A to Z Challenge Reflections

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Well, I finished survived the April 2012 A to Z Challenge and was fortunate to have been able to stay a week ahead of the game. I'm a planner and with a theme involved, it was really imperative that I write in advance.

Now it's time to reflect on the challenge, the HIGHS, the lows, the pros and the cons. {These my thoughts alone and do not necessarily reflect the opinion of other participants or the co-hosts.}

HIGHS:

1. Making new friends - I managed to find several great folks to converse with. It doesn't get any better than that. 
2. Global connections - I now follow blogs in the UK, Australia and a couple of other countries. Far cry from my norm of the US and Canada.
3. Finding new followers - I started the challenge with about 25 followers and ended up with almost 90. Hey, I'm a writer, I like to know that folks are actually reading what I write. Okay, realistically I know that many just clicked FOLLOW and will never come back, but that's okay. I may have done the same to their blog.
4. Challenging myself - I had never written flash fiction until recently and this let me work on my writing skills, keeping things tight but still telling a story.

lows:

1. Not being able to read as many blogs as I would have liked. I suspect I hit maybe a third of all the entries, no, probably a quarter. 
2. Paring my blog reader list - I won't continue to follow all the blogs that I did during the challenge (for various reasons). I was already following over 300 blogs and had to put many of my RVing friends on stand-by status. Now I get to start paring the list down to something manageable. Ugh!
3. ERRORS - I hated reading my blog post after the first comment of the day and finding an error. Eeek!

As to Pros and Cons, I think I'd rather list a few Tips for next year.

1. Folks, turn OFF word verification! No matter how many times it was suggested, I still found blogs with Blogger's horrible CAPTCHA still turned on. Invariably, those blogs had no or very few comments. Google is now very good at filtering out spam.
2. Be as prepared as possible if you are truly committed. For me that meant having my theme (yes, I will always use a theme) picked out, topics chosen and photo inspiration selected (read more about my theme selection process here).
3. Do your best to visit/comment/follow the blog of everyone who comments/follows yours. I also initially picked one new blog commenter from those blogs to check out as well.
4. If you have a WordPress blog, you can't use the Google Friend Connect. A good alternative is Linky Followers. I've even added it to my sidebar along with NetworkedBlogs [Facebook] to allow alternatives for everyone.
5. If you have a Twitter account, show it on your blog page. Many times I wanted to share with you that I was tweeting your post but couldn't find a handle. 
6. If you don't have a Twitter account, think about getting one. Follow some other great writers/bloggers, share their posts and they will share yours.
7. Taking Twitter one step further is Triberr where like-minded people share each others blog posts quickly and easily to their followers, exploding your exposure. My daily reading statistics almost tripled once I joined and participated. 
8. Read some of my earlier posts about getting ready:
   
   • Blogger and Word Verification [rant]
   • A to Z Blogging Challenge - Stuck? 
   • A to Z Blogging Challenge - Preparation - Blog Cleanup 

I know of at least two friends who wanted to do the challenge but didn't make it. I found two who had to quit near the end or modify their posts. Several others ran into health issues. It's okay. This isn't a job, it's meant to be fun, increase your readership and help you find new blogs and hopefully new friends.

Would I do it again? Absolutely, in fact I'm already working on my theme. Flash fiction inspired by photos I've taken over the years. The words will come after the photos this time around. I may repeat the 10x10 concept but not sure. I may be more lenient, just use a max word count.

Hey, you're my readers - what would you like to see next April?

Oh, and my one comment for the hosts, I would love to see the blogs broken into sections like: poetry, photography, fiction, writing, music, religion. It would allow me more time to find blogs that would interest me, ones that I will continue to follow. I would still pop into others as time allowed, but feel this would make things more efficient in the long run.