More or less. Freezing at night, very dry and the mountains don’t have any snow, but it’s almost…balmy of late. Today of course the wind is blowing at 20+ mph but still. It’s a novel sensation to not be actively wretched because of the weather. I had forgotten what that was like.
There are a lot of things it seems I’ve forgotten lately, and at times I feel like an amnesiac in my own life. Probably it is just the cumulative stress of the past couple of years; at the same time it’s as though things are slipping away and freeing up space, turning some lights on and others off. It isn’t all bad, at times even restful. Not remembering things, not keeping the same old opinions- for a minute there’s a feeling of freedom and openness. The trick is to keep on the sunny side of life, of course. Mostly it’s interesting to encounter daily life in what amounts to a whole new way. Other times it is tremendously alienating, very lonely, cognitively dissonant. Reconstructing a whole life is quite a project, and of course generally? You get to do that after a moment’s leap that may have been years in preparation but remained largely unconscious in nature. It’s all a big surprise. It amounts, in this case, to being in a sort of exile where the past has been wiped away and the future stretches out from an inchoate present. I think many must be feeling this sense of dislocation now, given the times and the tenor thereof. But it’s difficult.
Meanwhile, here it is yet another year, time marches on and all that. Realizing that the lay of the land has changed in a timely way is important to running a business. The digital world, for example. All kinds of apparent rules, SEOs and niches and what not. At the end of the day, it’s like a big race to the bottom. So many “opportunities” that seem to me to be rather parasitic. Sell this product to x number of people and then you’ll get money from them and the people they sell the product to….ye olde Pyramid Scheme. The market place is full of middlemen and the flow of things is indirect. But, you gotta do what you gotta do, right? Still it seems to me that a system built on consumption may not be the most long lasting. The producers of commodities get relegated to a lower and lower status, and the people who step in and affiliate themselves (!) to sell said commodities seem to be able to dictate everything about how those things get distributed, sold, for how much and when. So I see more and more people falling behind because they can’t sell what they produce for enough to live a simple life. Thus they stop producing those things. Then what happens? If you look at agriculture, you can see that one or two things happen pretty routinely. The commodity disappears, the original thing itself is no more. Except. It morphs into something that is mass produced and whose value is completely controlled by those who control the means of production. Think food. Chickens, for example. You have no idea how that chicken you’re eating was raised, what it ate, whether it was genetically modified or what. But the individual farmer, who used to raise chickens- actual real chickens for sale in a market- is hard to find in the maze of agribusiness. The same thing happens with the things I make. The hours I spent trolling through resources and visiting people and giving talks and handing out samples. To find that even a small, local grocery/natural foods/health store in a small place gets provisioned through a larger, middle man, entity. And whatever that entity carries is what the store will sell. Whether you have a small, feasible, competitive product, or not. So it’s interesting. The dance card is filled in advance. I still believe that success is possible, but it is a question of scope and degree more than one might have thought. Perspective, what really matters, what you really need- all that sort of thing, right?
So, in pondering the New Year Business Plan, how to “increase traffic” to the things I do, the website and this blog and stuff, I find that generally I’ve jumped through all the hoops. Except that I don’t put pictures on the blog, which apparently is CRUCIAL, Gentle Reader. Crucial. If you don’t have pictures there’s nothing for searchers to hang on to, more or less. Then there are all those bloggers I follow who quite often post nothing BUT pictures. Also, the places I do post pictures (website, for example) I do get a lot of traffic. Yes. But it is from people who come and download my pictures and text and that’s all that happens. I suppose I could say you’re welcome, but really. So I’m ambivalent about the picture thing, let’s just say. And, meanwhile, yet another computer fiasco so I can’t even GET to my pictures at the moment. A little matter of the photos going into downloads instead of the photo app. *sigh*
Boozilla: learning to fly one room at a time 
Posted by eksith on January 10, 2012 at 7:21 pm
Tags are your friend.
Right now, aside from one or two tags, the only way for people to find your posts is via the “Readomattic” which lists the most recently posted entries. But getting readers that way is down to luck and timing.
Speaking of timing, I usually get more readers when I post either around 8AM or in the afternoon around 4-5PM. Of course this is rarely possible for me because I’m always on Mars Central Standard time (otherwise known as 10 minutes before sleepy time).
I first found your blog as I was using the “Tag browser” (don’t remember which tag I was browsing at the time… it’s been a while :P).
I’ve noticed that whenever you do post, your list of tags are sparse and often highly restricted to one or two pertaining topics. This post, for instance, could also be filed under Life, Living, Perceptions, Weather, Nature, Agriculture, Economy, Cooking, Health, Marketing and even Business since they’re all discussed. They let you have 20, I think, so might as well use as many as is sensible.
Your tags are a summary of the post itself. Instead of a paragraph description as in a search engine result, you take a word selection cross-sample for the same purpose. And yes, you do see plenty of people abusing the feature with ones that are completely irrelevant to the post, but tags are a handy way to draw in people since they do subscribe to topics of interest.
A picture can help somewhat and the ones I’ve posted are usually of rubbish quality from my phone, but I don’t think they’re always necessary (on some posts, they can even be distracting). Besides, having been a regular here for a while, I can see your thousand words are worth more.
SEO products are ubiquitous because they don’t work. Usually, I’ve found the number of products on the market for an ailment is inversely proportional to their effectiveness or else only the effective ones will be visible. After all, aren’t they in the business of making your business visible and on top?
Posted by eksith on January 10, 2012 at 7:46 pm
Oops, make that 5 – 10 tags
Posted by boozilla on January 12, 2012 at 12:52 pm
I believe I’ve mentioned before that I am a Bear of Very Little Brain. This was so helpful in so many ways and I thank you from the bottom of my furry heart.