Filipino Hanapbuhay in AI Era Leveraging Digital Platforms

Updated , Published at 2:29 PM PHT,
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Building Sustainable Income Streams Thru Digital Platforms

The evolution of Filipino "hanapbuhay"

Traditional images of "hanapbuhay" in the Philippines present families working in the fields or near the seashores. These families are often related to one another by blood or marriage. Before the AI Era, these rural lands or fishing areas already developed into simple bustling business centers that adopted e-wallet apps like GCash and Maya. Since the rural areas are becoming digital business hubs and the cost-of-living is rising in the cities, many professional polyworkers in Metro Manila returned to these provinces to setup their fully-remote work online.

This blog post now seeks to "bridge" the traditional concept of Filipino "hanapbuhay" into the AI Era where polyworkers now search to to earn a living in the provinces where the "new now work with tradition".

What does "hanap" and "buhay" mean?
The Filipino term "hanapbuhay", can be divided into two Filipino words: "hanap", meaning to search, and "bu-hay", meaning to life (stress is on the first syllable), or living/alive (stress is on the second syllable).
What does "hanap" and "buhay" combined mean?
Answer: If hanap and buhay are combined as a compound word, it means "search for a livelihood" or "search for a living" - searching for a job, occupation, business, employment, or career to sustain one's life and family [1].
What does "Hanapbuhay" mean in relation to Search?
Answer: The word "hanapbuhay", rooted in the word "search", is can be linked to present methods Filipinos use in Facebook or YouTube as a means of livelihood, like content creation in blogs/social media marketing and web production (planning, designing, developing, and optimizing a website to meet business goals). These two digital means also use "search" as a means of livelihood. Search engines with AI capabilities are vital in both content creation and web production [2][3].

Rosauro's Legacy: Our parents' generation, and a generation before them, always valued business to be simple, conservative, and practical. Self-sufficiency in business is one of their hallmarks for "hanapbuhay".

  • These are the values they embodied in their work.
  • We were taught that the goal isn't about "getting rich quick."
  • It's about learning well the ropes of "hanapbuhay" with practical wisdom from the past, and integrating it to present strategies of working with AI search systems/tools.

While deeply rooted in traditional values, the pursuit of "hanapbuhay" in the digital age demands a new level of adaptability. Past Filipino generations have "withstood the challenges of wartime" and embody the traditional ethics. Present generations in the rural areas now demonstrate how those values are still relevant in times of economic downturn. With the current landscape characterized by rapid transformation and pervasive uncertainty, the younger generations adopt new strategies to maintain both competitiveness and sustainable growth in the AI era.

With Filipinos being inherently resilient - a human skill known to be irreplaceable in the AI industry - they can combine it with proactive moves.

  • A proactive mindset and move is crucial for navigating economic and environmental shifts.
  • It can transform disruptions into opportunities for growth.
  • It involves adapting to evolving AI technologies and to acknowledge that the "human in the loop" is vital for the responsible use of AI.
  • It follows the new rallying cry, "Sana all!" which, when translated, means a desire for inclusivity in all areas of life: political, economic, social, and environmental [4].
Adaptability & Growth in Business & Technology Systems

The strategic goal to adapt and grow as a Philippine MSME or professional polyworker in the era of AI is to leverage tools responsibly for best insights and increasing productivity. For content creators, successful AI adoption can mean aiming at producing copy and other digital content that delivers and obtains important leads. The objective is to produce copy that gains leads and to achieve it with:

  • efficiency and scale,
  • enhanced customer experience and productivity,
  • value breakthrough,
  • and AI tool reliability and accuracy [5]

AI adoption is meant to make work easier, with better quality output, and in less time for better revenue and ROI. AI can bring Filipino MSMEs and professional polyworkers together in a community to integrate human skills that invite the global online Filipino economic community to reignite the spirit of "bayanihan, pakikisama, and utang-ng-loob" through a simple reciprocal linking program.

This strategic goal of the new "Filipino hanapbuhay" can be also extended to digital platforms using multimodal (text, audio, images, and video) content to build income streams through

  • Personal branding & AI-optimized outreach in LinkedIn
  • Building community & authority on Facebook w/ AI technology
  • Amplifying reach & expertise through AI-powered SEO
  • Zero-click searches: Gaining visibility without the click
Personal Branding & AI-Optimized Outreach in LinkedIn

LinkedIn is a crucial digital platform for

  • professional brand development,
  • marketing your Philippine MSME
  • networking for polywork job applications,
  • AI career development,
  • and regular Job hunting.

You can do all these with AI tools that generate content and customize engaging messages for your brand to identify leads for connections and followers to expand your social network.

Awareness of trends in the job market at LinkedIn and connecting with a core group of professional family members, schoolmates, former co-workers, or MSME contacts is a good start to strengthen your professional platform. These main connections become the base to build new links to market your work expertise and skills to a bigger professional network outside LinkedIn through a marketing strategy called geotargeting (location-based marketing that reaches specific markets and searches for income streams) [6].

Geotargeting helps:

  • precisely target the right audience & boost conversions
  • increase relevance with personalized content
  • allow "localized advertising" and "region-specific promotions, offers, and messages"
  • improve customer engagement

For personal branding, one strategy is to integrate storytelling that reinforces your unique value proposition (UVP). With your UVP, you can strengthen awareness of your brand through greater visibility online. Repurposing long-form content (blog posts or articles) to your LinkedIn posts can amplify your professional reach. And, you aren't just networking for connections, but also contributing value by actively establishing your expertise and unique insights into the LinkedIn feed. You can repurposing long-form content like blog posts/articles into other formats like short reels, videos, audio content like podcasts, or infographics (an effective format used by LinkedIn professional content creators).

