backups aren’t great and you weren’t spending the money and the investment to have that protection, also a bad idea. So I’ve had that kind of crisis happen, and this was a situation, like a lot of our colleagues have been through, where one of my main more popular websites – actually the late night internet marketing site came under attack by what I can tell by the IP traffic was some kind of Chinese hackers with a denial of service attack, and took the whole business down. And it goes from something to absolutely nothing overnight, and took weeks to actually get that back.
So that’s example number one, and I have a second example that I’d like to share with you that I think is another cautionary tale for Fire Nation. When I first started in this business back in 2007 I started with AdSense. That was very popular at the time. Our friend Joel Comm was the AdSense king of the whole world, and he was publishing books on AdSense and we were all making a lot of money generating not so great websites, okay, and lots of them. And one morning I woke up and I had this very terse email from Google and they said, “We’re sorry, your account has been shut down, and not only that, we’re not going to pay you the money we owe you and there’s no recourse for you. This is a final decision.” And what I learned from that, and I think what Fire Nation can think about from that, is not that Google is evil. I certainly don’t believe that. But I wasn’t really Google’s customer. As the advertiser, as the guy placing the ads, as the content provider, I wasn’t the customer. The advertiser was the customer, and so Google really didn’t care so much about what was going on with me, and I had all of my eggs in one basket.
So when you’re building a business out there in Fire Nation, I think you need to be thinking about how the money is moving around, what your leverage is in that equation, and make sure that, as you mentioned earlier, that whatever you’re doing is a little bit diverse, so that if something happens over here with this part of your business, this other part of your business will continue to survive.
John Lee Dumas: So Mark, I actually came into the online entrepreneurial world straight into podcasting, and this was back in 2012. So I kind of missed the whole AdSense run where that was kind of king for a while, but kind of dabbling and kind of just seeing from the fringes what was going on at that time and hearing stories, I really think this ties in nicely into something that you said really early on in this interview, is that you need to find a way to provide massive value to somebody, to an audience. For me that’s Fire Nation, for you that’s your readers, your listeners to your podcast, massive value, Fire Nation. And I’m not going to put words in internet marketers’ mouths or people that did this, so maybe Mark you could kind of agree or disagree with this, but what it seems to me is that a lot of people back then were trying to add as little value as possible and still kind of game the system. So they could just do that over and over again multiple times adding the least amount of value possible to still rank and to still get their ads to work and all of these different things. And yes, that worked for a time, but that’s never going to be a long-term strategy and that’s never going to be something you build a foundation off of, Fire Nation.
So Mark, am I around the ballpark there? What are your thoughts being in that actual game?
Mark Mason: Dude, as usual, you’re totally money. This is just kind of fundamental laws of thermodynamics. If there’s not something valuable generating energy in this thing, generating its own energy where people are attracted to it, it’s just going to simply die. And I’ll tell you, one of my early mentors, Nicole Dean, she’s an affiliate marketer, she told me one time, “Look, Mark, I know you’re making a lot of money doing this AdSense thing,” at the time one of the big things we were worrying about is what we were paying per word. Could we get less than a penny per word for content? Doesn’t matter the quality of it, let’s just get it as cheaply as possible, and getting it out of countries where English wasn’t the first language. It was really terrible stuff, and she used to tell me, “Mark, look, you really need to be doing things that make the internet a better place.” And you talk about gold, if your business is making the internet or even better, the world, a better place, you’re on the right track. If not, if it’s an arbitrage play or some other thing where you’re not really adding value, you know, it’s fine to make a little bit of money for a little while that way, but if you want to build something that’s sustainable, you need to be working on adding value for people.
John Lee Dumas: Absolutely, and not to kind of turn this into a Gary V. fest, but it’s just so fresh in my mind from that talk he gave at Thrive, he talked a lot about legacy, and I think that fits in really well here, Mark, is that we are all going to get to the end of our journeys at some point. It is absolutely inevitable, and when we look back over our journeys, what is that legacy that we want to have left? Do we want to have left 200 useless websites that trick people into clicking things? Is that what we want for our legacy? Or do we want to have really given our heart, our soul, our mission, our message, our voice to this world and added as much value as we’re capable of? It doesn’t have to be unbelievable amounts of value. It’s what you as an individual are capable of giving to this world value-wise. I can guarantee you, you will be satisfied and happy with that legacy, if you can look back and say, “Hey, I gave you the value that I was capable of giving, and I made this world a better place,” in any way, shape, or form. So powerful stuff Mark, I love that story, I love this message that we’re sharing with Fire Nation.
