One of the big mistakes many home business owners make is that they try to do it all themselves. Product creation, product selection, website creation, marketing, blogging, managing the finances and so forth.

Trouble is, there’s only so much you can do, and most of us aren’t good at every single little thing that is needed to really run a successful home business.

I know I have a lot of weak areas in my marketing, for example. I’m just fine with article marketing, but I really need to learn more pay per click, for example. And don’t even get me started on the time crunch that makes getting things done so very difficult in the first place.

Doing it all just doesn’t work for most of us. So what should you do?

1. Figure out your weaknesses.

It could be focus, as you have too many ideas to focus on one for long enough to succeed. It could be a particular kind of marketing you’d like to do. It could be keeping up with paperwork.

Anything that is holding back your success you need to take a good look at. If you can figure out where you’re going wrong you might just be able to make it right.

2. Decide what to do about it.

Some things are very much worth outsourcing. Hate the paperwork involved in keeping up your business finances? It might be time to hire a bookkeeper. Hate to write? What about private label articles or a ghostwriter? Maybe even a guest poster if you blog and just need a little extra time.

The point is to not ignore your problems. Depending on how you want to do things you can either learn to handle them yourself or find another way to get them done. Think about what will be most cost effective for you in the long run.

3. Do it.

Figuring out the problems and what needs to be done means nothing if you don’t actually do anything. Get moving and put your solutions into action. Without that all of this is a waste of time.

4. Keep an eye on your progress.

Don’t just assume you’re doing better. Keep track. Figure out what’s working and what isn’t.

You probably won’t get everything right, right off the bat. Some things will work and some won’t. You may hire the wrong person for the job, whether it’s their skills, your ability to communicate what you want or some other problem.

Improving your business by acknowledging and working on your weaknesses is tough and time consuming, but worthwhile in the long run. It’s amazing what a few changes can do.

On the schedules printed for distribution at BlogWorld, one session was missing: Are Bloggers Losing Control? The New World of Distributed Conversations & Comments. It was lead by Stowe Boyd, Ted Corman, Louis Grey, Greg Narain and Brian Solis.

For those who were at BlogWorld and missed it due to that, it was a really great session. And not just because I got to tease the guy next to me that the low attendance was actually his fault. You see, he’s brought in a personal size pizza and was eating lunch. I told him obviously the smell of food had made everyone who had attended the previous session decide to go eat rather than stick around.

At start time we had something like 5 people in there. A few more trickled in, then everyone who was on Twitter at the time was asked to start tweeting to get more people in there. I don’t know how many of the others who showed up were due to that, but the numbers were still far, far lower than any of the other sessions I attended.

No, I didn’t tweet it. No laptop computer and let’s just say my cell phone plan is old. I’ve never used it for texting of any sort. However, you can see what people did tweet during the session by searching Twitter for #add. Scroll down because they have been pushed down by other tweets tagged that way. And of course these will get pushed further down as the days go by.

OK, so the crowd was small. What HAPPENED during the session?

I know, I know. The small crowd doesn’t matter so much as the information, which was amazing. I have 3 pages of notes to go through on this one. Things did ramble a bit off to the side of the topic at times, but it was still great.

The basic problem many blogs are facing these days is that their comments are going to other sources, such as Twitter and Friendfeed. Many bloggers say their comments are down by half.

The news isn’t all bad, though. These comments can drive more traffic and increase your overall community of readers. Your work is being exposed to a wider range of people than just those who had already discovered your site, and they’re being introduced by people they trust: friends on these networks.

This is considered by some to be the transition from Blogging 1.0 to Blogging 2.0.

Blogging 2.0 means your users are going to comment where they’re most comfortable. People may see your blog as the conduit, rather than the destination.

One of the considerations they suggested is whether or not it’s a positive to go from considering web pages to web streams. The distribution of comments means there are more ways for people to discover what you’ve written, but it’s harder for you as the blog owner to discover what people are saying and to participate in the conversation.

Should you try to participate in all the conversations?

There are good points to trying to participate in as many of the conversations as you can. It becomes clear that you care, and you can deal with misunderstandings.

