So now that I’ve said goodbye to April, I’ve also said goodbye to the Blogging from A to Z April Challenge for 2016.

What a busy month that was! The mountain of work, that came with the challenge this year, was caused mainly, by me choosing to do the challenge on two blogs. What on earth was I thinking??!! Also the topics I chose for the themes on both blogs, caused quite a bit of research.

Of course, I wasn’t organised enough to have done that research before April began. In 2015, I promised myself that I would have the research completed by April 1. Oh well, there is always next year.

Here are my thoughts:

What worked:

I thought both themes were really great. From my point of view anyway. They seemed to create quite a bit of traffic to my blog. Much more traffic than last year. It seems that themes that relate to Australia bring many overseas visitors. I hadn’t thought of that when choosing the themes.   Surprisingly, I received many lovely comments in relation to the content and choice of themes.

I was gob-smacked by the number of comments left on my blog. They came in fairly constantly during the day, and then in the morning when I checked, there were similar numbers from northern hemisphere bloggers.

Very happy to say that I picked up new followers on both blogs. Big suprise to me.

Due to the research that needed to be done for  both themes,  I learnt so much about this state and the town where I live. There were towns that I chose for no reason at all, that are now on my list to visit.

For the ‘Bendigo’ theme I chose places to visit and activities that were my favourites or that I thought would be great for tourists and particularly families, to come here and see. I made the decision at the start to keep the posts non-commercial, just to show how much there is to do and see here without spending heaps of cash.

When researching one of the towns, I came across a blog with a story about one of my ancestors, leading me to newspaper articles. This was an ancestor that I haven’t had time to do much research on yet. So have a head start now.

There were some blog posts about Bendigo, relating to places and activities that I haven’t been to yet. So looking forward to catching up with them.

I noticed this year that there were quite a few geni friends and geni friends to be, who posted. Seemed to be many more than last year. I’m looking forward to checking out their blogs during May.

Managed to post Z with everyone else on April 30. I was sure I would be late getting it done.

What didn’t work so well:

I seemed to be one or two days behind for the entire month. Whenever I managed to catch up, it would be short lived, and before I knew it, there I would be, one day late again.

Because I was frantically blogging or researching every day, I didn’t get to visit as many participating blogs as I would have liked. I have list on the wall next to the computer, and intend to visit during May. Now, I wonder if I could find time to a visit to all?  There are many great blogs out there, and topics on any subject imaginable.

I was also chasing my tail answering comments on my blog due to the amount of traffic and comments left.The number of comments is, of course, a positive. It is my lack of time that is the negative. Please accept my apologies if was slow to reply to your comment. I really did appreciate that other bloggers took the time to visit my blog.

For the ‘Towns in Victoria’ theme, I tried to choose towns which related to my family history. It would have been perfect for me if every town had a relevance, but unfortunately, a little over half of the towns that I posted about were towns chosen for other reasons. I tried to make the second choice, a town that appealed to me, but for a couple of the letters I just had to make a choice for no reason,other than it’s first letter.

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With eight positives and four negatives, it looks to me like the April A-Z Challenge is a winner.

Hmm now I wonder what theme I will choose next year…… Regardless of the theme, next year, this blogger will participate on only one blog. Also I will be choosing a theme that has an X and Z! These were a big problem for me on both blogs this year.

* The above  post also appears on my other blog,Tracking Down The Family | Jones Family History