Let’s kind of shift now to another story in your life, and just like I felt like I was there with you when the Chinese were hacking your computer or when Google sent you that terse email, take us to a moment that you had where it was an epiphany, an aha moment, a light bulb that went on in your journey and kind of walk us through what that moment looked like, and then what you did, Mark, to turn that into success.
Mark Mason: Yeah, I mean, I think you have lots of these if you keep at it. If you keep at it and you put the good stuff in your head, you listen to Fire Nation people, you keep learning and you become, you’re a lifetime learner, you have these tipping points where you never forget them. And for affiliate marketers always, always one of the key ones is one that you mentioned earlier, and I will never forget this. For me, of course, it was AdSense time for me, but it was, I had learned how to put this website online, I was writing content, and I was trying to get someone to click an ad, and I had never been able to do this. I’d been working at this for a while because I didn’t know what web hosting was and I didn’t know anything about internet marketing. When you start, you start at zero, right? That’s the thing. And I think that paralyzes so many people, people that are in their car right now listening to your show, John, they’ve been listening for months and months and months, but they haven’t done that first thing, that idea they’ve had the whole time, the thing they’ve always wanted to do, they haven’t done it because they’re not quite sure, they’ve got all this fear.
And so what you need is that first success. And I remember, it was a click, a $.69 click, the first money I ever made on the internet was a click on a website for $.69. I will never ever forget that stupid $.69, and I’m going to tell you ever since then it’s been that kind of thing. I remember that, I remember the first time I sold a $499.00 product where the commission was 50 percent. I mean, you remember those events, but I’ll tell you the tipping points that you really remember in a business like mine, where I’m trying to help people, and I know you get these, John, so I know you’re going to relate to this, is you get these emails from people and they say, “Mark, I did what you suggested and it changed everything and now I can do this with my family,” or, “I’ve been stuck for so long and I followed your advice and now I’m unstuck and all of these opportunities are in front of me. Thank you so much.” Those kind of things, where you’re actually helping people, that’s actually the go for me. Because remember, I’ve got a day job. I don’t need this activity to pay my light bill. And while I call it plan B, what really is in it for me is not really so much the money, it’s the satisfaction that I get out of that sort of interaction with people.
John Lee Dumas: I love this, and we have a mutual friend, Cliff Ravenscraft, who was my podcast mentor for over a year while I was part of his mastermind. He’s just an unbelievably kind, generous, genuine guy, and when I came to him and said, “Hey, I’m just going to podcast,” he’s like, “Okay, but what’s your monetization strategy?” And I didn’t really have one. And he challenged me on that, and I remember just sitting down and thinking about, “What’s that first way I’m going to bring that dollar in the door?” And I kind of came up with this way because I was just trying everything, of course, and I went to the new author releases in Amazon and I would compose emails to those authors and I would say, “Hey, your book just launched or it’s about to launch, I have a show,” and I would show them screenshots of my stats, “That gets this many listens per episode. For $400.00 I will promote your new book at the beginning of my show.” And I went through 30 or 40 of these, got some not so nice responses, got some really kind nos, and when I finally got that first yes and that PayPal for $400.00, I was like, “This is real,” like somebody actually sees the value in this.
And that’s grown from that $400.00 to now over $100,000.00 a month in revenue, but if I hadn’t gotten that first yes at some point Mark, like I kind of wonder what would have happened?
Mark Mason: Yeah, I mean, you’ve got to have that fuel, and you’ve got to have examples in front of you that let you know that it’s going to, even if it takes a while, it’s possible to be successful. That’s one of the things that I love about Fire Nation and the work that you’re doing on Entrepreneur on Fire is that it sets these examples in front of people that says, “Hey, if 1,165 people,” 1,165 people, John, can come on and talk for half an hour about the various successes that they’ve had –
John Lee Dumas: And failures.
Mark Mason: Yeah, and failures, why not me? Right? Why not me? And I think once they get a little taste of that success, boy, in general, my experience is they’re just off to the races.
John Lee Dumas: Mark, what’s your biggest weakness as an entrepreneur?
