Antone is the creator of White Hat Crew, and the owner of Gecko Tribe, LLC. He's an internet marketer, blogger, and programmer.
Unlike some people who know what they want to do by the time they’re out of diapers, my path to internet marketing has taken a few twists and turns.
I don’t recall what I might have wanted to do early on, but by the time I graduated from high school, my interests were mostly in writing and music. I entered college as an English major.
After a year of college, I took two years off, which I spent in Japan. By the time I returned to school, I was thinking more practically (which may or may not be a good thing!), and registered as a math major.
Math is one of my strengths, but it didn’t take long to realize that math majors spend 99% of their time studying mathematical abstractions rather than the interesting real-world math I’d studied up till that point (hey, it was interesting to me!) And they take very few classes that deal with history, philosophy, the arts, etc.
Next, I considered majoring in business. I soon decided that marketing was the only area of business that wouldn’t bore me to tears. But before I could switch majors, I switched schools and ended up as a Japanese major instead.
I considered double majoring in Japanese and marketing, but eventually decided it would be better to graduate in whatever major I could complete most quickly. Japanese beat out marketing by one semester.
After graduation, I worked for a few years in the Japanese department of Claris, a subsidiary of Apple Computer, first as a software test engineer, and then as a programmer.
The 3 1/2 years I spent there were good, but then in 1998, it was time for a change. Aside from a few short stints as a contractor, I’ve been working independently ever since.
Today, I’d describe myself professionally as a programmer, internet marketer, and blogger.
Personally, I’m a husband, married since 2002, and father of three.
In the wake of Google's crack down on content farms, which hit EZineArticles hard, EZineArticles has announced that they'll be making all links from articles on the site "nofollow" links (meaning that the links will no longer give any Google SEO benefit to the sites they link to).
This includes links in the articles as...
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Over at Daily Blog Tips today, Daniel Scocco fielded a question today about whether to approve Pingbacks:
The purpose of having trackbacks and pingbacks is to foster conversations among bloggers. By inter-linking the posts that are referencing each other it becomes easier to follow the different opinions and takes on specific issues.
...
I think...
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How many times have you read where some guru said "one of the biggest mistakes I made when I was getting started was to take too long to start outsourcing?" I'm guessing you've heard that several times.
How about "one of my biggest mistakes was waiting too long to start building a list?" You've probably...
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I've spent plenty of time ragging on people who go follower crazy on Twitter, trying all sorts of tricks to amass as many "fauxlowers" as possible, not realizing that none of them are actually listening.
Maybe I was wrong.
A few days ago, Jerry West wrote:
Previously, if Google's algorithm deemed information from friends/family useful...
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If you want to stir up emotion with internet marketers, 5 words are all you need to say: "the customer is always right."
The memory of every customer who ever asked for a refund 10 seconds after downloading the product, of every customer who asked a tech support question that's answered in big bold letters...
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In my "So I Sold to an Axe Murder" post the other day, I wrote:
Some visitors will be looking for solutions to related problems. If you're not slaying the dragon that's standing in front of them, many will leave. But if you can quickly get them to realize that the dragon's brother (one that...
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WordPress does a lot to automatically to optimize your blog for the search engines -- linking between pages, putting your post titles in your page title tag and header tags, etc. But one flaw in the design has been bugging me for a while: the order of page numbers. Let me explain.
Let's say you'r...
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If you've ever written a sales letter, you've felt it on the back of you neck. The hot breath of a disgruntled prospect, ready to let the axe fall at the slightest flaw in your pitch.
You've written, rewritten, edited and tweaked, and finally published. And in the end, just like in the horror movies,...
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Marketers are always cooking up schemes to get people to take some action: watch a video, read a blog post, join a mailing list, buy a product...
You've seen their limited-time offers, special introductory prices, social proof, iron-clad guarantees, stacks of bonuses, and a billion other tricks they use to try to motivate you to...
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by Antone Roundy | Joint Ventures, Mailing Lists, Marketing, Monday Question
Today, let's learn from each other's mistakes. The Monday Question for this week: what are the 3 worst mistakes you've made in your internet marketing efforts?
I'll go first. The 3 worst internet marketing mistakes I've made are (in no particular order):
1. Waiting to build a mailing list. When I started off, I gave...
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Split Test Content, Exit Intent Popups, Hover Stripes, Seasonal Ad Rotation, and much more.
TriggerNote is an Interaction Engine for your website. Use pre-configured "Recipes" to create exit hover ads, exit interstitial ads, etc. Or mix and match your own combinations of over 20 Triggers and Actions to make your website respond to visitor actions, grabbing attention, and customizing on the fly to speak to each unique visitor.
Hi.
I'm Antone Roundy.
I'm a strong believer in ethics, and have always tried to practice and promote ethical behavior in an industry where many slip over to the dark side.
At White Hat Crew, I'll share insights into internet marketing, with extra emphasis on ethical issues.
Read my Internet Marketing Ethics Manifesto
Join a Blogging Team
Blog & Tweet Easier
Guest Post
New to this blog? Start Here
Riffs on a Purple Cow is a Kindle eBook containing collection of articles I wrote, inspired by Seth Godin. Download your copy from Amazon.com.
It's also a demonstration of the blogging and business method outlined in my eBook, "How to Build and Operate an SEO Content Factory", which you can download for free in either of these formats:
PDF | Mobipocket (Kindle, etc.)
