The decline of organic reach

I've been listening to a lot of marketing podcasts recently and one of the things I've been hearing about is the so-called decline in organic reach. What this is chimes very much with my own experience over the years I've dabbled in the Internet and in the late 1990s and early 2000s, it was really easy to get lots of traffic just by putting quality stuff on the Internet. The search engines and indexes noted you and sent traffic to you without any effort.

However things have changed. Though they look the same , things are very different. I've been puzzling about this sitting in my room and then what I was hearing from the podcasts reinforced my own experience. It seems the engines like Google and Facebook and other big big companies have finally decided to come more commercial in outlook. Once upon a time they gave traffic away, but now it seems that they are only going to send you traffic if you pay them.

The other problem with the Web is there is just so much noise out there now. Once upon a time there were only five quality websites for providing information and say on haunted hotels. That was my area. And now I find that there are thousands of pagess and so we don't scroll down more than one or two pages on Google so if you are down the page of that, no matter how good your website it is you just aren't going to get seen.

I've even written a little blog about Cumbrian place names which is a pretty specialist area. If I say so myself it brings a lot of learning and scholarship and research to it and I put up tens of high quality posts that will provide lots of information for people looking for that. But if I search for that website, I simply don't find it on on Google. So does that mean there are now a lot of websites about the subject? I don't think so. It's just stuff is harder to find.

So I think your days of putting stuff up and just hoping and actually succeeding are gone. There's so much noise out there that even if your product is top quality unless you promoted it using money and probably more clever marketing techniques, you won't get seen.

So that leads me onto my new endeavour – finding clever marketing techniques!

Emotion Machines

Recently become almost possessed by marketing. And I was thinking well what are we actually selling through the medium of stories? And clearly it's emotions. Now when you take that into account and you look at the bestseller list on Amazon – particularly the best selling categories, then that's quite interesting.

The bestselling category of all is romance with a R. So the emotion that the people who want to read those books are looking for is a kind of ... (I said vicarious but the app dictated carious love affair – I like the idea of the carious love affair - one that is full of holes. I've had a few like that. ) come to think of it though, looking for love through story sounds little bit insulting. But I don't mean it like that. I think fiction allows is to live lives and go places that we otherwise I'm free to do. However the fact that so many people want to read about other people's love affairs and thus create emotions in themselves suggests that there is an awful lot of people living without love.

The next best selling category is suspense/adventure. I guess hear this suggests that there are lots of people living quite boring lives would like to aspire to be a cop or a fire fighter or a jet pilot. Or even a spy.

And then there's erotica. I have even been guilty of writing erotica but not under my own name. What would my mother think! (I hope my mother doesn't read that kind of thing) what would I think if she did? Even so, I think my theory holds true. If people are reading erotica that suggested the kind of emotions and feelings that literature instills in them meets a need that they're not having met in their real life. 

There are lots of genres of course but I write horror. I have suggested that in writing and reading this kind of literature stories we are looking for an experience of the other – some kind of presence or intelligence that isn't human. But I guess it might be a lot simpler than that. It may just be people looking for some kind of entertainment. Because it is ultimately entertaining to have these emotions go through our bodies and minds in a controlled way. I may want to fantasise about being a jet pilot shooting enemies down and we never really want to do it. Or I may want  to imagine being in love with someone wonderful - a perfect woman or man but wouldn't really do anything about that because I'm very happy where I am. And  as for erotica I guess I may want to have those feelings and imaginings but never ever want to pursue them in real life.

I talked elsewhere about stories being a kind of inoculation. So it's about our fear of being predated being prey and getting eaten And it might be quite thrilling just to have a little bit of that but not too much. And I guess that's true about romance, suspense, erotica and all the rest.

I just want to have a dabble  at feeling things but not do them in real life and that's why they invented stories.

The Ghost of a Place (2)

I woke last night in the middle of the night and this is always a great time to think. I began to think about writing and some of the recent blog posts I've done on www.tonywalker.live.

I was trying to find what essence that is in common between all the things I do and write. I was listening to a marketing podcast by some guy whose name I forgotten – but he was speaking a lot of sense, at least it seemed to me. He said that if you listen to someone talking. then you will find what they're interested in. He said some people will always talk to people about parenting or sports, or cars of writing. That's how you can identify their key themes.

In my case it's always been about ghosts, the paranormal,the feeling that you get in certain places. And that really is the key theme in my work. I see that I write about places I've been and when I wonder why I've gone to these places it's because of this feeling of numinosityy that I am looking for. In the ancient cultures of Europe and Asia and America the Native Americans and the South American native peoples and in Australia, in fact all over the world there are certain places which are set apart is being sacred.