On the other hand, finding all these conversations is time consuming, as is keeping up with them. You do have to think about how much time you can afford to spend on this. Think about how you’re going to follow all the conversations that can go on about your site away from it. Do you really need to care about all of them? Think about if quality or quantity of relationships matters the most to you.

Backtype was suggested as one way to find the conversations. It allows you to follow individuals, as identified by their URL. It’s not perfect, but if you want to see what a particular person has been talking about online, it can find them across various blogs.

Summize, the Friendfeed search tool and Yahoo Pipes were also suggested. Summize is now owned by Twitter.

A very good point made was that this is very much an in-crowd phenomenon. So if you’re getting hit hard, congratulations! Your readers are taking up the new technology very quickly.

But if you aren’t seeing this, you should still be paying attention. Just think of how fast things can go from unusual to mainstream in the online world. How long do we have?

It just depends. I was talking to Wendy Piersall after the session, and she said her comments are already way down. Lynn Terry said hers are up.

As for me, well, I rarely get a ton of comments so I really can’t say. Maybe I should blame distributed commenting just for fun.

Seriously, I won’t, because at this point it’s very much worth my while to keep building up my readership and the comments on this site. It does no one any good to pretend there’s no problem if there is one.

My suggestion, if you’re having a drop in comments, would be to check and see if distributed commenting is the problem. Use the tools mentioned. See what you can find out. You need to know if it’s a distributed commenting issue or something else going on. Assumptions are not your friend.

What options do we have?

A change like this wouldn’t be getting interesting without some tools to push things along. One such would be Disqus, a universal commenting system that has been around for close to a year.

The basic idea with Disqus is that they provide a universal way for visitors to comment on sites using their system. It works with Wordpress, Blogger, Moveable Type and TypePad. You get threaded comments, and your blog joins a community of other blogs that have chosen to use Disqus. It also handles the spam for you.

Each of your post becomes its own forum, and Disqus allows you to sync your comments section to it.

For users, it’s having a single login and a reputation that can be built across several blogs that can be an advantage.

Judging by the comments about Disqus on StumbleUpon, lots of people love this system, a few HATE it. Always good to know what people think about a system before you consider working with it.

This and other systems are still very much in development, and the panel had some good points that you should consider. The big one is “who owns the data?” which should matter tremendously to anyone choosing to use an outside service for their comments.

They also pointed out that these are very early days. When the telephone was new, you had to be on the same system as the person you wanted to call, or you couldn’t reach them. When texting was new, you had to subscribe to the same service as the person you wanted to text. Judging by these examples, the panel expects something similar in time for distributed commenting.

As I said, I learned a lot in this session. This was the topic I knew the least about, so it was generally fascinating. Definitely my favorite session overall.

What can I say but that I had an absolute blast! BlogWorld was utterly exhausting but really educational and I got to make a few new friends. I’ll be posting over the next few days on some of the things I learned.

One of my favorite sessions - and did I ever take notes! - wasn’t listed in the printed schedule available at BlogWorld. It was on the online one that I had printed out at home, so I was one of the few to know about it until people started posting on Twitter about it.

These kinds of things can be really overwhelming, and I sure wish I had a laptop. Would’ve really simplified the note taking, not to mention the chronic urge to blog. Do you have any idea how hard it is to be away from a computer for days when you’re used to spending significant chunks of most days on it?

Well if you’re like me, you probably do.

There were two things that were challenging for me. The first was simply dealing with some hip pain due to my current pregnancy. Not much to be done for that, but it ensured that I went to a lot of sessions. Great excuse to just sit down.

The second was more important. It’s hard to network when you’re no longer used to crowds of people. It’s been AGES for me since I’ve had to deal with more than a small group, and frankly things were overwhelming at times. But the time before and between sessions were nice for just talking to to people in the same room. After all, if you’re in the same session, coming up with something to talk about is pretty easy.

Choosing sessions to go to can be tricky. There can be many great titles available. But don’t bother going to too many on similar topics. There were a ton of them on monetization, and while earning money is nice there’s a lot more information you need in order to succeed.

Besides, the basics of many of the monetization sessions were to first try selling something of your own, preferably your own products, but ad sales as well, then affiliate marketing, with AdSense down on the bottom if you just need a way to earn money.

