Today is the first day of Fall 2008, Autumn is an exciting time for bloggers, the slow summer is finally over and we can all get back to business.

Fall / Autumn is my favorite time of year. I’m a halloween junky, and I also love to attend the Renaissance Festival here in ohio. I love the changing leaves, and the fresh apple cider at the local farms.

Fall has always been a time of relaxation to me. Even though my online endeavors and businesses are speeding up. There’s just something special about fall.

Fall 2008 will be the first year my wife experiences fall in Ohio. She’s from Utah, and sure they have trees, but she’s never seen the leaves change like they do here.

As fall 2008 approaches and the holiday season encroaches, now is the best time ever to build up your blog. Fall is when people come back from their vacations. Fall is also the beginning of the busy season for online professionals.

For political bloggers fall 2008 is extremely big being an election year. It’s about 6 weeks till election day. Have you made your decision yet? Will it be Mccain? Obama? Ron Paul? Other?

I of course back Obama, because I think he and Biden will do the most for our country, but a great place to get the low down from both sides of the fence is whitehouse2008.info.

Of course if you’ve been following my segments on Google trends, then you should be aware that Fall is the hot topic right now, and I highly recommend blogging about it.

Here are some related blog posts:

First Day Of Fall - 2008
Autumnal Equinox aka First Day of Fall 2008 Officially Arrives Today
We Made It!
Happy fall
An Apple A Day
The first day of fall 2008
94 days before Christmas and the First Day of Fall 2008
The First Day Of Fall
First Day of Fall, Memory Lane

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Running a successful blog takes a lot of effort. There are many things that go into blogging that most people don’t take into account, when they attempt to start a blog.

One of the surest ways to fail at blogging for a living is to waste your time online. Your time is valuable, it is your livelihood. Each second wasted can’t be returned to you, treat your time like gold and you will become a

golden blogger, just like Darren Rowse, John Chow, or Shoemoney.
Here are the 7 time traps that will make your blog fail…
Time Trap #1: Trying to hard to monetize your blog. It is true, that you do need to have a revenue source for your blog, but you shouldn’t obsess over this.

Many bloggers get it in their head that if they aren’t making any money it’s because their advertiser isn’t working out, so they try another, and another..and so on..

My tip is to put up some bidvertiser ads, maybe a few performancing ads, and leave it at that.

Notice I don’t mention adsense, it’s because they’re not a good program to go with until you’re bringing in a lot of traffic daily, if you have even a little click fraud they’re more likely to shut you down if you’re a small site. I am still banned because some idiot clicked on my links 97 times in a single day.

I bet if someone did that over at JohnChow’s site, or shoemoney’s they wouldn’t even slap his hand. Heck they probably wouldn’t even notice.

Time Trap #2: Obsessing over your design. Web Designers sometimes tend to be perfectionists, I know I fall into this category quite often. It doesn’t matter how pretty your blog is, if people aren’t reading it.

I’ll say that again for emphasis:
“IT DOESN’T MATTER HOW PRETTY YOUR BLOG IS, IF PEOPLE AREN’T READING IT.”
Content is king, not design. I’ve seen some ugly ass blogs that earn more than most people see in 3 months. When you have 500-1000 posts and are making the big bucks, then you might decide to tinkle with your design, or theme.

Heck by that time you might as well go ahead and hire someone to create you a professional and unique blog theme.

Time Trap #3: Twitter. Nuff said? Twitter has become this huge distraction. Twitter is great and wonderful, in fact I absolutely LOVE Twitter, but there is a time and a place. Set aside a certain amount of time per day or week to focus on twitter, and leave it at that.

With that said, I would definitely use the pingpress.fm wordpress widget in conjunction with ping.fm to simultaneously post to all your microblogging sites every time you update your blog. This will drastically improve your blog rankings and traffic.

Oh and speaking of twitter, why don’t you go and follow me already?

Time Trap #4: Not planning = Planning to fail. To be successful, you need to have a plan of action. The internet is the biggest time waster on the planet, and it’s addicting. It’s very easy to start reading an article, and follow link after link to related article, till 5 hours have passed and you haven’t written one blog post.