Mark Mason: It used to be, I’ve cured this one so I’ll give you the one that it used to be and then my current one. The used to be one is bright shiny object syndrome. So when I was getting started online – and now I teach people to avoid this as best I can, I would be off in one direction for a while, let’s say AdSense, and then I’d be on to another direction, and then I’d hear some other guru who was doing something and then I’d follow them for a while, but before I’d implement that I’d be on to something else. I think this is a pretty common problem in the world. So that used to be my problem. I don’t have that problem anymore. I know what I’m doing, John, and I think that’s a huge leverage thing, and I’m not saying that it won’t evolve. But if you’re absolutely sure about exactly what you’re doing, that makes all the difference in the world. That was weakness number one.
Weakness number two right now is just focus on trying to maintain the right level of focus for me that keeps the rest of my life in balance. Remember, I have a day job. I haven’t told you this, but I have four children, I have a beautiful wife who just got a stress fracture from jogging. To me, this is proof positive that exercise is really bad for you, because she was jogging, so I don’t understand.
John Lee Dumas: I powerwalk. I powerwalk. That’s all I do.
Mark Mason: I think that’s really smart. And two dogs, I have all this stuff going on, I coach my son’s baseball team. So as much as I would like to spend 75 hours a week on internet business, that’s not the right level of focus for me, and one of my weaknesses is not just going way too far to one side, it’s also not going far enough, you know? It’s keeping it in the middle, because it’s really easy for me to say, to back off too far or go way too far the other direction, and so that’s the real challenge, I think, for entrepreneurs who are working part-time. One of the things that I try to help my listeners with, and I have some simple rules for them to help them keep those things in line and work in the margins without ruining their life, but keeping their business moving forward.
John Lee Dumas: I like that phrase “work in the margins,” and for a lot of you, Fire Nation, that is going to make sense and is going to be the best thing for you right now. And, Mark, to kind of circle back, the weapons of mass distraction, they are everywhere, and every time you start to lose focus, Fire Nation, remember my acronym, follow one course until success. Now speaking of one, Mark, you have a lot of things that you are rightfully so excited about, but what’s the one thing above everything else that has you most fired up today?
Mark Mason: You know, the thing I’m working on right now is, I like to work on things that I wish I had had when I was starting. So the thing that I’m working on right now that’s got me most fired up is I am building what I believe will be the best, and by best I mean highest quality, most valuable, auto responder sequence about internet marketing on the internet today. And so what I’m doing is I’m taking all the combinations of the stuff that I needed to know when I got started, plus the stuff I needed to keep going. Right? Getting started is one thing. Keeping going is sort of a separate problem. So I’ve built this in to this kind of getting more and more sophisticated auto responder series that is really delivering value. Not one of these auto responder series like you used to see in the early ‘90s where every third day you’d get an ad for some other stupid promotion that you have no idea what it’s about, but an email series that actually delivers information and actually drives people to action, gives them something to do, something they’d look forward to getting in their inbox.
That’s what I’m really focused on right now in the context of this month and next month.
John Lee Dumas: Priceless. And when is this going to be completed Mark? Just put a date out there in the world.
Mark Mason: If you sign up now, I’m already ahead of you. You’re good to go. But I will be completed, complete, complete, and completely done at the end of November, by Thanksgiving actually is my goal.
John Lee Dumas: Killer. Well the reality is this is going live in mid to late December, so Fire Nation, this is out there in the world period, so go to the show notes page, just go to eofire.com, type in Mark, you can just check it out right there, and boom, you can sign up for more information about this auto responder series. It’s something that we have put so much energy into on behalf of Entrepreneur on Fire. I mean, we are really focused on emails and automation and funnels and responders. It’s critical, so definitely want to get your hands on this, Fire Nation. And you can see that Mark is not going to stop dropping value bombs, so before we enter the lightning round, which I don’t want you to leave, I don’t want you to miss, we’re going to take a quick minute to thank our sponsors. Mark, are you prepared for the lightning round?
Mark Mason: I’m girded, man. I’ve got my armor on, I’ve got my Kevlar and my kbar, I’m ready to go.
John Lee Dumas: Booyah. What was holding you back from becoming an entrepreneur?
Mark Mason: Oh, absolutely the lack of clear direction. No question about it, I just didn’t know what to do. As soon as I figured out what to go do, I went and did it.
John Lee Dumas: What is the best advice you’ve ever received?
Mark Mason: Work on your business every day. Even if it’s only a little bit, do something positive in your business every day.
John Lee Dumas: The Slight Edge by Jeff Olson, such a great book, that just hammered into my mind. Just the little things, Fire Nation, they add up. What’s a personal habit that contributes to your success?
Mark Mason: Getting up early. Absolutely critical, you need to have a miracle morning every day.
