First - thank you so much to those who are the master-minds behind the challenge - you are all amazing!
This was my first A-Z challenge. I jumped right in with all 3 of my blogs. Random Ramblings didn't have a theme. I posted about totally random things that simply were interesting to me. Maple Grove Cemetery was all Halloween-related. I admit to having second thoughts about keeping this one signed up. It was tough to come up with health-related / weight loss topics for each day that possibly 100 other people didn't already cover. But I stuck with it, although I wasn't entirely happy with all my posts.
I knew right away I was going to write my posts ahead of time and schedule them for the appropriate day at 4:30 am. I even went thru and created / scheduled my posts with just the letter and a brief idea I had for it, to edit later. I used an excel document to keep track of what the topic was each day for each blog and to X it off when done.
I also learned a very valuable lesson. Double check the blog, too! I totally missed "L" on 2 of them. I woke up at 5:45 that morning realizing I'd forgotten to do the MGC post and hurried to get something posted. I discovered that evening that I'd missed the RR post altogether. By then people had actually commented on my single brief sentence, so I was stuck. Ooops!
I loved the navigation buttons on the A-Z page! At first I just scanned the list and clicked on ones that sounded interesting. But then I realized that I was missing some good reads! So the "surprise me" button got used A LOT.
It was tough getting into the swing of replying back somewhat quickly to comments and coming up with something more exciting than "Thanks for stopping in!" but I confess that did get used a lot.
My followers almost doubled and a big thank you to all my new friends! I hope you chose to follow because you like what you read and not just because you felt sorry for me. I like having regular commenters, because I feel I get to know people a little and am happy to see them comment.
I also found a lot of new blogs to follow myself. I have a wide variety of interests and joining this challenge allowed me to find them!
There are a couple things I want to do differently for next year. First - I want to figure out how to add my fancy script signature to the bottom of my posts. Second - I want to add a small paragraph to the beginning of each post with a quick explanation of what the challenge is and to show that I'm not a posting weirdo. Thirdly - I'm not going to ignore regular posting.
So yes, I do plan on doing the A-Z Challenge in 2013. Looking forward to it!
