If you are old enough to remember Ronald Reagan’s speeches (and whatever your thoughts of him as a president (no political comments, please, I’ll delete them all) as a speaker Reagan makes the incumbent look like the boring college professor he is) you’ll likely remember this story:

It was Reagan’s favorite joke. Worried that their son was too optimistic, the parents of a little boy took him to a psychiatrist. Trying to dampen the boy’s spirits, the psychiatrist showed him into a room piled high with nothing but horse manure. Yet instead of displaying distaste, the little boy clambered to the top of the pile, dropped to all fours, and began digging.

“What do you think you’re doing?” the psychiatrist asked.

“With all this manure,” the little boy replied, beaming, “there must be a pony in here somewhere.”

I also heard this old “chestnut” dozens of time from some of my senior colonel and general officer leadership in the USAF, it certainly predates Reagan (I go back to Truman, you know).  What does the little parable have to do with living in the Philippines?

Actually quite a bit.  For two categories of my readers.

(and if you are not a regular reader, may I ask you please to subscribe to regular distribution of PhilFAQS, the site that answers the Frequently Asked Questions about living in the Philippines?  It’s free and has advantages to both of please … salamat.)

First, if you are an expat living in the Philippines or a “wanna be” expat on that perpetual quest for the elusive “foreigner job in the Philippines please read along and you just might see an opportunity in there somewhere.

Second, if you are one of my Filipino readers, always asking that question, “Why can’t I be a success and make money online like Carl Ocab or Yuga”?, then please give a little thought to what I am going to write.  People do not become successful because “lady  Luck’ smiles on them, they seize an opening and make their own luck.

In my view, in today’s online world in the Philippines, there is a lot of “luck” just waiting for someone to pick it up and run with it.

This story got started when a blogging colleague, RT Cunningham wrote about the Philippine Nursing School his son attends in the SBFZ (Subic Bay Freeport Zone) near RT’s home in Olongapo City.  Anyone who is a frequent reader here knows I often write about Subic and the other Special Economic Zones, hoping I might alert a few people to the real opportunities available every day.

To sum up RT’s article in a few words, he wrote about the irony involved in the fact that the school, although well established and quite successful was virtually “invisible” to people searching the web looking for a reputable nursing schools in the Philippines.  He wound up by predicting that although the school could benefit a  lot from having a decent website and doing just some basic SEO work (Search Engine Optimization … mainly just some simple editing to make the search engines “notice” certain web sites and display them high in their listings) that the changes were unlikely to ever happen.  Philippine businesses are by and large very web-averse, and even those with web sites don’t use them effectively at all … a web site tends to be something that gets “put up” and then ignored, seldom if ever utilized to drive business and help an organization get out their message and bring in clients to earn a profit.

Well I pretty much agree with RT’s estimation.  The idea of trying to set up as a web designer and/or SEO engineer here in the Philippines leaves me cold.  Jobs are going to be extremely hard to come by and every job that is won is going to be hampered by budget constraints and by client reluctance to try anything out of the ordinary.

“If paying for advertising on the spare tire covers of Jeepneys in Manila was good enough advertising for my daddy, it’s good enough for me here in 2009” is a common thought process.

So Dave, I hear you thinking, where is the opportunity?  Glad you asked.  What if we looked at the imbalance between businesses that could benefit greatly from web sites and web services, but won’t, and people who are ready and willing to provide them?  One thought is, perhaps we should turn things upside down.  Instead of wishing and hoping to get paid for your skills and efforts, what if you just provided the fruit of those efforts and got paid anyway … regardless of what “Juan’s Nursing School” or any other business wants to pay you?

This is not a new idea to a large number of folks who make money inline.  In fact virtually everyone I know who makes money online does it this way … I have only a few successful online friends and acquaintances who actually make money the “old fashioned” way, such as bidding for and winning contracts to provide web sites.  The main reason for this situation is some simple economic facts.

There are close to a million searches on Google per month for “nursing schools” and various combinations of the phrase.  Searches like this are what the ‘nerds’ call high OCI (Online Commercial Intent).  For example if 10 million people a month search for “Katie Couric’s legs” we can be pretty sure they have a low commercial intent, but someone searching for “nursing school”  is very likely to be on the path to enroll in one and spend a bundle before s/he graduates.  A million or so “high OCI” searches is a “pony”, and a handsome one at that.

Now only a small fraction of those million or so potential buyers are searching for “nursing schools in the Philippines”, but one reason so few are is a., they are too lazy to type in that long a phrase and b., they don’t know about nursing schools in the Philippines.

Just a brief idea of what could be done:

• Build a simple blog/website with a page for as many nursing schools in the Philippines as you can possibly find.
• Provide standardized info for each school, as in courses offered, pass rates, contact data, etc.
• Optimize the site for nursing school search phrases that get lots of searches.
• Add articles about nursing, is Philippine education the equal of US or better or worse or?
• Wash, rinse, repeat, while monetizing with Google AdSense and other routes.

And here’s the “pony size” bonus:  If you scan the US and Canadian hospital employment pages (typically on the hospital’s own web site) you will find a non-trivial number of them pay substantial hiring bonuses and even third-party “finder fees” for bringing in candidate nurses whom they decide to hire.  Now none of this is automated and I make no guarantees, but any time people are asking for what there is a supply of (nursing grads) and you know where the supply is … here in the Philippines … and there are virtually no web services trying to connect the two (most web sites that do say they are about Philippine Nursing Schools are chat rooms and forums where students meet and gossip … again, no OCI) then I believe the ears of the pony are already poking out the top of the pile.

Any time you come across something that can’t be bought, is needed but will not sell, or especiaslly something that  the “experts” say won’t work, you have just stumbled into a big “pile” of opportunity.  Have you found your pony yet?

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