Hello everyone. I just need to mention a few things to make the poetry challenges provide each of you with the best chances of receiving some extra visitors each week. There are a few things I wanted to tell you.

1. Make certain to either do a PINGBACK or place a COMMENT LINK to your poem in the Comments Section of the challenge you are doing.  It makes it easier for other participants to visit you, and for me to gather the links for the collected poets’ posts.
2. The PINGBACK helps the challenge receive notice by your followers/friends/readers on your blog. This is one way our challenges have seen increases in poets the past several weeks. If you have been doing PINGBACKS for quite a while, see if something as simple as a text color change catches a visitor’s eye. I’m not asking for it to be intrusive. I’m also not asking that you do a PINGBACK AT ALL. Doing the challenge is the only thing that matters. I’m confident in saying there are people out there using the prompts we don’t know about, and that’s WONDERFUL. I never expected to do a challenge when I started a blog, nor have 50 participants per week back before I burned out on blogging, writing, and life itself.
3. Why do I do the challenges?
   1. To give writers something to write about.
   2. So each of those who take part has a community of friends if they want one. They can make one by visiting the other poets’ poems, comment at times, and interact on other posts. You don’t know how many long-lasting friendships on WordPress started through the haiku challenge.
   3. So each of you gets extra visitors each week, and maybe some regulars who start checking out your other posts.
4. I don’t always comment on poem posts; it doesn’t mean I’m not reading them. I am or the poets collected posts wouldn’t exist. Sometimes I have the energy to comment and even write a haiku responding to your haiku. More often than not, I don’t. I’m working on the first book in a new series I’m writing and editing books multiple books for others, and it’s using up more energy than I could’ve imagined.

5. For those of you who do both PINGBACKS and COMMENT LINKS, you may notice the PINGBACK disappears. I remove one so people who visit the challenge and click the links to read the poems don’t visit the same page they just left. Sometimes I correct the links when links provided give error messages.

© 2020 Ronovan Hester Copyright reserved. The author asserts his moral and legal rights over this work.