Building Community & Authority on Facebook w/ AI Technology

Facebook is another important digital platform for vital social media connections and niche marketing. Many Philippine MSMEs readily open a Facebook Page for their business and use it as a channel for producing short reels that promote community engagement and useful content dissemination. These reels contribute well to lead generation and brand visibility, giving more opportunities to search and link to new income streams. Images, AI-automated responses, and geotargeting can be used to build community and authority on Facebook's AI capabilities. A real example in the National Capital Region of the Philippines are antique buy-and-sell MSMEs in the province of Rizal. They deploy real photos of antiques in their Facebook feeds and use geotargeted ads that effectively reach leads in nearby Pasig City.

Philippine MSMEs and professional polyworkers also use AI to generate content that delivers consistent brand value. Many GEN AI tools can be employed to produce copy and short videos for "brand storytelling". Brand storytelling involves nuance and cultural cues that can pitch a UVP well. It can be combined with the efficiency of AI to provide clues for better presentation and act as a soundboard to test ideas for a more effective sales pitch.

GEN AI image of modern urban Filipino household

Symbolic GEN AI image of modern Filipino "hanapbuhay" with less extended family members involved and living in an urban setting

Amplifying Reach & Expertise through AI-Powered SEO

SEO best practices are important to expand reach and attract new income streams through digital platforms. Content scaling can be done with AI through long-tail keywords, making your content more specific to your niche expertise. Due to the conversational use of AI, you do not only rely on one or two keywords but also need to study which long-tail keywords lead visits to your site. AI tools such as ChatGPT, Copilot, and Gemini are great helps with this research work. Content scaling with long-tail keywords is effective with the right timing. Timing is key to expanded reach that taps leads to income streams [7][8].

A blog or website is already standard in the context of "hanapbuhay" for Philippine MSMEs or professional polyworkers in the age of AI. SEO for Facebook and other social media platforms is easy, especially if accompanied with ad spends. But to be more professional in one's reach, it is vital to begin a blog for starters. With a blog, you can optimize for long-tail keywords that contribute directly to establish expertise and authoritativeness. This AI-powered SEO strategy is integral to the goal of producing and delivering valuable and high-quality content to your target market. As more loyal readers engage with your site, you can earn their trust as you continue to scale your content with Google's E-E-A-T framework. It is Google's E-E-A-T framework combined with entity optimization that links your site well to established income streams [9].

Below is list of more SEO best practices that deliver.

  • building FAQ-based content to match AI snippet-friendly formats
  • employing AI for schema markup,
  • use of internal linking strategies,
  • meta description optimization,
  • analyzing site visitor data to increase your SEO metric.

All these strategies are explained in more detail in a new directory of articles on AI adoption, Content strategy, and Implementation

Zero-Click Searches: Gaining Visibility Without the Click

A particularly relevant strategy for Philippine MSMEs who want to begin with blogs is the "zero-click strategy". This approach focuses on providing direct answers to user queries on search engine results pages (SERPs) without necessarily requiring a click-through to the site.

Your brand's site still gains even without the "click", because visibility in the source links increases brand awareness. The reason is that a user can remember a phrase or word, from your a title of a page from your site, listed in the source links after AI Overviews. He not only remembers it, but he can actually scan all the links in the first page of AI results, and luckily make a click to your page to gain information and a stronger clarity in his search.

A key strategy here is to find that long-tailed keyword in your title page that makes him not only trust the AI Overview summary, but continues to scan the source links under it to clickthrough to your page.

How to optimize for snippets in Zero-click?
To optimize for featured snippets, you can format your text to provide immediate answers in one to two sentences to questions using concise, clear formatting, such as bullet points or numbered lists, and question-based phrasing.
How to use structured data for Zero-click?
To use structure data, a schema markup must be applied to your copy to make it easier for Google to machine-read your content and display it in rich results like FAQs, product reviews, business events, food recipes, etc.
How to know high-intent queries for Zero-click?
To know the high-intent queries that users place in AI search, conduct a keyword research to identify actual questions that your audience is asking. One way to research is through the query data that is recorded by Google Search Console for your site.
How to build brand authority for Zero-click?
To build brand authority, you must consistenly enhance your brand by marking it up with known entities your brand is linked with which is also in Google's Knowledge Graph. By making content optimized with those entities, your site will appear more regularly in AI search systems results pages. This reinforces your brand's visibility and expertise even without clicks [10].
Filipino Hanapbuhay in the AI Era

Unlock the power of "Hanapbuhay," the Filipino concept of searching for livelihood - blending traditional resilience and practicality with cutting-edge AI strategies. Discover how digital platforms like LinkedIn and Facebook empower Philippine MSMEs and professional polyworkers with sustainable income streams. Learn to navigate the AI age now, transforming new challenges into growth opportunities. Make that first step to build an AI-ready workspace for hanapbuhay.

For additional information, send an SMS or an email provided at the Contact Information page.

You can also follow this Archive at LinkedIn. A detailed guide to register an MSME in Pasig City is also in this Archive.

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Location: Kapitolyo, Pasig, Metro Manila, Philippines