frustration Do you ever feel like your rowing a boat upstream or climbing a hill that never ends? That's what I feel like sometimes. Well, I took 2 days off from posting anything at all so that I could put things in perspective. Usually when I take time off from posting, it's because I don't have a choice due to power outages or a lack of DSL connectivity. This is one of the few times I purposely didn't write anything.

Not only did I not write anything, I refrained from responding to comments and email messages as much as I could. I don't normally do that either. In order to see where I stand, I needed to ignore as many things as I could get away with ignoring.


Traffic Patterns

Apparently, all of my work and experimentation with traffic generation methods have paid off. I mentioned before that my daily traffic was around 300 unique visitors per day. That number has increased, in a very short time, to more than 400. Even the weekend traffic didn't dip below 300.

Of course, some of the merging of content from the other two blogs probably has a little to do with it. It can't be that much, though, because the combined traffic from both of those blogs was less than 35 unique visitors per day combined. Not only that, but I haven't moved even half of the posts yet.

Niche Blogs

I now have 3 niche blogs online. The first one, which was online 2 days before the second one, is only halfway indexed while the second one is completely indexed except for the home page (go figure). I expect the third one to index within a week. All 3 of them are included in my Google Webmaster Tools account, Google Analytics and Yahoo Site Explorer.

The first 2 blogs are already receiving a very small amount of traffic. Some of the posts are appearing in the Google SERPS already, but nowhere near the first page. This kind of thing takes more than just a few days, so I'm not chomping at the bit quite yet. Besides, I didn't pick extremely good keywords to target on those.

The 3rd blog, on the other hand, should see quite a bit of activity once it gets indexed. I'll write about all 3 (or more) at the beginning of July and provide some of the stats I'll have by then.

Research

Most of my time was spent doing research. Writing articles for niche blogs doesn't take very long since I type more than 60 words per minute. I found 3 more keywords to work on. Actually, I found 4 in the last few days, but I gave one away to someone else because it's a niche I really don't want to work, no matter how well it would do.

Researching keywords was not my main focus.

Doing Things That Are Different

That was my main focus. I'm quickly growing weary of writing about writing, writing about blogging, writing about search engines and the topics that bring in a few social visitors. I'm at the point in my blogging career where I don't want to write about the same things all the time. That's what niche blogging is for, not this blog.

In fact, I'm probably going to write more food and health-related articles in the future, or possibly more tech-oriented stuff. Perhaps I'll write more scripts… I just want to do things that are different from my own normal routines.

Projects

I have some ongoing projects that I've neglected and plan to do a lot of catching up this week. If I skip another day of posting, it'll be for that reason alone.