Trust me - this is a trap that I fall into all the time myself. It is one that can get the very best of us. Having a plan of what you’re need to get done, and when you can just surf without a plan will in the end help you stay focused.

The truth is, if you can’t post at least 5 blog updates to your blog per week, then you might as well stop trying to do it for a living. It will never happen for you. I’m sorry to say, but why waste  3 years trying and come out broke and pennyless. Sometimes even 5 blog posts per week isn’t going to ensure your total success, but it is a start. If you can do 1-2 per day then you’re awesome, and should be worshipped by all the wannabe’s.

Time Trap #5: Too many household distractions. Unless your blog is about tv, or tv related topics, or you’re live blogging about some show you’re watching, it’s probably not a very good idea to watch tv while working online. It’s also a good time, if you’re a professional to find a place that you can go and work, a place that isn’t full of distractions. Of course for mom’s, I know that’s hard but this is about doing your best. If you can’t get rid of all distractions work on getting rid of the biggest ones, and you should do quite well.

Time Trap #6: Obsessed and ignoring those who matter most. I have to admit, I’m obsessed with blogging and social media, it’s hard not to become addicted. Sometimes being obsessed makes us forget those that mean the most to us.

As bloggers we need to take time out each day for those we love, or they will resent your blogging. I know this from personal experience. This is a time waster because when people are angry at you for blogging it affects your performance. It also affects your spirit and attitude, which I believe affects your ability to manifest success.

Keep your house in order, when blogging. Bring your family into the conversation. Set time tables where you’re not to be disturbed, and other times where you’re not to touch the computer, reaching a balance in your online and offline lives is pertinent to true success.

Time Trap #7: Not Using the best tools available. As a blogger there are many tools available to us. It seems like each day there are more and more. My advice is to find the one’s that work best for your daily activities, and use them. I swear by feed readers. I don’t have to patience to scan blog posts for ideas unless I’m reading it in a feed reader.

My favorite new tool is a twitter tool called monitter, and I also enjoy ping.fm.

Monitter is a great tool that lets you track live updates on keywords that matter to you. It’s a great way to get new ideas on blog posts. There are many blog tools and research tools for bloggers, that it’s impossible to name them all, and I’d be wasting my time trying.

Mashable.com is a good blog tool starting point, and perhaps I will write another post listing the best blog tools, let me know if you’re interested in that topic, and I’ll definitely post about it.
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I had 26 responses to the following survey on twitter: “What time do you read your feeds the most, or see the most hits..”

My findings were both what I thought it would be, with a few twists.

I was pretty certain that Morning would be the best time of day. Other than that I wasn’t very certain.

According to my small poll, I was correct -  12 of the people polled, said they read their feeds in the early morning usually between 6-9am.

What I didn’t expect was for the second runner up to be the Night Crew(8pm - Midnight). There were 9 who reported the most activity @ Night.

Third is also a surprise, because it’s a busy time, people are coming home, spending time with families, and eating dinner. But third place is Evenings between 5pm-8pm. There were8 who chose this option.

Tieing for third was the mid morning group (9-11). 8 people also chose this option.

4th place was Afternoon (2-5pm). With 6 people.

5th Place was Noon and Late Night with 2 people. (Noon is roughly @ 12, give or take an hour); Late night is considered after Midnight.

All in all it was an interesting experiment, I think the most interesting part is that I asked a question on Twitter, and got 25 really good answers, which turned into a pretty neat blog post. Twitter really is a wonder.

I’d like to thank the following participants for contributing to this post:

mfelker

ethnicomm
cocoy
egbert826
digitalvision
mlewis106
tempyra
chrisWhite
maryn
TheBlogArtist
kgoyette
frjohnsen
ihenni
nbostic
amypalko
dr_pete
Kforbriger
samuelbowman
jasonp107
deege
cemcatik
TwisterMc
mkoby
gesteves
bmckay
theunguru

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