Keeping up with the basics

So in the last few weeks, my blog posting has slowed. Life has caught up to me, I have less time to dedicate to my online activities, work pressures, spouse time, kids stuff, house maintaining, blah blah blah.  The same old story that I'm sure everyone has heard before.

What I want to know is How do other successful bloggers manage? Because I know I am not the first, nor will I be the last blogger who has to deal with life in general. The first thing that comes to mind is to schedule my blogging, I know that most people schedule time in their day/week/month to get their blogging done and I plan to do the same. The head-scratcher is how much time to dedicate to blogging.  How much time should I allocate to posting, reading, reading other blogs, commenting and all the other activities that come with maintaining a good and active blog?

I've spent a lot of thinking time pondering this. The first thing I've asked myself, is well - how active do I really want to be?  I love my weekly WWW Wednesday update.  It helps me stay current on what I am reading and planning out what my next read will be.  I also love writing book reviews. I figured out how to write reviews on goodreads and auto publish them to my blog (work smarter, not harder folks!) which is great because I love being part of the literary community. However since my book reviews are dependent on my active reading time, and I really hate setting an amount of time to reading a book (a topic for another post), I am not always consistent with my reviews.  As a matter of fact, I am three reviews behind as I sit here and write. Perhaps before picking up a new book, I should write the review of the one I just completed? Hmm? or duh! whichever works.

The second thing I've asked myself is what does success look like for me? Right now, my blog would be successful if it is an active site that has regular followers and receives about 100 hits a week.  Small potatoes for some of you, but monumental activity for me!

Finally, what kind of posts will I publish? . For the blogs that I manage to read, I notice that the authors/writers have different features, post types and styles and generally have a nice variety. Well most do. So how can I emulate that without sounding insincere?

For all my bloggy friends out there - reviewers, writers or otherwise - how much time do you allocate to your blog activities and how much time do you think a new blogger should allocate to their blog to keep it fresh and successful?