Reflections on the 2017 A to Z Challenge

I will admit right up top that I was leery about the lack of the linky list, (You'd think this was an L post, wouldn't you?) but having survived the entire month with more activity than ever, I have been won over. Yes, it was more work than signing up one time on the linky list before April. Yes, I had to remember to copy my links every day to google+, Facebook, and the A to Z site, but it worked. In fact, by the middle of the month, hectic mornings sidelined my advertising rounds a couple times, but people still came.

So what changed for me this year?
I started gathering a blog list in a word .doc to visit during the theme reveal. Anyone who had an active blog who was participating got added. It made it way easier to make my daily rounds than trying to hunt down links for everyone everyday or magically sync up with their posts on any of the three posting mediums I mentioned. Because many of us were in different time zones or advertised in the morning or evening, there was often a two to three letter range of where we all were within the challenge by using my method, but going down my list during my morning rounds helped keep me organized.

Not to say I didn't find other blogs along the way. Often, when I was posting my link, a topic would catch my attention and I'd wander off (as I'm prone to do on the evil internet), to see what they had to say. I did the same thing while leaving comments. Oh, who's that? Click. Thank you to all of the A to Z people who made the effort to push us into leaving links in our signatures! That made finding other blogs so much easier.

By the end of the month, keeping in mind that I did delete a few blogs from my list due to a total lack of return comments or they just stopped participating, I was actively reading and commenting on twenty-one blogs everyday. That does not include the few interesting attention grabbers that I also visited here an there. I cannot emphasize enough how much adding a link to your signature makes it easy to get to you.

Following that many blogs meant I gave up my writing time altogether, but April is often a (mostly) writing vacation month for me due to the challenge so that was nothing new. What was new was that instead of following a handful of blogs, I had a whole list of people I enjoyed visiting each day. While there were a few days that got away from me, I did try to comment on as many blogs on my list as possible. Saturdays were hard because I don't have a set aside writing time to use for blogging during April.

What surprised me:
• How many people commented but left no way to find their blogs. Their Google+ accounts only had comments on other people's blogs or no activity at all. They didn't leave a link. I'd love return the visit, but I don't have twenty minutes to solve the mystery of where to find you.

• How much smoother the month goes when you write your posts ahead of time. It leaves much more time for commenting.

• That the lack of a linky list actually worked really well. I had far more visits this year than in previous years.

• All the fun blogs I found and interesting people I virtually met throughout the month. In previous years I connected long term with one or two blogs, but this year, with a much larger daily list, I hope to have many more long-term connections.

For me, April has become the month of networking. While I follow blogs throughout the year, I also sporadically become a writing hermit and seem to fall off the face of the networking earth. Having a month set aside to get out there and meet people is a good thing.

Thank you to all of you who took the time to comment throughout the month and to those of you who stopped by just to read. I hope to see you throughout the year. My A to Z blog list is saved for future visits as time allows.

Now that April is over, it's time to get back into writing mode!