John Lee Dumas: Fire Nation, if Mr. Late Night himself is getting up early, I want you to as well. And Mark, there’s always people that email me, “John, I’m just not a morning person,” and I always respond, “Wake up at 5:30 a.m. for the next 45 days and then tell me if you’re still a night person, because I guarantee you’re passing out at 9:15 p.m. like I do every night because you just can’t stay up, so you’ll become a morning person pretty quickly. Share an internet resource, Mark, like Evernote with Fire Nation.
Mark Mason: Internet resource like Evernote, I use so many tools, but one of the internet resources that I’ve been using here lately that I really really like is Back Blaze. So I think backups are so critical, and I have my entire life on my MacBook Pro. I take it with me literally all over the world. I travel for my day job quite a bit, and Back Blaze I think is one of the best and most effective backup plans, and unlike other people who will talk to you about backup plans, I can tell you, I actually used it to restore a gigabyte of photos for my wife, and they sent me a disk by Federal Express with all of those photos exactly the way they were supposed to be, so we had a real live fire exercise with them. Awesome customer support, highly recommend Back Blaze as a product.
John Lee Dumas: Love it. If you could recommend just one book for our listeners, what would it be or why?
Mark Mason: Yeah I absolutely – Right now, I’m going to recommend, you know I love books, there’s so many good books up there, but right now Miracle Morning, I think that is an absolutely excellent book. Actually Pat turned me on to that, and that really changed things for me. Even though I’m the late night guy and I do a lot of stuff at night after my family goes to bed, getting up in the morning, getting my head right with the ball, kind of figuring out what I’m going to do for the day, what’s critical, sneak in a little meditation, a little bit of exercise, I mean, that’s key, that miracle morning is really a key thing.
John Lee Dumas: Yeah, and Fire Nation Hal has been a past guest on EO Fire, so if you want to check out his episode, we talk extensively about the miracle morning, you can just in the search bar at eofire.com type in H-A-L for Hal.
Mark Mason: And even if you don’t want to get up in the morning, you’ve got to hear Hal’s story about how he got to where he is. That’s a miracle story to go with the miracle morning.
John Lee Dumas: Yeah, and unfortunately Fire Nation you’re hearing this after the fact, but I’m actually speaking December 5th at Hal Elrod’s Best Year Ever event here in San Diego, so if you could time travel, I would have loved to have seen you there. But we’ll get it out in other channels. Now Fire Nation, I know you love audio, so I teamed up with Audible and if you haven’t already, you can get an amazing audio book for free at eofirebook.com. And Mark, this is the last question of the lightning round, but it is a doozy. Imagine you woke up tomorrow morning in a brand new world, identical to Earth, but you knew no one. You still have all the experience and knowledge you currently have, your food and shelter is taken care of but all you have is this laptop and $500.00. What would you do in the next seven days?
Mark Mason: Yeah, I would go find out what people’s problem is and I would figure out how I could help them online and I would make a website to do that, very straightforward. Find a problem you can help somebody with, and take action to help people with their problems. The rest of it, the monetization, all that other bologna, that takes care of itself as long as you’re adding value and helping people.
John Lee Dumas: Mark, let’s end On Fire with a parting piece of guidance, the best way we can connect with you, and then we’ll say bye bye.
Mark Mason: Latenightinternetmarketing.com.
John Lee Dumas: Boom. And what’s that parting piece of guidance?
Mark Mason: Well the parting piece of guidance that I would say is take action. I mean, stop watching NCIS, whatever it is that you’re doing late at night, and actually do stuff. And it doesn’t have to be a big thing, and it doesn’t have to be a world beater. If you can make 100 people’s lives better, 150 people, 200 people, you can make an awesome business out of that. You do not – there are billions, six or seven billion people in the world. You do not need to reach all of them. If you can reach a few of them, 100, 200, 300, you can make their lives better, and if you do that, you will be well on your way to building a successful business.
John Lee Dumas: Fire Nation, you are the average of the five people you spend the most time with, and you have been hanging out with M squared and JLD today, so keep up the heat and head over to eofire.com, just type Mark in the search bar, his show notes page will pop right up with everything that we’ve been talking about today. Of course, go directly to latenightmarketing.com to check him out. He has a killer podcast, and don’t forget about that awesome autoresponder that he has cooking. So check it out on the show notes page and Mark, I just want to thank you, brother, for sharing your journey with Fire Nation today. And for that, we salute you and we’ll catch you on the flip side.