The exact details varied, of course, but you can experiment with those and see what works best for you. Some did find affiliate sales to work better than selling their own products.

When your schedule and budget allow, go to one of these conferences. I found it to be highly rewarding.

The economy in the United States is in a pretty serious downward spiral right now. Too many major companies are needing bailouts or having to close down. It’s not a pretty sight.

Does that make now too risky to start your own business?

Not at all! Some businesses thrive even during recessions. It may mean that you have to be cautious about the risks you take, in case your financial position turns out to be more precarious than you thought.

That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t take a chance.

What you’ll want to look at is what will continue to sell. It’s not like people quit buying things completely in a poor economy. Their priorities will shift instead.

Will Scams get worse?

One of the big problems can be that the more desperate people get to earn money, the more scams come out.

Be careful in joining any opportunity. Do your research, get opinions from other people and listen to your gut. You need to be passionate about what you do, but that doesn’t mean you should forget common sense.

I recommend finding out who is generally trusted in whichever industry you want to get into. If they have a website or blog, start reading. Find out what resources are worth paying for to shorten your learning curve. More important, find out which are a complete waste of time and money.

What Kind of Business?

There are too many possibilities to name just offhand in one post.

One possibility, of course, is to sell to the other people starting home businesses. I expect a lot of people will be starting out.

But this is not something I recommend unless you have already had some success in your own business. If you’re doing well, you may be able to help other people succeed in your industry and earn some good money doing so.

If you’re starting out, it’s probably not your best choice. Lots of people try it because they see so many ways to earn money. But too many of them end up propagating the scams that are such a problem to so many people. You’re better off earning a living doing something you can be proud of.

You may also consider starting a home business with products that people will use up and reorder. This is why so many network marketing opportunities do well in better times. Some will continue to thrive. It’s up to you to figure out which.

Know Your Limits

Not just your financial limits, although these are very important. Know your time limits. Your skill limits.

Knowing your limits doesn’t mean you can’t work your way past them. Matter of fact, it’s a good idea to stretch yourself. You just have to know when and how.

Sometimes the solution to a skill limit will be to hire help. Other times it will be to learn that skill. Still other times you may decide that you don’t need that particular skill just yet.

If you’re working hard on your home business you should be able to get past some of your financial limits over time. Make sure you reinvest in your business whenever possible. The more you can increase your budget for your business, the easier it is to build it up.

Time limits can be tough, especially for those working a regular job plus raising a family. Your time limitations can be somewhat overcome by outsourcing parts of your business. There are plenty of freelancers out there who would be glad of the work.

You will probably also have to sacrifice some of your family time, leisure time and/or sleep. You decide what is worth sacrificing for your own situation.

Don’t let a bad economy scare you off starting your own business. It’s possible to succeed despite the economy. And if you can succeed now, how much better can you do later?

People always say you should start a home business that you’re passionate about. If you don’t love it, it’s going to just be too hard to keep on going.

That doesn’t mean you’ll always enjoy what you do. Sometimes even the best home business can get you down. When your business gets harder to work, it’s time to take a look at why.

Where You Work

Maybe it’s a lack of a private workspace. I know I find it a lot harder to work when my husband is on his computer. It’s right next to mine, and even though he knows that I don’t like to have someone look over my shoulder as I work, and he tries not to, I’m still very aware of his presence. This makes it harder for me to get things done.

How You Work

It could also be the tedium of the parts of the business you don’t enjoy. You aren’t going to enjoy every aspect of your home business equally. You might love making presentations to customers if you’re in network marketing or you could dread them. You might love working on your business’s website or find it tedious. Article writing, forum participation, commenting on blogs, handing out business cards, advertising in general… you won’t enjoy all parts equally.

The key here is to figure out if you can outsource any of this. Some things you may well have to do yourself, or feel that way. But if you can pay someone to do the things that you drag your feet on or that kill your enthusiasm, why not? Focus your own energies on the parts you enjoy and that bring in more money.

How Your Family Feels About Your Home Business

Then there’s also the eternal curse of a lack of familial support. It’s incredibly rough when your family doesn’t support what you’re doing, especially in the early days when maybe you really aren’t earning that much.

