Steemit Has Another Digital Marketing Nerd : My Intro https://steemitimages.com/DQmVne3og5yctJFr1VBt2xzW5qGuuD1uFLRKxeyZeYXnyzU/20180318_215556.jpg) Why Am I On Steemit? Hello there fellow steemers! My name is Mark O'Shea and this my Steemit story. I am 38 and a dad of one awesome little girl. Let me start off by saying I am totally stoked to be here and be apart of this community. I really think the concept is great and with some of the other social media platforms being such a stick in the mud, Steemit is quite refreshing. Well, a little more about me and my Steemit journey.

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So, I have always been a bit of a geek. I love sci-fi and pretty much anything to do with computers and the internet. Huge Star Wars fan and my brothers all hated my turn to pick movies when we were kids because the only thing ever I picked was Empire Strike's Back or Return Of The Jedi. I currently am travelling all around central and South America working as a digital nomad. I was born in Ireland and grew up in New York. Just putting this out there, New York has the best pizza in the world and I can't wait to get back home and grab a slice. John's Pizza hands down.

So on to my story, I love digital marketing and building websites. I kinda fell into it by taking over a family construction business. When I first got out of High School I enrolled in culinary school at Johson & Wales University. I ended up running a kitchen not long after that in Manhattan. Which was a dope experience but a lot of hard work and long hours. I learned a lot about management and time efficiency. Overall good times. And bonus once a girl finds out you can cook it's a great way to get them over, lol. Everybody gotta eat. But I soon kinda burned out and decided to get out of the business and besides I never really got to spend time doing anything else. As I soon found out running a successful kitchen in money making Manhattan is not all it was cracked up to be. There is a lot of late nights and booze among other things. So I decided to clean up my act after some youthful indiscretions and switch up directions. I made the decision that I would move back to my hometown of East Hampton and help out with the family business.

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I moved back out the Hamptons and took up training Jiujitsu and helping out my father with the family business. I had trained martial arts before. Like some karate and Wing Chun but this was when the UFC was really starting to gain some popularity. I never even watched MMA in truth until about UFC 50 or something like that. I as soon as did I was hooked though. I mean you always think fighting is something like to see on TV with punching and kicking, but it is entirely different once you start grappling. It blew my mind. I travelled all over the east coast training with some of the best there is. The Serra brothers, Marcelo Gracia, Renzo Gracie a few times in NYC. Hermes Franca and Kurt Pelligrino in Florida just to name a few.

You may be wondering what does this have to do with digital marketing, computers or even crypto?...I am getting there. Well after my father took ill and with a baby on the way I stepped up to take care of the family business and run things. Now my father had a great reputation but never marketed his business a day in his life. Everything was word of mouth and there was no client list for me to start retargeting.

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I quickly found out I knew how to manage a business but not market one. I mean outside of knocking on doors or pinning my business cards to job boards in local stores and on bulletin boards. I soon decided that I needed to learn how to advertise and effectively fast. One of my old Judo instructors was an internet marketing guru and a business genius. Afterall he was getting my money so I decided to ask him how he did what he was doing and how could I get on the same gravy train to apply that to what I was doing. I was at this time besides running the family business a personal trainer/lifeguard/swim instructor and I was teaching jiu-jitsu part-time. I was doing everything I could to make ends meet and this was during the housing crisis like 2008 / 2009.

Fortunately, my Judo instructor took me under his wing and introduced me to digital marketing and touched briefly on coding out web pages. Seeing this was the wave of the future I decided to pursue it 150% for the restoration business. Thinking that would pay off much faster than marketing jiu-jitsu. Well, it did. I enrolled in school for Web development and Graphic design. I also did as many courses as I could on SEO and just digital marketing in general. I got all my Google certs and Bing too. I became a Google certified partner. The business grew to 6 figures inside of 18 months and during the time when the housing market had kinda crapped out, so this was pretty cool.

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But after splitting up with my ex-wife, things fell apart. Lawyers are not cheap. I moved back to the NYC and took to trading and studying the market. I enrolled in OTA or the online trading academy and really learned a lot about how the markets work and all of the different indexes. I had heard about cryptocurrencies but never really got into them until everyone was inboxing me on Facebook. It was Bitcoin this and Bitcoin that. So I decided this was more than just a fad. One day while doing some research into cryptos on youtube, I usually skip the ads at the beginning of videos as most of us do...but this time I decided to actually watch it. Behold it was a commercial about Steemit. After being reluctant to even get into the crypto space I was intrigued by the concept and decided to watch as much as I could about it. Doing as much research as possible on the platform Steemit one is bound to run across Jerry Banfield, who I had watched a few times on other subject matter, and he was praising Steemit. I like Jerry and I figured this was a great way to break into the market and support the crypto market of which I am a big proponent of. Just knowing the amount manipulation in the other indexes...I truly believe the crypto space to be a game changer for all the little people like us. I look forward to getting to know some really cool people on here and making new friends.