Hello and welcome. My name is Alan Petersen. I started Interactive Front in 2000 and it’s gone through several changes since that time.
The Beginning
I became interested in the Internet in the mid-1990s and soon began to peek behind its curtain (learning HTML, SEO, RSS, CSS, and all that good tech stuff that goes into a website). I started Interactive Front to offer web design services to Real Estate Agents. Here is an embarrassing archive view of that website back in 2000:
Domaining
I entered the domaining industry (buying and selling domain names) in the early 2000s and soon it became more profitable and fun than creating websites for Realtors, so Interactive Front shifted its focus to the domaining industry for several years, managing a portfolio of hundreds of domain names. Here is the website back then:
Affiliate Marketing
It was during this time that I discovered the world of affiliate marketing. It all began when Google unleashed AdSense to the online world. Instead of having empty online real estate or simple “for sale” landing pages for my domains that weren’t generating any income, I began putting up parked web pages for my domain names in order to monetize them with AdSense ads while being actively sold. Some of these parked pages began to earn a nice passive income from AdSense. This led focusing the company into the performance-based marketing industry (performing niche and keyword research and partnering as an affiliate with advertisers like Amazon, eBay, Target, and small merchants, to promote their products and services).
Affiliate marketing has been the main focus at Interactive Front since 2005, publishing over 100 websites in a variety of niches, from wine cork crafts to Galaxy CB Radios, irrigation supplies, language learning software (Spanish, ASL, and French), deer hunting, online bingo, and others.
Publishing
In 2008, I entered the information marketing space by publishing my first non-fiction e-book (a “how to” guide about podcasting). Interactive Front has since published non-fiction “how-to” reports and video training courses every year since 2008 on a varied range of subjects; from how to self-publish non-fiction with CreateSpace, to a guide on the condo laws of Costa Rica.
In 2013, I published my first fiction book, The Asset. A high octane, CIA thriller set in Venezuela during the 2002 coup against Hugo Chavez (published under my fiction publishing arm, 17th Street Books). The second book in that series, She’s Gone
I’ve been sharing my expertise in online book marketing and self-publishing as a speaker at events like the Northern California Book Publicity and Marketing Association (NCBPMA) and as the organizer of the San Francisco Bay Area Self-Published Author’s Meet-up Group.
WordPress Plugin Development
In 2015, I published my first WordPress Plugin: the Author Work in Progress Bar Plugin. The plugin was developed from scratch. The plugin makes it easy for writers and authors to add beautiful progress bars (AKA progress meters) to their WordPress powered websites via Widgets or by generating a shortcode.
The plugin tracks word or page count goals, current word or page count, and calculates the progress by showing the completion percentage and displaying that with a very cool progress bar with multiple colors and other choices to choose from.
The feedback and reviews for the plugin have been excellent and it has been downloaded over 850 times and it is actively installed on over 300 websites!
In 2016, I’m planning to publish a premium plugin for WordPress for the self-publishing community.