The Commission Junction check came in two weeks ago but I couldn’t find time to drop by the post office to pick it up. The check was dated April 20, 2006 so if you’re a Philippine-based publisher it takes around a month for the check from Thousand Oaks, California to arrive. I wish they had a faster and more secure way of sending checks because I wouldn’t want to lose the check they mailed last May 19!

In a few days, I’ll be managing campaigns, this time as an advertiser. Any affiliate marketing tips for advertisers out there? What would be a good affiliate program manager to publisher ratio? Can 1 manager manage over 2,000 demanding affiliates? We’ll soon find out.

I’m happy to link to one of the friends I met at SES China. Inway Ni was the man on the ground in charge of orchestrating the entire event. He’s just launched China Search Daily, a blog on his “ideas, thoughts and experiences” about the Chinese search industry. He’s the guy to look for when you need SEM work done for the Chinese market.

In 6 months time, I would like to:

• become an advanced Omniture SiteCatalyst™ user and get conversions up a few significant percentage points
• get Google Adwords Professional certification
• get Yahoo! Search Marketing Ambassador certification
• attend SES San Jose
• get a new theme for this blog
• organize the first SEO Philippines Beercon

Google’s financial targets must be really high this quarter. First it was indexing woes, then institutionalized adsense blending and now this: landing pages to affect AdRank.
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Aaron Wall’s What Does Write Naturally Mean for SEO post provides a working framework for researching keywords that search engines see as semantically linked to your main keyword. Writing persuasive copy sprinkled with your keywords and other semantically related keywords sounds like a valid ranking factor, and it’s good for both humans and bots.

Let’s apply that to the shoemoney experiment.

Here’s more evidence that Google is really cranking up efforts to milk the AdWords cash cow for all its worth this quarter: “institutionalized” ad blending.
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Leonardo Da Vinci would be shocked to know that his name has inspired a few AdSense arbritage players to make some clickmoney off the popularity of the Da Vinci Code.
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Shoemoney, shoemoney, shoe money, moneyshoe, money shoe? This is about Shoemoney’s other contest.

Should I win, I’ll be using the prize money to get myself and some SEO Philippines members drunk. Hey now that’s charity!

Those are the traits I look for when scouting for new recruits. While it’s getting harder and harder to find the right people, staying with applicants with the smarts, passion and ethics for the job will almost always be the best recruitment mantra to follow. I’ve also seen managers hire people of less caliber for fear of being outshined by their subordinates. No good has come out of that practice.

While hiring the best has its pitfalls (most of them outgrow your vision and your wallet in a few years), I would always go for the best-in-class candidate and risk having to replace him/her every year, than have the same stupid asshole onboard for the next 5 to 10 years.

How would you go about recruiting people?

It’s not everyday that we get to read transcripts of what transpires during a Google interview, more so from a Filipino! Peter Abilla was blessed (I keep saying it as if it were religion) to have been invited for an interview and given a job offer which he rightfully declined IMHO. It’s a little dated (March 29, 2006) but still a classic.