Blog Challenges, Blog Tours & Blog Awards by Annmarie Miles

Please welcome back Annmarie Miles for another month with the Writer’s Fun Zone. In today’s article she discusses blog challenges, blog tours and blog awards. Enjoy!

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Blog Challenges, Blog Tours & Blog Awards

Well Carol Anne Olsen Malone was the only brave soul to take my challenge and she did a great job. You can take a look at her ‘Characterization in a Flash’ on last month’s column. https://writersfunzone.com/blog/2013/07/09/characterization-in-a-flash/

This month we’re all about the blogs.  

Blog Challenges: 

There are many blogging challenges out there. If you want to flex your blogging muscles there’s plenty going on.

April AtoZ:

If you’ve been reading my column you’ll know that earlier this year I took part in the April AtoZ Challenge. The idea is you blog every day following the alphabet as your theme – taking Sundays off. Many folk had posts written in advance so they could spend more time visiting other blogs. Some flew by the seat of their pants and posted at the 11th hour. It was a great month and I made lots of new friends on the blogosphere, gained a number of followers and found some blogs to follow myself.

It’s never too early to start preparing for April you know…

http://www.a-to-zchallenge.com/

 

Five Minute Friday:

This is one of my favourites at the moment. A theme is posted and you literally write for five minutes on that theme. No plotting or pondering, turning off that internal editor – you just share your thoughts on that week’s theme. You can always spell check etc before you post.

You then add a link to what you’ve written to the ‘Linky list’ on the Five Minute Friday page and check out the one posted just before yours – and others if you’d like to.

Not only does it connect you with some new bloggers but if you are struggling to write and feel a bit dry, it is a wonderful spring board to get you going again.

http://lisajobaker.com/five-minute-friday/

 

The 10 Day You Challenge:

This is a new one I just found last week which I’m going to try soon. I can’t seem to find the origin of this so if you know of it please let me know.

So you blog for 10 days on each of the categories. Make sure to add the name of the challenge to the tags in your post. When you post on social media be sure to add the name as a hashtag. They work on Google+ and Facebook as well as Twitter.

 

If you decide to do the 10 Day You Challenge please leave a comment below, I’d love to read more of them.

 

Blog Tours

Many authors do ‘blog tours’ on the release of their books. Now, if you wanted to run a blog tour I can give you no better advice on that than Beth Barany herself. So please do contact her if you’re interested in doing one.

But you could host someone who is doing a tour. Again it is a great way to find new readers and to find new blogs to read because it brings new folk to your blog. You can ask on Twitter or Facebook if anyone is looking for a host – there is always someone looking for one. And who knows what connections it might open up for you.

 

Blog Awards

It is blog awards time again in here in Ireland. Nominations are about to close and the nominations list will be out later this month (said she – biting her nails).

Are there blog awards where you are? It’s worth finding out. They can be local, national, theme based, genre based… If you’ve never entered you should think about it. Some times we need to be brave and step out.

The criteria that is judged often includes – the design, how often you post, whether or not you get comments and interact with your readers, how easy your blog is to navigate and if you use images and whether they are credited correctly.

So even if you decide not to enter, why not take a look at your blog and see how it measures up.

Do drop a comment below if you’d like me to take a look. I’m no expert but am happy to pop by and say hello.

My blogging has lead to so many great contacts and opportunities and I have some exciting projects in the pipeline which I hope to share with you next month.

Until then… happy blogging!

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Annmarie Miles is 40 something, Irish, Christian, married, and proud to be all of those things. She loves words, music & chocolate. She mostly writes about the things that life has thrown at her and how she has tried to learn, love and laugh at it all along the way!

Where to find Annmarie:

Email: amowriting@gmail.com
Facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/amowriting Google+ auntyamo
Twitter: @amowriting
Personal Blog: www.auntyamo.com
Fiction Blog: www.ficticiousamo.wordpress.com