You have more influence than you think

"Whoever you are and where ever you may be, you hold in your hands the happiness of more people than you can imagine."

(Henry B. Eyring)

I have this habit of checking the stats of my blog every time I publish a new post. Sometimes I will sit and click refresh over and over again to see if the number of views has gone up at all in the last millisecond. Probably not the most productive use of my time, but hey, a little self indulgence every now and again isn't all bad, right?

One of the features on Blogger's statistics is showing your blog's traffic sources and referring URLs. With that, you can also see any keywords that have been used in searches that led to your blog. For me, there isn't usually anything there, since my blog isn't too high up in the search engine hierarchy. However, while casually looking at stats the other day, I noticed three different searches.

They were originally in Spanish; here are the translations.

"I hate being 15"
"I hate my teeth"
"I like him but can't talk to him because I hate my teeth"

These keywords led their searchers to a blog post of mine called I Have An Overbite...and That's Okay, which I translated into Spanish as I Hate My Teeth. (It was a little complicated to translate the title and make it sound good, so that was the next best thing, haha.)

The Spanish version of this post got a dismal number of views, according to myself, who sets higher expectations. However, by reading the keywords of searches that led to three of those views, I came to an important conclusion.

I have a lot more influence than I thought.

While it may not be true, I'd like to imagine that the individuals who typed in those searches were young women, probably with their self esteem pretty low. I would also like to think that maybe they were helped by reading the experience of another young woman who had really low self esteem but was then able to overcome it. I don't know any of that for sure, but it got me thinking.

My post could have just 1 view. And if that one view helped to brighten someone's day who needed it, or teach someone something they didn't know before, than it was worth taking the time to write the post.

In this day and age the internet has come under fire quite often as being something that dissociates us with reality and with meaningful human interaction. While that may be true on many accounts, I believe that it can also be a powerful tool for meaningful communication. And through blogging and other types of internet public discourse, it can provide meaningful communication to people you have never even met and will probably never meet.

This also means that we should be cautious about the things that we write. To quote Sara Bareilles*,

"You can be amazing
You can turn a phrase into a weapon or a drug..."

"Nothing's gonna hurt you the way the words do
when they settle 'neath your skin..."

So be careful. Words are so powerful. For good or for bad. So "let your words be anything but empty." Lift people up. You have more influence than you think.


*Brave, by Sara Bareilles