Alston Antony

Background

I have spent more than 15 years working in search. Today I am Senior Digital Marketing Manager at Brainstorm Force, where the work centres on SaaS and WordPress product marketing: SEO, positioning, paid acquisition, and the measurement and reporting that decides whether any of it worked.

My background is engineering rather than advertising, and that shapes these resources. My MSc dissertation was an automated SEO management system — so when a template here calculates something, the formula is visible in the cell rather than hidden, because that is how I would want to audit somebody else's work.

Qualifications

Education

Professional memberships

• Professional Member, BCS — The Chartered Institute for IT
• Professional Member, Digital Marketing Association of Sri Lanka

Certifications (16)

These matter more than the count suggests: they map onto the exact topics the resources on this site cover, which is the point of listing them rather than making a general claim of expertise.

Teaching and reach

Much of the last decade has been spent teaching this material rather than only practising it, in English and in Tamil. Teaching is why the resources here are shaped the way they are: if a template needs a paragraph of explanation before anyone can use it, the template is wrong.

People taught

30,000+

Udemy learners

18,728

Udemy courses

6

YouTube videos published

604

SaaS products bought and tested

500+

Websites owned and managed

100+

What I build and run

• zPlatform.ai Founder

  An independent AI tools directory where every tool is installed, configured and used on a real project before a verdict is published.

• Digital Marketing Tamil Creator

  A Tamil-language digital marketing channel, teaching search and SaaS marketing to a non-English audience.

zPlatform.ai is the most direct evidence of how I assess software, and it is why the software comparison here carries an explicit evidence label on every row. Installing a tool and using it on real work produces a different verdict from reading its marketing site, and a reader deserves to know which one they are getting.

Selected client results

Published on AlstonAntony.com, where the context for each is set out. Repeated here so the claim is checkable — not because these figures are typical. No result is.

74%

increase in organic clicks for ZipWP

9.38x

ROAS from a rebuilt ad account architecture

59.1%

email open rate on a reactivation campaign

#1

ranking for 28 keyword variations in a Black Friday campaign

Why this site exists

Search for almost any digital marketing template and you get the same thing: a long article explaining what a template is, wrapped around a download that either does not work or leads to a signup form. The article ranks. The reader leaves with nothing.

This site is the opposite arrangement. Every page is built around a file you can open and use — a spreadsheet with working formulas, a document with the sections already structured, a checklist you can print. The writing exists to explain the file, not to pad a word count, and nothing is gated behind an email address.

It is deliberately small. I would rather maintain fifteen resources properly than publish two hundred and let them rot.

How I create resources

• Every resource starts from a real task. If I cannot describe the job somebody is trying to finish, I do not build the page.
• The file is built first, the page second. This is the reverse of how most content is produced, and it is why these pages are shorter than the competition's.
• Formulas are visible and auditable. Where a template calculates something, the arithmetic is in the cell so you can check it rather than trust it.
• Example figures are labelled as examples. Sample reports use illustrative numbers and say so on the page and inside the file. They are not client data and they are not benchmarks.
• No invented statistics. If I cannot source a number, it does not go in.

How I review software

"We tested 40 tools" is usually untrue and you have no way to check it. So every tool on this site carries one of three labels:

• Personally tested — used on real work, not just an opened trial.
• Currently or previously used — part of an actual workflow.
• Researched from official documentation — the vendor's own docs and pricing pages have been read, but the tool has not been run here.

Most entries are honestly the third, and the table says so on the row. Pricing appears only where it links to the vendor's official pricing page with the date it was checked, because software pricing changes constantly and a confident stale figure is worse than none.

Corrections and updates

Every resource shows when it was last updated. If you find an error — a broken formula, a stale price, a claim that does not hold up — tell me and I will fix it and change the date. Corrections are not embarrassing. Stale pages are.

Affiliate disclosure

At the time of writing this site carries no affiliate links and no sponsored placements. If that changes, affiliate links will be marked at the point of the link, and a commercial relationship will never be presented as an independent recommendation. Rankings here are not for sale.

This site and AlstonAntony.com

The two do different jobs. Digital Marketing Mind is the free resource library. AlstonAntony.com is my personal and professional site, where consulting and SaaS SEO work lives. Content is not duplicated between them.

Contact

LinkedIn is quickest. The contact page lists the alternatives, and what I do and do not reply to.