Modest beginnings

My name is Anthony Mangia and I am an up-and-coming Internet Marketing professional. My interest with computers started in elementary school when I first learned how to use a computer – I can’t remember what the system was at the time, but I do know that my favorite game was Lemmings. In middle school, I used to watch in awe as my brother created little personal websites for fun on our crappy old Compaq. I didn’t know it at the time, but the hours I spent watching him would have a tremendous impact on the rest of my life.

I wanted to make websites like my brother. Cool, awesome websites with lime green text on a black background and flashing GIF images. Hell. Yeah. I buried myself in the family computer whenever I could, poring of the source code of every website I could find. By high school I was the go-to web developer for all of the local garage bands trying to make it big. I used the same iFrame-based layout, essentially only changing the banner and style of the buttons for each band. Impressive, right? Hey – something had to fund the video game addiction.

Popping my SEO cherry

My foray into the world of internet marketing did not start until the end of my Freshman year at Rutgers University. I was sitting around my dorm on a reading day (when we were all supposed to be studying for finals) and, while my mind should have been focused on my classes, all I could really think about was the summer. I had big plans, and something would have to fund them. I opened up The Daily Targum and searched through the Classifieds ads, and e-mailed a few resumes out for the heck of it. About two hours later I got a call back from this company named Broadspan Commerce.

Broadspan Commerce was a New Brunswick based company that operated a number of websites, most of which sold furniture online. The job I applied for was as an Office Assistant – paperwork, faxes, and e-mails. The CEO at the time interviewed me, liked what he saw, and asked for references. It was my first job – I told him he could talk to my parents, or give me a few days and I would try to find a high school teacher or two that liked me. He called back two hours later and said to forget the references, I was hired.

I went in his office on my first day of work, in late May 2006, and he explained to me that I was not going to be filling the Office Assistant position he hired me for. Instead, he was changing my position to Marketing Assistant, and intended for me to run the Search Engine Optimization initiatives. My literal response was “Search Engine whaaat? I’m not entirely sure I’m qualified for that…”. He told me not to worry about it, and that my first job was to teach myself as much as I could about SEO in the first week.

And so I did. The CEO kept close watch on me, and we met a few times a week to go over our “Master Plan” (he literally had our SEO Strategy on a word document with “Master Plan” at the top). After six months, I had soaked up every single piece of knowledge about SEO that I could find on the internet, natural search engine traffic was up 75%, and life was good. Things were just getting started, however.

There were some shake-ups at Broadspan. The CEO that hired me and laid down the tracks for my future career was gone. So was the VP of Technology, this super intelligent guy named Scott. I quit two weeks later, and enjoyed being unemployed for a month. If things had ended there, I likely wouldn’t have pursued the industry that I had just spend 6 months learning about, and god knows what I would be doing today. Things didn’t end there, however. The VP of Technology from Broadspan called me up. He was now a higher-up with Ask.com and had a position that he thought would be perfect for me.

I am Jeeves

My god, it was. The position was as a Search Relevancy Evaluator on the Quality Evaluation Team. I spent a week at the Ask.com office in Edison, NJ gaining valuable insight into the SEO industry from the point of view of the search engines. It was fascinating and refreshing to have my lens switched from the website side to the search engine side. Best of all, it was a contract job and I got to telecommute. I was making bank working from home – chilling on my laptop and getting paid. I would go into it, but I’m sure some of it would be considered proprietary information. That gig lasted for a year, and was awesome. Nobody should ever get paid to have that much fun. Once that gig was up, I found myself in the middle of my Junior year at Rutgers University, seeking my B.S. in Marketing at the Rutgers Business School. Classes were difficult, so I spent four months focusing on my academics and having a great time at school. This brings us to just about the present day, May 2009.

Present day

The recession was in full-swing. So many people in the ultra-competitive business school were struggling to find a job. I wasn’t worried, though. I had my SEO skills to fall back on. I spent about a week and a half searching for a job before I took one as the Internet Marketing Specialist for Mario Badescu Skin Care. I’m still here currently, and it’s an amazing job. The people are great, the office is awesome, but best of all, I’m really being allowed the opportunity to develop my skill set. I’m making crazy strides in terms of professional development – when I started, I had two-year old SEO skills. I’ve already sharpened those up to the point where my time on SEO Forums is spent giving advice instead of taking it. I’ve also begun running Mario Badescu’s Affiliate Program and paid search campaigns. We’re starting to see progress for our target keywords, and the metrics we use to measure our other programs are positive as well – and I couldn’t be more excited.