Use December's blogging lull to your advantage

If you've been blogging for more than a year, you know that we are heading into the 'dead' season for blogging. As we get into next month, everyone's attention moves to other, frankly more important areas, and blog readership across the board goes downhill from around mid-December till the New Year. Traffic will come to a crawl and for this blog, Christmas Day and New Year's Day are probably the two lowest days of the year for traffic.

So since most people will be taking a bit of a vacation from blog reading, it might be tempting for you as a blogger to take a mini-Holiday as well. But I think that would be a mistake, and that you should use this time wisely to improve your blogging efforts. Here's five ways to make the most of December's blogging lull:

1 - Re-evaluate everything. Go back and look at what your blogging results have been for 2009. How did traffic do? Subscribers? Comments? And how did these metrics tie back to your blogging goals? Put your blogging strategy for 2009 on trial, and then tweak it for 2010. Set goals for your blog. But make sure that those goals tie back into your larger focus for your blog.

2 - Ramp up content. David Armano advises doing this, using the Holiday vacation to push out as much if not more content than usual, with the thinking being that since many other bloggers are slacking off, your content can more easily be seen. We are going to keep looking for content to share with our networks, and if you keep creating great content while everyone else slacks off, guess whose posts will be shared with my network? Use December to increase your blogging visibility.

3 - Use December to get a blogging jumpstart on 2010. Hey we all want to spend time with friends and family during the Holidays. Work in all forms seems to take a backseat, and that's a good thing in many cases. But if nothing else, use that last week of December to get your content in order to hit the ground running in January. Most people won't begin to get back into reading blogs regularly until Jan. 4th (a Monday), and this is when many bloggers will begin to get back to writing. Use December to have at least one week's worth of posts already written for January, so that way first thing on Monday the 4th, you've already got fresh content waiting on readers, while many other bloggers are thinking about getting back to writing.

4 - Experiment. Every year I spend the final week of the year spending time with social sites/tools that I've been meaning to try out, but just haven't had the chance. I started doing this 2 years ago when I decided to see if I could finally figure out what the hell was the big deal with this Twitter site that everyone was buzzing about. December is a great time to examine different tools and see if they work for you to complement your blogging efforts.

5 - Become a commenting superhero. Remember, traffic is going to come to a crawl on many blogs. Virtual tumbleweeds will be bouncing into the blogger's legs and they will probably just resign themselves to the fact that it will simply be a few weeks before the traffic comes back. So just as you can use this lull to ramp up your content and get noticed, do the same thing with comments. If many people aren't commenting, this is your chance to get noticed. And not just with other readers, but by the bloggers themselves.

So there's some ideas for being proactive in December, and taking advantage of the blogging lull. And by the way, I'll be utilizing all of these steps, what about you?

Pic via Flickr user Katmere