This is the Temenos - the sacred lying around the place where people went to see the gods. And I know that I've always been interested in going to places like that in the UK - at Glastonbury, Iona Lindisfarne - in fact the whole of Wales for me - Cornwall, the list goes on. And when I go on holiday abroad to Japan are Europe or America I find myself going to temples and sacred sites.

I've mentioned elsewhere on this blog that I used to run ghost tours. How that started it was that I wanted to go to these places myself and show people what there was to be seen or more exactly what there was to be felt in them. You may have read about the dragon energy in the stone circles. This was a project done in the 1970s and that they found this bizarre energy in certain places that was partly electromagnetic. I had a funny experience this year at Avebury stone circle in the south of England. And here there is a village have - a pretty, old village – surrounded by stone circle and I was trying to find with my compass at East and kept spinning round it was most bizarre.

So,  I used to run goes tours and I used to go to old castles and very atmospheric buildings and put on these Cthulhu mythos murder mysteries. That was set in the 1920s so I got to got to dress up but instead of being a Miss Marple or Agatha Christie thing it ended up being some horrible tentacled monster or a Dimensional Shambler going to get you. It was great fun but it was an attempt to artificially create this feeling of the Other. And I see that in my writing - I tend to go to that again and again/  I tend to talk about places in my writing very specifically and link it to this feeling of something else being there. Now this could be a monster or a ghost or just a feeling that there is some intelligence that that isn't human. And I guess ultimately I'm looking for God. Whatever that means.

But how does that link to this blog? I think that I'm trying to share with you my discoveries - so my discoveries about books and films and especially places where we can get that special feeling that there may be something there , something more mysterious something that reminds us that we not alone that there is an intelligence in this world that is in human

By the way, did you hear that we've found signals from aliens finally?

Follow me on Twitter for a lot of tweets about this kind of stuff @bigtonywalker

Amazon unlimited

I recently signed up for Amazon unlimited. It was the  month's free subscription that got my attention. You may have noticed that I have been a little bit manic this past month. And I’ve been devouring books about digital marketing. The trouble with these books is that the writers promote them fiercely and tell you that they're the best thing since sliced bread: their book is the one that’s going to give you all the secrets that will help you break through. Before reading them you can’t really judge. Many of them have hundreds of positive reviews and that might be genuine or it might actually be because they’ve paid people or influenced people to write a good review.

I’m going to reserve this blog here (Thoughts from the Microcosm) by the way from my thoughts about writing while my WordPress blog is the one I’m going to use for thoughts about the macabre bra (I left that dictation error in because I thought it was funny) and ghosts and alchemy and magic and haunted places.

Anyway, I was looking at all of these apparently indispensable books and thinking these books are going for $4.99 each. And there are lots of them!

And then Amazons advert caught my eye-and that’s what Amazon is really good at. Amazon unlimited is the answer-it’s £7.99 for a month but the first month it’s a free trial. You can have 10 books out at any time and this allows me to get any book out then I want and most of these books on marketing and writing are actually in Amazon unlimited.

I’ve also picked up a lot of criticism from writers about Amazon unlimited. Apparently they pay you half a cent  per page read so on average writers are earning half as much as they would from lending a book out compared to selling it. And a lot of advice from writers has been to  avoid Amazon unlimited. I can see this from a writer’s point of view however I think subscription services certainly have a large part to play in the future development of reading. So like it or lump it, I think we stuck with subscription services such as Amazon unlimited. That’s the view from the writer’s point of view however from the readers point of view  I think it’s wholly positive.

So I’ve been able to go through the books at great speed both  the good ones and bad ones. To be honest there are many that I wouldn’t have bought but when I read them I found I have some very useful information in them. I would never have got to see that without Amazon unlimited. Simply because I wouldn’t of shelled out 5 pounds for the privilege of seeing whether this was trash or valuable.

So I think it’s a good deal. You can actually get out a ton of books in your first free month without paying a penny and read what would’ve cost you a whole lot of money. So I would recommend that you sign up for Amazon unlimited and read as many books as you want for the first month and then if you don’t like it you simply cancel your subscription

You could even read my books!

And guess what I dictated this whole piece was sitting in the car by the side of a busy road. That’s not bad is it?

City of the Alchemists – Magical Prague.

 

“It’s a fairytale town, isn’t it?” To misappropriate a quote from In Bruges.  Almost a year ago, the beloved Sheila and myself took a trip to Prague. It was very beautiful – the Christmas trees were all out and the market was in full swing. If you’ve never been to Prague, just go. It’s like a fairytale of a middle European city.  But I had ulterior motives. I am partway through my Alchemical Tour of Europe. Several years ago, I became very interested in alchemy (prompted by Jung’s work on it) , and I decided to tour alchemical spots.  The thread to this is mainly Edward Kelly and John Dee’s travels and travails in the 16th Century.

