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.

Pay Per Click - needn't be a bottomless pit

"Pay Per Click" is the form of internet advertising in which a company opts to pay for an advertisement, which is then presented via the Search Engine Search results or via peoples' own websites. If someone happens to 'click' on the advertisement, a charge is incurred by the advertiser and the 'clicker' is carried through to the website of the advertiser (hopefully to then purchase something).

Pay Per Click (or PPC) is therefore also known as sponsored search. i.e. it is a funded "push" by the advertiser to get noticed, as opposed to an organic (free) "pull" by the search engines to display company information in the search results. Google offers this service via "Adwords"; other service providers are Yahoo; Miva; 7 search; Epilot; Looksmart, MSN and others.

Advantages of PPC? Advantage 1. It can promote a website to public view far faster and much wider than reliance on 'organic' search engine optimisation. Equally, the effectiveness of the advertising campaign - unlike in the physical world - is traceable to the 'click' - so there is a whole load of information an advertiser can glean very very quickly about the effectiveness of their campaign. (I have also used PPC as 'market research' for keywords to be used in my organic search engine optimisation - because you can see very quickly which phrases are being displayed and clicked-on and which are not. Even though I don't then continue with the actual PPC campaign itself.)

Advantage 2? There is a lot less mystique around "how to rank in the search results" around PPC than there is around organic Search optimisation. And whilst undoubtedly you can still fail utterly and spend hugely with a poorly optimised PPC campaign, the advantages in '1' above still generally obtain. If you pay, you will be displayed.


Disadvantages of PPC? Really stem from its advantages! On the surface it seems any altruism displayed by search engines in providing 'free' SEO utilities for organic search results go out of the window when it comes to PPC. Indeed if you click and drag your cursor over a Google search results page, it highlights the PPC results first, the organic search results second, demonstrating how Google itself prioritises its website construction and popularity rankings within its own pages! So - yes - with PPC, you, er, pay for it. The more competition there is in a particular market, yes, the more you pay to make your ad competitive (i.e. display higher up the rankings). No kidding, Search Optimisation keywords themselves (as an example close to my heart) in big urban areas can cost as much as $30 a click!!!! You can see how PPC can indeed be a bottomless pit. This has led to a conspiracy theory amongst SEOs that Search Engine companies keep their rules about organic search optimisation deliberately obscure and ever-changing, exactly BECAUSE they want you to take out expensive PPC campaigns.

Which leads me to the point of this post, and why I have titled it as I have. (Is PPC a bottom-less pit?) Because actually "for the little guy", the PPC market superficially is, exactly that. (A yawning chasm into which they throw lots of money, without ever seeing where it goes or what comes out of it). PPC is therefore (on the surface) a reasonably 'unfair' and exclusive preserve of big companies and deep pockets. This runs contrary to proclamations by search engine companies of how they level the playing field and champion the little guys.


This is where, of course, I provide a synthesis of exactly how "little guys" can do well, piercing through the mumbo jumbo, conspiracy theories etc, right? Right! For a clue, look back to my post titled "maintain, deepen and niche".

You see, PPC (as indeed SEO itself) can be viewed as a bottomless pit for large companies selling "one-ize fits all" commodity products. Their organic SEO also has to optimise the words everybody else uses on 11 million other pages across the web. Because if you are going to pursue commodity products, you have to sell to a commodity market. So at this level, I think actually the search engines are pretty ALTRUISTIC in their sneaky hidden algorithms and expensive PPC bid mechanisms. They work absolutely against the big companies playing to a wide field. (The rules and tools keep you guessing and keep you paying).

But little companies should not be trying to compete on this playing field. If small companies (I provide Search Engine Optimisation Services for small European Businesses in the Limousin, Poitou Charentes and Aquitaine regions of South West France) pursue "Maintain, Deepen, and Niche" strategies, my experience is:

a) I can land them on Google Page 1 using "deepend and niche" type terms just through organic search results and I have a pretty good results record behind that (otherwise bold) statement;

b) Their use of PPC has to be very targeted and specific.

Both PPC and SEO are mass market disciplines supported by mass-market tools.
Small companies generally fail to make headway with either because (if they do SEO at all) they equally bring a mass market mentality to their activities: they try to rank on Google using really generic terms; and equally conduct PPC campaigns (if at all) with the same mindset.


So I think there is neither an SEO conspiracy going-on against the little guy, nor do I think PPC is a bottomless pit. It is just that in most cases, the literature and body-of-knowledge has been created for the big companies tossing huge sums after very generic search terms. And small companies themselves lack the knowledge and skills-base to conduct adequate marketing (which at the end of the day is what underlies good SEO).

Briquesetclics exists exactly to offer Search Optimisation services to small European businesses in Southwest France: specifically the Limousin, Poitou-Charentes and Aquitaine.