H as in How Do You Make it Work? - by Matthew MacNish

Hello A to Z Challengers!

How has your April Challenge been going so far?

Personally, I've found a great balance between feeling not so much overwhelmed, but pleasantly challenged, and having great fun discovering new blogs and bloggers at the same time.

Hard is why we call it a challenge.

It's not easy writing a blog post every day except Sunday for an entire month, and even we co-hosts who are seasoned bloggers don't have the easiest time making it happen without freaking out a little bit.

How do we pull it off?

Well first of all, every blogger is different, but I would wager we co-hosts all use similar strategies. First, we schedule our posts ahead of time. There's nothing wrong with flying by the seat of your pants and drafting your posts the morning of for regular blogging (I do it all the time myself) but it would be really difficult to make that work for the A to Z April Blogging Challenge, and any time you did spend writing a post would be time you couldn't spend visiting blogs.

I don't actually write all 26 posts before the challenge even beings, but I do write about the first 10-15, and then I write another week's worth of posts each Sunday until they're all done. You can of course pick whatever strategy works for you, but we would highly recommend figuring out some plan for writing as many of your posts ahead of time as possible.

Another thing we do is get Help.

Not only do we have another fabulous list of Co-Hosts this year, but all of us have minions/assistant/helpers as well. When you're checking a list of literally thousands of blogs, it helps to not have to do it all alone.

My assistants this year are Sylvie Hanes from Life from An Optimist's Point of View, and Carrie-Anne Brownian/Ursula Hartlein from Welcome to My Magick Theatre.

They help us go through the list, and highlight great blogs with great themes, and also find people who aren't participating, or might need a reminder if they aren't up to date with their posts.

Have any questions?

Feel free to ask questions here, in the comments.

You can also reply to the co-host responsible for your section of the list in the email we sent announcing the challenge.

You can also ask questions by emailing us at contactatozteam@gmail.com. Find us on Facebook, and Google + as well.

Thanks for dropping by, and I hope you are all enjoying the Challenge and discovering tons of great new blogs! - Matthew MacNish

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