Their collaboration began in London in the early 1580s. Dee was a mathematician and magician and famously astrological adviser to Queen Elizabeth I of England. But Dee was hungry to speak to angels and learn the secrets of the Universe. There is much to know about all of this, and I’m not going to tell you. Google is your friend, if you’re interested, but many reading this will already know. Edward Talbot later Kelley was a world apart from the intellectual and credulous Dee. Kelley was Dee’s seer, who looked into Dee’s shewstone and reported back what the spirits showed and said to him.  This is documented in A True and Faithful Relation and   It has been said that Kelley was a charlatan.  Kelley and Dee are supposed to have found a red powder at Glastonbury, that famous sacred site in England. They used this red powder to turn base metal into gold. Of course, Jung says this is a metaphor for the transformation of the Ego into the Self, but most people believed that the transformation of lead into gold was the thing in itself.  The good people of Mortlake, now a suburb of London, turned on Dee and burned his house. It may also that he fell out of political favour. In any case, they took up with a Polish nobleman and moved to Krakow where they contacted angels and began to transcribe the language of the angels, named after the Biblical Book of Enoch – Enochian.  When that fell apart, they were on the run again and fled to the capital of the alchemists at that time – Prague.  There were visits from angels and the angels even told Kelley to tell Dee to have their wives in common. Dee returned to England, leaving Kelley who was apparently thrown from one of the castle towers. They were always throwing people out of windows in Prague of course.

I’ve been to Krakow before and am going again at the end of November.  My previous alchemical trip was to Heidelburg, which I will write up. I have yet to go to Chartres, to follow Fulcanelli and his Le Mystère des Cathédrales, though I will.

So, this is what happened. One day we took a tram up to the castle on the far side. It was a cold winter’s day and we walked up through some suburban streets past sinister looking military facilties with lots of cameras. We visited the castle and the Golden Alley where the alchemists had been housed.  Then we walked through the old town. Later we went to the Strahov Monastery on the Petrin Hills.  I wanted to go there because in 2000 I played Vampire the Masquerade – Redemption where the monastery is a nest of vampires and the Petrin Hills and woods are full of the bloodsuckers. The place was strangely quiet and it was possible to kid oneself that they were there asleep, merely waiting for night to fall. We walked back through the woods, getting strangely lost. We visited a mirror maze up near the Camera Obscura tower at the top of the hills and then came across the strangest little house where there was free wine and odd men with beards and long hair were very kind to us. Very kind. Too kind. One guy reminded me of Mr Tumnus. His house was like that.

We went to the nicely done Museum of Alchemists, in what was supposed to be Kelley’s house after Dee went home. There’s even a pub there called Pub Kellyxir (get it?).  Which reminds me of that song Drink the Elixir by Salad.

Just imagine walking down those cobbled streets with those magical houses. The air is cold and you stop to get a cinammon pastry from one of the shops. The Christmas lights are twinkling and people walk by, their breath coming in clouds. You just need a beer. So you get one. And everything is even better and suffused with that warm, fluffy beer haze.  That’s a kind of alchemy, though not the one I went to Prague for.

We also visited Dee and Kelley’s house, known as the Faust House because it is said that Faust, who like didn’t even exist, had lived there and made his famous pact with the Old Lad, Prince of the Air there.  There is a blue light that is supposed to mysteriously emanate from the cellar of the Faust House, but I never saw it. Nearby are great Czech pubs serving lovely dark beer (did I mention the beer?).

So, did I find what I was looking for in those lovely streets? Yes and no. Prague is a Box of Delights. As for finding the True Gold, the Elixir of Life, the Stone of the Alchemists – well as the Irish say – if you go to Rome but don’t take Jesus with you, you won’t find him there.

Ain’t that the truth. And then there’s Bruges…

Moonchild ~ Aleister Crowley (The Dennis Wheatley Library of the Occult ~ Volume 3 (Sphere, 1974)) — When churchyards yawn…

And so we move onto the next book in the series with Crowley’s occult novel, here called Moonchild but also known as The Butterfly Net and, of course, Liber LXXXI. In his brief foreword Crowley states that he wrote this book in 1917. It wasn’t published until the short-lived Mandrake Press put it into print […]

via Moonchild ~ Aleister Crowley (The Dennis Wheatley Library of the Occult ~ Volume 3 (Sphere, 1974)) — When churchyards yawn…

Cockney Rebel: Austin Osman Spare — cakeordeathsite

Phil Baker’s excellent 2011 biography of the gloriously eccentric artist/magician Austin Osman Spare should hopefully revive interest in an unjustly neglected London artist. Hailed as the new Aubrey Beardsley at the tender age of 17 he fell into obscurity and lived in Dickensian squalor when the satyrs and general air of Yellow Book decadence that […]

via Cockney Rebel: Austin Osman Spare — cakeordeathsite