It’s been my experience that not every home business picks up a lot during the holiday season. Some slow down.

If your main focus is information, for example, it may be hard to come up with ways to bring people in for the holidays. While people may be looking for jobs during the holiday season, for example, they may have more trouble finding work as fewer companies hire, especially as you get close to Christmas.

Similarly, families may be too busy with get-togethers to be online so much. I’ve seen this particularly happen with mothers. They will look more for holiday ideas and recipes, but in other areas they just lack the spare time.

You can of course combat this somewhat by having content relevant to the upcoming holidays. Share tips on saving money on holiday shopping. Suggest fun things to do. Share recipes.

You can also prepare for the post-holiday season.

Employers start hiring again in the new year, for example. Anyone who has overspent during the holidays is looking for ways to pay down those credit card bills. People are generally ready for life to get back to normal.

If you weren’t able to pick up holiday traffic, perhaps some of this will be more accessible to you. Think about what your target market will be doing after the holiday rush. Life and business shouldn’t stop after the holidays.

The holiday season is fast approaching. I’m seeing stores with Christmas decorations up already and hearing reports that people are hearing Christmas music in stores. And it’s not even Halloween yet.

Hopefully you’ve done some work on gearing up for the holidays. If you haven’t, now is not the time to procrastinate. Poor economy aside, people are shopping already.

What you need to get done depends on the kind of business you’re running. Some will need more preparation, others less.

This is the time to spend more on your advertising, for example. You want to get those shoppers who are already buying for the holidays. Shopping early is an easy way to spread out the expenses of holiday gifts for many families.

You should also make sure that any holiday themed merchandise is easily found. This is the time of year it will get moving.

If you write about products, now is the time to start thinking about what products will sell well for you through your articles. What do people need to know in order to buy through your links? What’s going to capture their attention?

What else do you do to get ready? How early do you start planning?

Making progress with your home business can be a frustrating experience. Sometimes it all goes so smoothly, but other times you’re just stuck. Why is that?

I believe that one of the big reasons is that it’s so easy to let the past rule what you’re doing now and what you plan for the future. Just think about it. All those habits you’ve built. Are they all still productive?

Sometimes what worked in the past will hold you back later on. It just isn’t good enough anymore. If you’re still relying on the tried and true, even as it becomes less effective, you’re going to work yourself into a rut.

For example, I just rewrote my work schedule the other day. It’s a pretty lightweight schedule, focusing on general tasks I want to work on each day. I had long since quit following the old one, but hadn’t done anything about a new schedule.

Having a good schedule does amazing things for productivity, though.

Similarly, you may find a particular marketing tactic just isn’t working anymore. You can’t let your pay per click ads just stay the same forever, for example. You’ll often get better click through rates and quality scores if you keep on testing. You can let an ad that is converting well sit for a time, but then it’s time to check things over and try something new.

Your past failures can also hold you back. Maybe something didn’t work for you, and you’ve just never gone back and tried it again. You may have struggled with pay per click advertising, article marketing, commenting on blogs or forums, and gotten poor results.

If you haven’t looked at why you failed at one of these, perhaps it’s time. Take a look and figure out what you can do to make it work this time around. Maybe this time the whole thing will click and you’ll have a new source of traffic and leads.

Don’t try more than one new thing, or retry more than one thing you’ve done before, at a time. Most people get overwhelmed by trying to do too many new things at once, and you increase your odds of failure. Give yourself a chance to focus on picking up that skill while still working with the old ones that work for you.

A lot of people get into blogging for money because they hear about the fantastic success some people have enjoyed. It’s hard to not envy someone who is earning 5, 6 or even 7 figures a year from their blog.

Trouble is, for many people earning the way someone else does becomes their sole focus. They do their best to copy the successful people they see around them, rather than be themselves.

The biggest problem with imitating the more successful bloggers around you is that it’s easiest to be nothing more than an imitation. You don’t stand out. And if you don’t stand out, you’re not going to get people interested in what you have to say.

It’s one thing to take occasional inspiration from those who are doing better than you are. But if that’s the only thing you do, you’ll have more trouble developing your own voice.

Be aware of what others in your niche are doing, but find ways to stand out. Take a controversial position. Have fun. Worry less about what’s working for others and figure out what works for you.

The thing about blogging is that you can learn quite a bit about what successful bloggers are doing, and still not succeed with your own blog. You’re different people, after all, and the different approaches you take to similar tasks will not get you the same results.

If you really need to compare yourself to someone, take a look at the people who are at your same level of the game. Watch the people who are doing exceptionally well, if you like, but in many ways your most direct competition comes from the people who know about as much as you do.

Even then you don’t want to focus too much on what the other people are doing. You should be focused more on what you can do.

So What Should You Be Doing?

There are some things you absolutely need to get done to succeed as a blogger.

1. Develop your own voice.

You don’t want to sound like everyone else. Be yourself. Have your own style and your own opinions. If you love covering industry news, cover it. If you don’t, leave it alone except when it catches your attention.

2. Write for your blog – a lot!

Many of the most successful blogs are posted to more than once a day. Sure you can get away with less, but you may get less attention.

Don’t overdo! You can annoy readers if you are writing so fast that you forget quality in favor of quantity. Or if you just provide too much information for them to read. There’s a balance to be struck, and it’s up to you to decide what that balance is.

3. Comment on other blogs.

Yes, this takes away from your writing time. But it’s a great way to network with your fellow bloggers and get visitors.

Don’t worry about whether the links to your site are “do follow” or “no follow.” Don’t constantly link to your own posts within the body of your comments. Don’t be self promotional in general.

Be a genuine contributor. Your comments will stick better and bring better attention to your blog.

4. Don’t start too many blogs.

It’s easy to get caught up in the excitement and start up blog after blog. But it’s not going to do you as much good if you can’t maintain quality on all of them. Run just one blog until you really know what you’re doing. Then decide if another one is something you need to start.

Am I perfect with these? Heck no! I post on this particular blog far less than I should, but I have others that are more of a focus for me. I have also dropped blogging on sites that I simply do not have time for right now. As my personal life changes I may pick them back up, but for right now they’re on the back burner.

And of course I sometimes wish I could succeed as wildly as certain other bloggers. But I don’t let that get in the way of working on my blogs in my way.

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?