Dear Sara – call me!

Hello rivendalereview.co.uk Team,

We provide comprehensive digital marketing services that range from web development to ethical SEO. Besides that, we will also suggest some traffic generated keywords as per the SEO packages. All the techniques used by us are ethical and proprietary. In case you require any additional information, it shall be our pleasure to furnish the same. With our web development and mobile app development services, we can take your business to a whole new standard.

Most of your questions should be answered within the proposal, but don’t hesitate to let me know if you need any more information, such as client references.

If you want Audit Report of your website, then we can provide you as per your request.

Best regards,
Sara W@{}s
Project Manager

Note : If you want detailed plan of our proposal, please reply with Yes.

Dear Sara,

Thank you for your email. You ask if you can call me. You seem a little forward, if you don’t mind my saying, though I do wonder, idly, yes, if I should ask you to call, wonder if indeed you could help with my present quandary, but would you really know where to begin with it? I certainly don’t. That you provide comprehensive digital marketing services, ranging from web development to “ethical” SEO, is all very well but, sadly, irrelevant to my actual needs right now. Similarly your suggestions regarding traffic generated keywords, I suspect – whilst I’m sure well intentioned – may not be of much use to me either.

I wonder, have you actually seen my website? It’s rather old, a sort of Gen 2 unpublished writers thing from the late 90’s, one I abandoned in 2011. Why? It’s a question I ask myself from time to time, especially since it costs around £15 per year to maintain it in such a sorry state of obsolecence. I’ve moved on you see, Sara? though it seems at times I am still firmly anchored in the past by these rusting barbs of lethargy and self doubt.

Are you able to help with that at all?

Forgive me, I suspect you’re very young and have yet to encounter self-doubt, at least on the scale of that faced by men of my age. The confidence of youth fades as time passes, you see? the trees, once lush in their greenery, stand bare against a cold sky and the sweet-scented meadows turn into a cloying mud that pulls and slithers at every step, so it’s hard to move in any direction. At such times the best a man can possess is the patience to abide, that and to trust the seasons of the mind will turn once more, though in the greater sense – the metaphorical sense, that is – given the state of world-affairs at present, it’s easy to doubt such things are even possible any more. Such is the fix I’m in, and Search Engine Optimisation does seem rather an inappropriate salve, wouldn’t you say? Or am I missing something important here?

I mean, you have read my stuff, right? You wouldn’t just be – dare I even say it – Spamming me would you? Sara,… tell me it’s not true! That would hardly be ethical would it? Oh, my dear,… what happened? What has brought us to such a fell pass as this?

Call me yes,… you should. Or better still, join us here, we poor scribblers at WordPress. It needn’t be like this!

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Stormy Petrel

When we write online, we are like birds calling in the wilderness so our own kind will know us. But we should be careful not to go more than half way towards meeting whatever approaches as a result, and be prepared to withdraw at once if what we have attracted seeks to take advantage. There seems to be no way of inviting exclusively those birds of a feather without automatically attracting the wrong sort as well: the predators.

When we call into the wilderness, we tag our writings so others who share our ideas might find us. But the predators take those tags as indicative of our habit and try to hit us with some sort of service. But I am from the Old Testament era of the Internet, a time when its promise loomed large, and it had more to offer than mere shopping. Therefore I find the predators annoying in their crassness and think their growing domination and their souring of this wonderful mind-space space an utter abomination.

In response to the last blog I have received advice on how to make money online, was offered beauty products, lifestyle advice from teenagers, and budgeting advice from spivs. There were also genuine responses, easily discerned from the fake, and as ever I thank those most valued birds of a feather for being the icing on the cake of my wordsmithing. But in general, our bird-calls mainly flag our position to the hunters who ready their guns seeking to fell the money from our pockets. And in hardening myself against predators, in learning to evade them, I find I mistrust every advert that comes my way online because I suspect I have been clumsily profiled. I resent it and find it creepy. As a self-publisher though I have no choice but to operate in this territory. I suppose then I’ve become quite the snob, seeking kinship exclusively with my own kind while being infuriated to a comical degree when the predators hear my call and respond by showering me with their shite.  Those Victorian men of letters, contributing piffle to “Blackwoods” never had this problem.

As a young engineer, many years ago now, finding my feet in a huge and, at times, terrifying manufactory, I once had the privilege of working with a crusty old curmudgeon in whom I confided my utter bewilderment at the oftentimes Byzantine processes required to achieve the simplest of things, also the long hours we spent in meetings, discussing ‘policy’ without actually achieving anything. And he told me that in engineering, all there really is is cutting metal, that the rest is bullshit, that we should never lose sight of that one key fact, then all would be well – at least with us – and we would not go crazy.

It was good advice, advice that has served me well, and which can be applied metaphorically and usefully to many areas of life outside the metal-cutting business. But in a society that has de-industrialised it has also become impossible not to conclude all there seems to be left now is the bullshit, and no more so than with the online world where nothing tangible ever existed in the first place.

It’s therefore disappointing when you put up a piece of work to which most of the responses are from snake-oil entrepreneurs. It’s not disappointment that so few birds of a feather hear my call, more perhaps that there seem to be so few genuine wild birds of any feather out there at all. It’s as well then that of all the species, I am the least gregarious, and therefore well suited to the environment, happiest in small company. I am an albatross perhaps, or a stormy petrel.

It’s a very big ocean we are crossing, and meaningful encounters are  naturally rare. True, the ocean has also become a sterile environment, thick with dross and boiling with fatuous nitrates, a fact we birds of a feather recognise only by our detachment from it and we lament its loss. Everyone down there is trying to profit at the expense of everyone else, it is a place of predators and prey  like worms in a bucket where everything is a baited hook, and even imaginary concepts like “lifestyle” have their price-tag.

We follow the styles of the celebrities, ape the decor of their homes, dress the way they dress, even pretend we are celebrities ourselves with our Insta-profiles. I suppose I’m no different. It’s just that my styles are a couple of hundred years out of date. I am all frock-coat and pince-nez. I am a pocket-watch and leather-bound journal, grimacing at modernity.

Krishnamurti had much to say about such faulty thinking. Basically, he said, the world was never in trouble before we came along, and even we were fine until we started over-thinking everything, that it is our oftentimes corrupt thought, our ground-level delusions that are at the root of all suffering. It begins with thinking, and ends with killing. So, dear snake-oil entrepreneur, before you respond this time with your spam you should take time to read what I’ve written, observe the tag-traps I have set for you, then you’d realise your hits on me only become a part of the meta-structure of the very thing I’m getting at, and it’s thus I profit instead from your avarice.

But each to their own. So you keep your nose to the ground, Mr Entrepreneur, sniffing out your grubby coin, always an eye for the easy buck, weighted by your  petty ambition, while we true birds of a feather spread our wings and soar.

Squawk!

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