Welcome to the era of "Nano careers"!

Tough times call for a change of mindset and expose weakenesses in the old one. You get this "duh!" moment when you cotton on.

I think we all became used to the idea in business of "making it big" (granted we did at least accept the rarity - but it was still our goal). That is, of having these "Branson" episodes where an idea (whatever it is) suddenly seems to become big overnight and the Dragon's Den is on the end of the phone desperate to get you on board. ( Or was that just me dreaming...;-) )

I grant most of us probably thought that however unlikely we all were in our own business ventures of "making it big", this was still very much the target, and mindset, wasn't it? Of making it big ...or going back to the 9-5?

But in a credit-absent environment, where the likelihood of being funded enough to make anything 'big' is smaller than it ever was, and a 9-5 job is the new "Big" deal, let me introduce you to the "Nano Career", or the idea of "making it small". The point about the nano career is you just have to make lots of "very smalls!"

If you could create a business opportunity which would make you £100 over the course of a year, this would not be very interesting to a "making it big" mindset.

Supposing you could ensure that creating this opportunity cost you no more than £10 over the year, about an hour of your time and could pretty much be left to itself after that. This is then a "nano career"!

I have attached an example "Nano Career" into the header of this blog! (Click on the title.) It builds on the themes in my last two posts "Maintain deepen & niche" and "Is Pay Per Click a bottom-less pit?"

The nano career is obtained by having something to sell that people will want to buy, obviously - but by setting up the Pay-per-click advertising campaign to have such a rarefied set of search criteria that you spend no more than 10p on a click and cap the campaign costs at say £5 a month. What are the results?

On the one hand) You will likely get less than 100 clicks on this campaign during the year;

On the other) The people searching for those "rare" criteria have now driven right up to your front door and are therefore very likely 'buyers';

You ensure the sales commission for the product is sufficient to justify a single sale from just one of those 100 people (i.e. you will earn more than the £10 you spent).

Plus you can add your specific links into emails, blogs, etc etc etc to increase your chances of being clicked on.

Do this several times a day for every day of the rest of your career.

Welcome to the age of the "Nano" career.