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.
The other day, somebody asked me to do more "how to" type blog posts. Here's one: "how to create a blog worth subscribing to," or, more accurately, "one way to create a blog worth subscribing to." Obviously, it's not the only way.
I was going to call it "how to get me to subscribe to...
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If you've read this blog long enough, you've probably heard me mention my free PDF, The Great Big Picture of Internet Marketing. In just a few pages, it gives you an overview of what you need to do to start your internet marketing business off on a solid foundation.
Seth Godin reminded me of the...
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Marketers spend a lot of time trying to get customers to choose them. One thing that makes it easier is to spend some time up front choosing your customers.
Back in July, Seth Godin wrote:
Many organizations will take any customer, any time, and bend and writhe to accommodate money in whatever form it arrives....
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I've got a question for you today. I've been considering which affiliate programs to add support for to Affiliate Afterburner/WP (I just added ClickBank support), and it got me thinking about different types of affiliate programs and the capabilities they offer.
Individual vs. Networks
On the one hand, you have big networks like ClickBank, Commission...
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After a lot of hard work, crunch time is over at last, and the new version of Affiliate Afterburner (which is now a WordPress plugin) is ready for prime time (whew!)
Affiliate Afterburner/WP makes it easy to monetize your blog by adding affiliate ads from Amazon.com, eBay, AllPosters.com, and AdSense to your posts or sidebars....
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As I'm sure you've heard by now, Apple co-founder Steve Jobs passed away yesterday.
It's amazing how much influence one person can have on the world if they catch a vision and pursue it with vigor. As a Mac user, every day of my life is better because of the influence Steve had on how...
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by Antone Roundy | Copywriting
Copywriting experts will tell you that your sales letters need to focus on benefits, rather than product features. What they won't always tell you is that there are three kinds of benefits. And that you need to talk about all three.
Direct Benefits
Direct benefits are the things your product gives the user. For example,...
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I've been hearing the term "thought leadership" bandied about a bit lately -- often in relation to content curation. This morning, I read an article on FeldThoughts that set thought leadership in a slightly different light for me.
Brad Feld shared an email he'd received from Chris Moody saying:
When I think about FG [Foundry...
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Learning lessons in the school of hard knocks hurts. But there's something you can do to ease the pain and maximize the benefit you get from it: share your experience.
Over at ProBlogger, Sanjeev wrote about a time when his blog got hacked:
Once my blog was clean, I dug into it further, to check...
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If you were watching carefully, you may have noticed a little change to the White Hat Crew blog recently: underneath each post title, where it says "Posted by Antone Roundy", the name is now a link. The reason for the change is that it's time to start accepting guest posts, and it only seems right...
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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.)
