Some Last Advice

This post (1/31) is part of the Blaugust Reborn event! You can find out more about the event at Belghast’s blog. I (Chestnut) created a Twitter list of all participants. Armagon created an OPML file of all the bloggers to import into your feed reader.

Okay yes, I know that Blaugust prep week (and thus the advice-centric week) is over, but I wanted to do one last small piece of advice, that’s actually kind of important.

Friendly reminder to #Blaugust folks that you should try your best to use #BlaugustReborn on your social media postings! I even started the hashtag on Instagram if folks use that to promote!

It’ll help @belghast in the end if you can use the hashtag! Be kind to Bel! ?

— ? Chestnut ? (@ggc_chestnut) August 1, 2018

That’s right. If you plan on advertising your posts on social media (outside of the Blaugust Discord), it benefits Belghast if you use the correct hashtag. I know that sometimes it’s difficult to remember, and some folks have mentioned that they’re shy/uncomfortable with pimping their stuff (News Flash: YOU ROCK FOR DOING THIS, DON’T BE SHY! YOU ARE AMAZING! PIMP THAT BAD BOY.), but, truly, it helps.

Let me give you a story to put it into perspective.

In November, I run a blogging initiative/event called IntPiPoMo (International Picture Posting Month—and I hope y’all will still be blogging and want to participate!). The TL;DR premise is that a picture is work 1k words, so posting 50 pics throughout the month means you’ve written 50k words (the goal for NaNoWriMo, also held during November).

Having to go through multiple blogs throughout the month and keep a count of the pictures that people have posted can be quite a task! Especially if I take a social media break for a day or two. So some folks started to keep a tally on their blog posts (at the top or bottom), and they generously used the #IntPiPoMo tag on Twitter. It’s a task whether there are 8 participants, or 20 participants. Not that it isn’t fun. I get great enjoyment out of it. But it’s a lot of hours per week devoted to the task.

So imagine, for a moment, having 80+ blogs (HOLY MOLY!) to go through. And not only are you counting the number of posts written by these blogs, you’re trying to keep track of which tiers they’ve accomplished (there are 5). Then imagine taking a day or two off for a personal break.

Bel is a pretty spectacular person (though, I’m pretty sure we all are at least starting to realize this by now!). He’s giving many hours of his day (and thus week) to help tackle the Blaugust event. He is giving us the benefit of his time and energy, and that’s a commodity when you’re an adult. So, obviously, he cares! If he didn’t, he wouldn’t do this.

So just give him a small moment of help—tag your posts on social media, and consider adding a post counter at the top (or bottom) of your posts. In fact, if you want, you can steal mine!

Thanks for letting me get on my soapbox, folks. And I’ll be actually following the weekly prompt tomorrow!