Skelliewag.org is among the five finalists for the Best Australian or New Zealand Weblog at the 2008 Bloggies. It’s the second category from the top, so there’s not too much scrolling required to take a look. The other nominees have about a billion raving fans, so a vote from you will really help me out :-).

I don’t ask for things often, but the Bloggies are kinda special.

Photo by (Bill & Mavis) B&M Photography

True productivity is not about doing more in less time. It’s about doing less in less time. It’s about defining what is truly worth doing and sticking to that alone.

Bloggers often tell me that there’s not enough time available to do everything they truly want to do: to start that dream project, to write that value-packed post, to guest-post on a popular blog. If I said to them: “You can have that, but you need to stop reading feeds and outsource comment moderation,” most people would respond: “It’s not that simple.”

But it is. If you can eliminate three hours of the inessential from your week, and doing your dream takes three hours a week, you can have it.

I’m not suggesting that you do all the below, but I’d like you to ask yourself each question and consider the pros and cons of your answer. How much time would you save? What’s the trade-off? A mental exercise rather than a prescriptive list, I want you to start thinking about where elimination fits in your blogging routine.

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Photo by a4gpa

Unless you’re blogging about Mexican Walking Fish (who’ve been trained to fight in the Greco-Roman Wrestling style) you can bet that your niche is pretty crowded. If you’re blogging about personal finance, technology, blogging or making money online, the sheer number of peers and competitors can make standing out seem impossible.

While many have argued that blogging in a crowded niche makes things unnecessarily difficult, I disagree. Sure, being the first blog to cater to the needs of an under-served audience is very useful, but few under-served niches remain. Let’s deal with reality. Most niches are crowded. And there’s nothing wrong with that.

In this post, I’ll explain how you can leverage a crowded niche for maximum benefit.

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Photo by Frabuleuse

Each weekend for the next five weeks I’ll be posting about one of the 5 barriers to success. If your blog is growing too slowly, if you’re rarely receiving comments or blogging feels like shouting into an empty valley, I hope this series will help you identify what isn’t working — and change it for the better.

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Photo by Hamed Saber

There are two reasons why I’ve used the above title for this post. Firstly, it’s a follow-up to my article on How to Get 1,050 Subscribers in Three Months. Secondly, because my new blog, Anywired, reached 1,100 subscribers five days after its launch on Thursday.

This post contains everything I’ve learned about starting a second blog while using your first blog, connections and profile as a platform to launch it from. If you take only one thing away from this post, let it be this point: your first blog is always the hardest. It only gets easier after that.

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