If you’re a business that’s tired of seeing how your website is bringing you zero business OR if you’re a web professional that’s looking to acquire new skills in search marketing, read on.
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It’s more than a month away but if you’re in the area, please join me at the 4th annual Direct Marketing Association (DMA) Philippines Conference and Exhibition on September 20-21, 2007 at the Grand Ballroom, Hotel Intercontinental, Makati City, Philippines. I’ll be on the Search Engine Optimization and Analytics: How Best to Leverage Search Marketing and Web Analytics to Drive Leads panel and I’m really excited to present to the best one-to-one marketers in the Philippines.

Back in college, I took an elective in direct marketing and it was one of the most enjoyable and engaging subjects I had. I also manage an inhouse email marketing department and I’ve always looked to strategic database marketing as a guidebook, nay my bible, when running our Cheetahmail-powered email campaigns. In email for example, one should personalize campaigns with customer segmentation/personalization in mind. Direct marketing espouses that too, but with online you can do soooo much more. It would be an honor to present SEM to these marketers since I’ve learned so much from them. Going online is a natural progression for most marketers and I really consider it a privilege to be one of the first few online marketers to present the merits of online channels like search, PPC and email to the traditional offline marketing crowd.

I’ll probably end up talking about why the sacred direct marketing triangle of List + Offer + Creative works as effective online as it does off (if not better), then introduce why web analytics is a validation mechanism never before seen in traditional channels.

It should be great…but don’t take my word for it ;) participate!

If you’re absolutely paranoid about brand control, you need to secure your domain and other TLD variations (if you’re a global empire, ccTLD too). I think that’s a given if you’re an entity concerned about managing your online reputation.

While cybersquatting (or domain squatting) as a business model works, it’s a cat-and-mouse game. But if I could get away with owning a major Philippine telco domain name (I’ve since sold it), that tells you how iffy intellectual property law implementation is here in the country. Brand managers should pull out their credit card now and start buying unregistered domains close to their brands. If you’re doing this now, consider yourself spanked. No online-aware brand manager ever releases a brand or an advertising campaign without buying the best brandable domain for it weeks, if not months, before roll out.

If you’re working on a limited budget consider getting the .NET and .ORG to go with the .COM you already have. If you’re doing a Philippine-based campaign, buy all three plus the .COM.PH and .PH variations.

Contrary to news reports, I didn’t get lost in the jungles of Borneo. I was just preoccupied with work-related improvement initiatives for the 4th quarter/holiday season and other SEO Philippines initiatives in the pipeline. I also recently just gotten engaged to my loving girlfriend and I’m learning to adjust to the engaged life :)

For Bayanihan SEO contestants, we moved the contest checkpoint dates. Required links and leaderboard app should be up tomorrow (thanks Boris!). Apologies for the very late update.

Ghostwriters, misrepresentation, controversy baits and the Mob. Buti na lang I haven’t been blogging :) So what else did I miss?