Welcome And The Big Rebrand

Episode 2-7-8. Hey, hey, hey, everybody. Welcome to episode 278 of the podcast that was formerly known as the Late Night Internet Marketing Podcast. That's right. It was formerly the Late Night Internet Marketing Podcast. It's now The Mark Mason Show, and it's being rebooted in partial celebration with my anniversary of 35 years on the job at my current employer. That just happened last week. And, you know, I'm recognizing that there will be another chapter after 35 years on the job, and I'm preparing for that. I'm preparing for building out the markmason.com brand. I've got a draft version of the markmason.com website up, and we're changing this show into The Mark Mason Show, and I'm super excited about that. This rebranding really has been long overdue. You know, when I started The m- the Late Night Internet Marketing brand, it was a brand for side hustlers, that's the late night stuff. And the internet marketing is what we called it back then. It was making money online, and the fancy term was internet marketing. And that, that term not only has kind of gone out of favor, we usually use the phrase online business these days instead of internet marketing. But it's limiting, and it has some negative connotations. I think sometimes internet marketers are thought of more like online used car salesmen. You know? That it's just internet marketing has that easy money sleaze feel to it. And so I'm ditching that, and it's gonna be The Mark Mason Show. I'll tell you what also is changing, and one of the reasons I wanted to rebrand, is everything that is happening with artificial intelligence with me personally and in our industry. You know, the big thing that solo entrepreneurs are going to be concerned about with regard to artificial intelligence is how to create differentiated businesses when everyone that you're competing with has AI. You know, in the past, if you worked hard and knew how to do super technical things like video editing, building landing pages, putting together websites, managing affiliate links, and all of this complicated technical stuff, that was a barrier to entry to online business for so many people. There were just so many things you had to learn, and if you weren't techy, it was hard to learn. Like even just starting a podcast, it took a lot of effort. And let's face it, most people weren't interested or willing, uh, to do that sort of investment for something uncertain. And so those of us who were willing to make the investment, we had an advantage because we gained technical skills, and that formed what we'd call in today's business lingo, a moat around our business. It protected our business because we could do things that other people couldn't do. Well now, with things like Claude Code, uh, anybody can do anything, and that's one of the things that we're going to be talking about on The Mark Mason Show going forward. Not just business information and the things that are going on in my businesses, and my advice to you about how to build solo entrepreneur businesses and small businesses that are based on online marketing principles, but we'll also talk about how to leverage AI To make it so that you can do that while making your business unique and making it something that where you're delivering something of value with a competitive advantage that, at least to some extent, you can protect. And I'm excited about this because I'm pretty much 24/7 AI. In my day job, I'm working on AI all the time. I have an AI mission statement for my team. We're involved in the deployment of artificial intelligence and automated workflows and automated business process applications at the enterprise level. And then I come home, and I work on automation at my house and in my business. So I'm automated 24/7. I'm running a personal assistant. Her name is Donna. She's an AI personal assistant. I actually named her after Donna from Suits. If you know, you know. Donna Paulsen's, like, the most amazing executive assistant in the history of executive assistants. And she's helping me run the business, and AI will help me run this podcast. Now, a lot of times when you tell people that,"Hey, I'm gonna use AI to create content," they freak out. I think this is part of the mode conversation. I will be doing the stuff that I, only I, can uniquely do, and that's giving my opinion, putting my input in, trying to help you be better at what it is that you're trying to do, trying to help you succeed from my point of view, using my personal experience and the things that I care about and wanna talk about. I'll be doing that. It won't be a video avatar. It'll be me. And actually, what gives that real leverage, and I think this is where AI, has a harder time competing, that is the part that I love. As, uh, Gay Hendricks would say, that's inside of my zone of genius, getting on the camera, talking to you, us having a discussion about whatever it is that we need to talk about. Coming to you authentically and transparently as me, that's what I can do. What I don't wanna do is struggle with a blank screen trying to figure out what great topics there are out there that I care about that I'd like to talk about, and brainstorming those, and trying to do the SEO around that so that you'll see this. Trying to edit the transcripts and put blog posts online so you can find my episode, syndicating video clips. I don't care about any of that. I'm gonna have AI do all of that, and we'll talk about that. What I'm not going to have AI do is the part that you really care about. AI will market the show, AI will help me do the administrative parts of the show, just like a producer would if I hired a producer for this show. But the part that you care about, the value part, the part that makes this The Mark Mason Show, The Mark Mason Show, is, is Mark Mason. And I'm gonna be there with you and for you as we bring this journey forward. I've got a lot of projects going on. As I mentioned, I've got a lot of big enterprise projects going on where we're deploying my AI solutions, or really my team's AI solutions, to thousands of people, all the way down to silly little stuff that I'm running in my own home, where I'm in a football pick'em pool. It's not football season right now, but Back during football season, I had an AI bot that helped me pick games so that when I was picking football games with my buddies, I could get my picks in on time. I had all this friction in my life over getting my football picks in. My buddies were always giving me a hard time because it took me so long to pick games. And now with AI, I just teach AI how I pick the games, and it helps me do the research and pick the games and automate that, and now my picks are never late. So it goes from the very serious to the very simple, and other cool stuff like, um, AI assistance and automated content creation when that's appropriate, uh, an analysis of affiliate campaigns. And all of these things, managing ad programs and stuff that is outside of my zone of genius and outside of your zone of genius, stuff that maybe we don't care about as much, we just don't want to do, but we have to do, that's where AI really can help us, and that's what this show is going to be about going forward. It's the use of AI in online business, particularly for solo entrepreneurs and small operators that just wanna run a business, and it's a lifestyle business. It's something that we're excited about, but we don't wanna be dragged down by it. You know, that's what we're talking about here on The Mark Mason Show. The goal for this show is gonna be weekly content, and it's gonna be stuff that I'm excited about and I'll be bringing to you. And hopefully, I will reduce the friction around this so much that, uh, I will never miss a week. That's the hope. The hope is that if I'm only responsible for doing the stuff that I'm excited about, which is getting on the mic and talking to all of you, that I will be able to get this show out every week, because I always wanna do that. What I don't wanna do is edit the video for YouTube and make a thumbnail and worry about, you know, whether or not the thumbnail is optimized for clicks, and make the show notes and the YouTube notes and, and all of that stuff. I'm automating all of it. And one of the side benefits of that for you is we'll talk about those workflows, about how I'm doing them, about what I'm learning when I do them. We'll share some of them And most of these things we're gonna be talking about in the Mark Mason VIP community. That's gonna be a free community that you can just join. We'll talk about every episode there, including this one. So if you wanna go over to vip.markmason.com right now, you can sign up. It's completely free. Maybe someday we'll have a premium version of that where you can get true direct access to me. But right now it's just I hang out in there, you hang out in there, we talk about whatever you wanna talk about with regard to online business and AI. So that's it, Mark Mason, uh, vip.markmason.com. Go check it out. Let me know what you think. Um, it's brand new and, you know, we've got a lot of growing to do there as well, so we'll do that together. So that's the big announcement, The Mark Mason Show. We're gonna keep the feed, keep the episode numbers. This is The Mark Mason Show, episode 278. Really just represents a change of title and an AI-generated theme song. You know, one of the big pain points around getting away from the Late Night Internet Marketing Podcast is the fantastic Late Night Internet Marketing Podcast theme song. I've got a new, much lighter weight, theme song that I'll be bringing in. But for now, until next week, let's listen to that Late Night Internet Marketing theme song one last time, and I'll catch you next week. Ciao.