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.

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My son persuaded me to watch The Seeker: The Dark Is Rising with him. It was a load of crap, in my humble opinion.

Will Stanton, on his 14th birthday, finds out he is "the seeker" and has to collect 6 signs before "the rider" unleashes darkness on the world.

What the movie failed to explain, until near the end, is why Will was the seeker in the first place and why things didn't start happening until he was 14.

Judging by the reviews at IMDB and comparing the movie with the plot of the book series started over 40 years ago, I think I'm correct in my opinion that this movie isn't worth the time to watch it.

The Seeker: The Dark Is Rising stars Alexander Ludwig, Christopher Eccleston and a bunch of other forgettable actors. Here's a trailer:

Click here to view the embedded video.

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If you've ever picked up a newspaper and read a sensational headline, then you already know the power of words when you control how they're used. Just the word "power", when combined with an exclamation mark (see the article title) produces a mental image of power.

A Little Background

I recently went through a speaking lesson with my 22-year old son. He has a bad habit of mumbling and slurring words and I've had a difficult time hearing and understanding him (and I have acute hearing). During the lesson, I instructed him on how to enunciate, project his speech, and look people in the eyes when speaking to them.

Early in my military career, circa 1981, I was forced to learn techniques of military instruction. All noncommissioned officers were eventually required to go through courses in leadership containing this training syllabus. I had the fortunate advantage of learning to control my thoracic diaphragm in the process because I was stationed at the Marine Corps Recruit Depot in San Diego, California.

Later, when I began writing manuals (Marine Corps Orders), I was able to use what I learned about speaking effectively into writing effectively. It's called natural writing.

Emotional Words Evoke Emotional Responses

Regardless of whether they're spoken words or written words, how we use them is much more important than the words themselves. This is why I believe grammar, spelling and punctuation are important when writing. You want to correctly convey the same meaning as if you spoke them aloud.

There's one thing we can learn from an Internet troll (those people that comment in ways to incite disorder and mayhem). The troll knows how to evoke an emotional response from people who read what he or she wrote. The emotion is usually anger, but it's effectively provoked nonetheless.

Summary

No great orator or great writer has ever been successful (unless you count Samuel Clemens a.k.a. Mark Twain) without learning that words are power. By practicing your speaking voice, and translating it into your written voice, you can achieve much more than mumbling your way through life.

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It was John Emerich Edward Dalberg-Acton (Lord Acton) who originally wrote "Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Great men are almost always bad men." in a letter dated April, 1887, to Bishop Mandell Creighton. Many people who quote Lord Acton's Dictum aren't aware that it refers to Papal power and was made by a questioning Catholic.

While Lord Acton's Dictum was written more than 120 years ago, the meaning of that quotation has never been truer than it is today. We already know that world governments are filled with bad men in positions of power and authority. People have a tendency to overlook, however, the misuse of power and corruption within the church. This issue isn't about the abuse of religion; it's about the abuse of POWER.

As recently as 2006, the Catholic Church in the Philippines attempted to keep a movie, "The Da Vinci Code", from being played in theaters across the country. Although it was only successfully banned in the city of Manila and played throughout the rest of the country, theaters in certain locations refused to play it, including the only decent theater that's local to me. I and my family had to wait until we received it on DVD (in the mail) in order to watch it.

While the instigator of the attempted ban of The Da Vinci Code in the Philippines was the Philippine Alliance Against Pornography (PAAP), there's no doubt in a country where 80 percent of the population are members of the Catholic Church, that the power of the Catholic Church unduly influenced the course of events.

When a movie like this is suppressed by the Catholic community as a whole (or any religion, government, organization), it tells me that those in a position of power feel threatened by anything that could put their authority and power in jeopardy. If a person's beliefs are solid, no works of fiction can have any effect on them.

The preceding is my opinion and why I agree that absolute power corrupts absolutely. If you disagree, feel free to smite me.

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