May 09, 2012

A-Z Reflections

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. The Life of Lisa was all health & weight loss-related.  A lot of my topics were easy to come up with and others changed as I did research and found something better. 

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 edit the post here 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!

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