Finding a way to build that support can be a real challenge, particularly if it has never been there at all. Some people won’t get it until you can show a decent income for the time you spend. Others just need to understand more about what it is, what your goals are and what you need from them.

Children can be especially challenging. They need your time and it’s easy to feel guilty when you need to do something for your business. If you can find a way to keep them happy as you work, or to work as they sleep, you may suffer less from guilt.

For some, this may mean finding daycare. Yes, it sounds contrary to running a home business, but that can be how it goes. You can also consider finding another mom to trade care with or arrange more playtime with friends for your kids. Older kids can even get involved in what you’re doing.

Overwork

Another problem can simply be that you need a break. It may be that you’ve been overworking yourself and really just need a touch of time away from your business. This could be a few hours doing something purely for fun, a full day or even a vacation.

Make sure you do this! Time away from your business can be inspiring and actually improve your progress.

Too Little Networking

Getting to know other people in your industry can also be a huge help. They’ll probably understand your frustrations. Many of them will have been there. Talking to people who know what you’re working on can be a huge help.

Even when you’re in similar businesses you can often help one another build up your businesses. Just because you’re competitors in one way doesn’t always mean you compete in everything. You can be friendly about it

The key is to not give up just because you aren’t enjoying things at the moment. Figure out where it is that you’re really struggling and try to bring back that passion.

As you work on your blog, it’s good to read up on ways to improve your chances for success. There are so many things you can do to bring up your readership or generally improve your blog.

You can drive yourself crazy trying to figure it all out. You’ll even find strong opinions on what seem to be little things.

Full vs. Partial Feeds

This one can get quite a bit of debate. Full feeds are great for people who use feed readers and just want to get their blog reading done, but the blog itself may lose out on traffic from those readers.

Partial feeds mean that the first part of your posts must drag people into clicking to read the rest of the post. But some readers will unsubscribe if you require this of them.

There are some strong feelings on both sides of this. Some bloggers worry about their feeds being scraped if they use full feeds. Others want readers to come to their blogs to hopefully improve the number of comments and maybe even ad clicks.

Personally, I go for full feeds simply as the most functional option for readers. Anyone who is moved enough to comment still has to click through to the site. Properly added product recommendations will still make it through to the feed reader, so you can still get affiliate commissions.

Displaying Feed Counts

Having a lot of readers is a wonderful thing for a blog. It’s one of the things that makes blogging worthwhile. Some bloggers display their feed counts, while others don’t.

And of course some fake the numbers so that they look popular. All too easy to do and generally too easily discovered.

I’ve seen general agreement that if you have fewer than 100 subscribers to your feed, you may as well forget about displaying the count. You aren’t getting the social proof that you should want from this. Some will say to wait for even higher numbers, but that’s up to the individual blogger.

Even some sites with a huge number of subscribers will prefer to not show numbers.

Don’t bother faking counts, as being caught out greatly damages your reputation. Instead, think about why it is you want your count to show.

In many cases, it is for that social proof that a lot of people are subscribing to your site. Feed subscriptions don’t tell the whole story, but it’s a number that is easily made public.

Just keep in mind that there are other ways for people to tell how much traffic your blog is getting. The number of comments is a good clue. A high subscriber count displayed with few comments (assuming comments are turned on) can indicate a problem.

Using the Right Social Media Sites

Social media websites have proven to be an amazing way to get the word out about individual blog posts. But if you try to sign up and participate in them all, you’re going to drive yourself crazy and possibly be counted as a spammer if you do nothing more than self-promote.

I’ll be perfectly clear. Social media can make a huge difference to your blog and the traffic you get. But overdoing it is not the answer.

Pick one or two to start with, and participate on them. Promote your own things occasionally, but your main focus should be on being a good member. You’re looking to build a solid reputation and some trust. Network with people doing well on those sites as well as with others just starting out. Get a real feel for what goes over well.

Don’t give yourself too hard a time about learning it all right away. There’s a lot to figure out and taking your time to understand what you’re trying to accomplish will do more than plunging blindly in.

While any of these can make a difference in how your site grows, they really aren’t that likely to make or break you. Even your own use of social sites, which can drive serious traffic at times, can matter far less than if your readers use them. Give yourself time and work the way that is best and most productive for you.