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Thursday, January 12, 2012

Blogging A to Z?: A Word from the Other Side

         On January 6, 2012 Timothy Brannan from the blog The Other Side put forth a challenge to OSR/RPG bloggers (that's " Old-school Renascence /Role playing gamers) to consider doing the Blogging from A to Z April Challenge.   He presents valid reasons for doing the Challenge that would apply to all other bloggers as well.  This post is reprinted with Tim's permission.


Blogging A to Z?


Last year I proudly participated in the Blogging A to Z challenge in April.

I felt it was not only a good way to stretch my creative abilities but work on my writing and do a bit a cross blog-genre promotion.  My hits went up, and stayed up, drastically during and after April and I got my greatest surge of followers.

Well they are doing it again this year.

Though I am not sure I am going to do it this year yet or not.
Last year it worked out on many levels for me.  I recall thinking about the posts I had queued up and how they would fit the challenge.  When "Z" fell on a Saturday it clinched it for me.

Part of the purpose of the blogfest is to post every day.  I do that now anyway.

Keep in mind I am NOT saying participation is a bad idea, far from it in fact.
I actually suggest that we get MORE OSR/RPG bloggers participating to get our message out there.

The one thing we all talk about is getting more people involved in our hobby, we can't do that if the only people we talk to are already in our hobby.
Plus if you are selling a product you should participate just to attract more attention to you and your book or product.

If I do it this year then I need to do a theme or something, make it more challenging than last year.

Are you going to participate?  Why or why not?

Who's ready to accept Timothy Brannan's challenge?






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21 comments:

Anonymous said...

I intended to participate this year, I even started getting some posts ready ahead of time. The thing is, I DO post every day; often more than once. While I enjoyed the challenge last year and my readership increased I also found myself severely bound by the alphabetic chains. I found many new blogs to follow; so many, in fact that I can barely get through them all satisfactorily in a day. So no, I have decided not to participate in the A to Z this year. I will however, pop in and visit a few blogs as I have opportunity.

RHYTHM AND RHYME said...

I wouldn't dream of missing it, I was there the first year, last year and by the Grace of God this year. It's fun, it gets you to meet new people, I bless the day Arlee Bird had this brilliant idea.

Yvonne.

Adam Lloyd said...

I intend to sign up this year. It'll be my first year, but I'm looking forward to it. As someone who only usually posts twice a week, I know this is going to seem like a mammoth task, trying to be funny and relevant everyday, but I'm definately up for the challenge.

Matthew MacNish said...

I had no idea their were gamers who resisted open source. Sounds fascinating!

Alex J. Cavanaugh said...

There's something for everyone in this Challenge!

Jean Katherine Baldridge said...

YES! jean yates!

Marta Szemik said...

Yes! Absolutely will participate. It will be my first year as well. I'm trying to think of a theme and I have one, but I don't know if I like it too much. If I can make it somehow funny, perhaps I'll go with it. I know my hubby would love the theme.

Timothy S. Brannan said...

Awesome! Thanks for the re-post.

One point though, OSR is "Old-school Renascence"

I know a lot of bloggers from my corner of the web are going to participate this year.

Arlee Bird said...

Timothy, thanks for the correction. I googled "OSR" and came up with the term I originally used. I've now accordingly corrected this. I still don't know what it means though. Thanks for contributing today's post.

Lee

Arlee Bird said...

Welcome to the new participants in the Challenge.

Delores-- Hope you'll decide to do the Challenge. I find the letter prompts to be somewhat liberating. I can always find a word that starts with the letter of the day to adapt to a post that I've written. But we'll still appreciate your support.

Lee

Kittie Howard said...

Well *gulps* I've decided to take the plunge and participate in the A-Z Challenge this year. My theme will be the USMC, as we spent some years in that arena, and I've written the first post, will do the second today and so on as I'm committed to my high school reunion in Louisiana a week in April. (Yep, the episode with the Marines is bad and serious and being taken so; they were in Sniper Scouts, not exactly a Sunday School picnic group, no excuse as excuses don't fly in the USMC.)

Er, where do I put my name on da list?

Timothy S. Brannan said...

Not a problem AND you gave a PERFECT example of why people in my blogging circles NEED to do this.

We throw "OSR" around like everyone is supposed to know what we mean and assume that they do cause we do. Well you showed that "the outside world" doesn't. And that is not even touching the surface of why Book X is better than Book Y but only a "clone" of Book Z.

So thanks for posting this! I hope we can more RPG-bloggers to join.

Nicki Elson said...

Hi Tim and Arlee. Oy! Tim! You so sweetly gave me an award weeks ago and I...I flaked. :( Just like I flaked on giving Lee an A to Z testimonial. And now you see why I need to join the challenge again this year - it did wonders for improving my blog organizational skillz. Not to mention the cool folks I met along the way. :)

P.S. I'm taking that zebra.

AllenTesch said...

I intend to sign up. Hopefully this year I can actually do it.

mimi torchia boothby watercolors said...

You wrote: "Plus if you are selling a product you should participate just to more attention to you and your book."

what does that mean?

I am thinking of participating by doing a painting every day from a to z.
Q, X, and Z will probably be kind of silly, but I guess that's normal.

Arlee Bird said...

Mimi, what is meant by "selling a product" refers primarily to authors who have books they are promoting. This is often the reason they have blogs. We hope A to Z participants will not be posting daily advertisements for products, etc, but if it were done that would be done in good taste and in an entertaining manner. Blogs that are strictly geared toward advertising or self-serving with no intent of participating in the A to Z posting or interacting with some of the other blogs will be purged from the list.

Let's face it, for many blogging serves as a form of promotion, but blatant advertising style promotion can be very tedious for some of us.

Hope that kind of clarifies your question.

Lee

mimi torchia boothby watercolors said...

Thanks Arlee. The question was more the hope that the writer would re read their sentence and correct it so that it made sense. :-)

"Just to more" does not make sense.

now I am ducking the shoes being thrown at me.

Arlee Bird said...

Maybe I should edit these guest posts, but I usually don't. But now that you've called attention to this I've kind of fixed it. Hope it makes the statement more clear.

Thanks
Lee

mimi torchia boothby watercolors said...

THANK you Arlee. It could have gone either way..

Hilary Melton-Butcher said...

Hi Lee and Tim - I'm definitely in again this year .. opens the door to lots of things .. it's a creative place to be ... see you there!

Cheers Hilary

Darth Luau said...

Better late than never, but I'm in!